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• Come up with plausible misconceptions as alternates;
• make the questions cover stuff reasonable students should understand given the exposure to it;
• Make the questions somewhat entertaining to read if possible to induce people to not dread the tests;
• Create sets of questions that cover basics, medium, and advanced subjects so you make sure the C students can pass but not everyone gets A's
• the breadth of the questions has to cover the breadth of the classroom topics reasonably well

• Give them a theoretical framework of basic concepts they'll use the rest of their lives;
• Give them enough knowledge to (a)back up the above framework, (b)Prepare for further academic study, and (c) inspire them to regard the subject as interesting and worth future study for the rest of their lives.

Ice makes a pretty good Cerenkov radiator. Just ask the folks on AMANDA and RICE.

Where's the video footage and survey reports from your "consistently violent and non-specific interment conditions." AKA Noah's Flood? And why are you afraid to say what you actually mean? Is it something to do with this perhaps?

How about some evidence to back up your assertions?

Kick ass! My alma mater is ranked 15th. And ya'll think we're a bunch of hillbillies and rednecks around these parts. ;-) I'm happy to see that KU (Univeristy of Kansas) didn't even make the list. Serves them right for beating us this year in football. I guess even a one-armed, deaf, blind, dyslexic, quadriplegic squirrel finds a nut once a decade or so. :-)

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.

And this quote :George Mason: "I ask you sir, who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people." (Elliott, Debates, 425-426) (from here

In fact there is tons of evidence that the militia==the people, and precious little for any other interpretation.

There is a /ton/ of 'free' GIS data available on the internet.

I say 'free' because in reality the US taxpayers have paid for it, but take a look at things like:

Kansas DASC,

Census Bureau TIGER data,

collection sites like Geo Community,

and an almost limitless number of other sites. Most states now have GIS sites of one form or another, with downloadable data.

Jim Deane

QoS is a Quality of Service. Presumably the Windows service just allows QoS traffic shaping.

You mean http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/software/latex4 wp.pdf

(for the lazy man like me)

The IDEA archive has a far more complete collection of accents and voice samples. Excellent source material for geeks who work in film, TV or theater.

Every year it drains it aquifier and every year it gets less and less. It isn't refilling. The chance Inida had to avoid it it lost in the 90's.

Have you ever looked at a map of the US aquifer system? More details here. I'd be most worried about the Ogallala Aquifer that serves Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. That's draining quickly. Another generation or two and its Ogallala's remaining water resources will not be economically viable to extract. Bye bye US grain production. Of course, the reduction in Canadian natural gas exports will have shut down the US fertiliser production long before then...

Not from the 4th century BC onwards. Read this.

Down to the year B.C. 366, the consulship was accessible to none but patricians, but in that year L. Sextius was the first plebeian consul in consequence of the law of C. Licinius (Liv. vi.42, vii.1). The patricians however, notwithstanding the law, repeatedly contrived to keep the plebeians out (Liv. vii.17, 18, 19, 22, 24, 28), until in B.C. 342 the insurrection of the army of Capua was followed, among other important consequences, by the firm establishment of the plebeian consulship; and it is even said that at that time a plebiscitum was passed, enacting that both consuls might be plebeians (Liv. vii.42). Attempts on the part of the patricians to exclude the plebeians, occur as late as the year B.C. 297 (Liv. x.15, Cic. Brut. 14) but they did not succeed, and it remained a principle of the Roman constitution that both consuls should not be patricians (Liv. xxvii.34, Liv. xxxix.42). The candidates usually were divided into two sets, the one desirous to obtain the patrician, and the other to obtain the plebeian place in the consulship (in unum locum petebant, Liv. xxxv.10). But as in the course of time the patricians were thrown into the shade by the rising power of the nobiles, it came to pass that both consuls were plebeians. In B.C. 215, the augurs indeed opposed the election of two plebeians (Liv. xxiii.31); but not long after, in B.C. 172, the fact of both consuls being plebeians actually occurred, and after this it was often repeated, the ancient distinction between patricians and plebeians falling completely into oblivion.

Also there are still quite a few good college stations around like KJHK in Lawrence, KS which was recently voted by the local paper as one of the best reasons to live in Lawrence. Check the link and catch the stream!

If it wasn't broke, why the hell did you fix it!

This doesn't look very flat.

LOL! Sure looks flat to me. I think you need to get out of your state more. I'd call that gently rolling countryside, and if that's the best example you can come up with, I don't think there's much left to be said.

Of course, I've lived in California, New Hampshire, and New York. All of these states have substantial mountain ranges.

Also, I think the analysis was incorrect. It looks like they included the nearly vertical sides of the pancake, which is not what people refer to in the phrase. The phrase "flat as a pancake" refers to one of the two planar surfaces of a pancake, not the sides. Thus, the data set should be chopped where the edge slope begins.

...and I can certainly say that not all of Kansas is flat. The Flinthills certainly aren't flat (where I'm from) as anyone that has ever tried to haul a load up one of those hills can tell you. Sure Western Kansas is quite flat. Basically the entire western half of the state is flat (with some exceptions of course, and the line that devides the flat part of Kansas from the feature-rich part of Kansas isn't really straight). Central and Eastern Kansas is anything but flat. Our glacier-cut hills are fairly steep (including the one named after my family near my home town). Not as steep as the Ozark "hills" mind you but steep enough to give gravel trucks a long grade to pull. This doesn't look very flat. Those hills are mild compared to the ones in my neck of the woods. Kansas flat? Ha! Only if the Pope is Athiest.

Yeah . . . we generally keep the good stuff here. But we make a few exceptions, like Lynx. . .

RNA worlds model a higher level of assmbly where amino acids are constructed into RNA. RNA worlds are assumed to also be a necessary (but later) step in the Origin of life. One problem with the approaches used is that historically they used to require lockstep state transitions, but recently Wright and Joyce developed a continuous approach, which allows transitions to occur at overlapping time.

Numbers are, at least for me, less mnemonic than letters. Besides, I moved two years ago. Someone else has my old phone number, but my email address is still the same.

I like it that way.

At the trial or upon any hearing, a part or all of a deposition, so far as otherwise admissible under the rules of evidence, may be used as substantive evidence if the witness is unavailable, as unavailability is defined in Rule 804(a) of the Federal Rules of Evidence, or the witness gives testimony at the trial or hearing inconsistent with that witness' deposition. Any deposition may also be used by any party for the purpose of contradicting or impeaching the testimony of the deponent as a witness. If only a part of a deposition is offered in evidence by a party, an adverse party may require the offering of all of it which is relevant to the part offered and any party may offer other parts.

• Very little code financed by the Federal government is ever licensed under either of these two licenses - the choice is basically agency-proprietary (the Federal agency asked for the rights in the contract, and kept them) or company-proprietary (the agency didn't ask for the rights, and the contractor kept them).

NASA uses and produces software under the GPL license.

Any number of of projects funded by NSF, and other Governmental Agency, grants end up licensing software under the GPL.

There is an aspect to this discussion that I don't think gets enough play. The GPL is a great boon to academics who don't have to purchase costly software, and risk throwing obstacles in the way of those who would reproduce their work, or reinvent wheels. This boon comes with the very small cost that the software so produced should be shared with others. I think that this is in harmony with the spirit of Scientific Research, the "standing on the shoulders of Giants" as Newton said.

Could you tell me, perhaps, why all the other Bill of Rights amendments- free speech, search and siezure, don't have to self incriminate, etc, speak of undisputed Individual Rights, but the framers just happened to let a State Power slip into a document listing individual rights? Moreover, if you read the entire document, the Bill Of Rights lists Inalienable rights given by our creator, i.e., rights that cannot possibly be revoked by an entitiy that didn't give them- the government. Throughout the constitution, the government, state or local, is assigned "powers" given by the people, whereas the people have "rights." Our Government, National, State, or Local, has no power that it hasn't been granted by the same citizens thereof.

Your "Guns are for pussies" statement is clearly flamebait; since when did trolls get mod points here? Regardless, here are a few quotes from some of the folks who were kinda important in writing the constitution:
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater ... confidence than an armed man." Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and punishment (1764).

"The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword, because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops." Noah Webster, An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution Proposed BV the Late Convention (1787).

"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." --James Madison, The Federalist Papers, No. 46
and you seem to be a fan of gun control; i suggest you check out The Racist Roots of Gun Control

Yes, I was referring to former topsoil. Rather than Kansas having hundreds of feet of accumulated topsoil, the Kansas Geological Survey doesn't even map it. Perhaps erosion is so powerful that it washes away topsoil faster than it can be formed -- but if that were the case it should be gone. If permafrost material accumulates faster than topsoil accumulates in faster-growing warm climates, either topsoil is removed faster in warmer climates or the removal is blocked by the arctic climate. (I used the term "permafrost material" because I suspect that the many shallow lakes contribute an amount similar to that of trundra plants).

And I agree that oxygen wouldn't penetrate thawed permafrost very deeply, which is why I was wondering if anaerobic bacteria generate methane. They do, so we don't have to wait for oxygen to penetrate thawed permafrost, as decomposition will start as soon as it warms up (I'm sure there already are bacteria frozen in there so there is no travel time).

So we might be watching a thawing that triggers the next ice age; one is expected soon so it is not surprising. The methane from the permafrost might increase temperatures briefly, but it only lasts 50 years in the atmosphere and then its "greater warming than carbon dioxide" behavior will be gone. (By what percent would permafrost methane increase the amount of methane in the atmosphere?)

Perhaps because things tend to become better with larger numbers of masses using it. And perhaps because some things tend to wither and die when the userbase doesn't increase.

I want it to be popular among the educated computing community, but I couldn't care less about little Johnny using it.

Nice philosophy for writing an OS, but where do you draw the line? "Nobody below my knowledge base should be using this?" Oh please. What next? Everyone using linux should know how to write stuff in BASH? Everyone should be proficient in C/C++? Everyone should be a kernel hacker?

Sorry, but an OS that's like that isn't an Operating System. It's a toy. Linux is not a toy, nor is it just your toy.

I want people to use Linux who actually bother reading man pages, understanding things etc. -- clearly you don't.

Yeah, I'm going back to windows now. And I'm not coming back until I learn RPM... Oh that's right! I'm trying to learn something by using this OS. My mistake.

Not exactly sure why, but congrats Taco and crew, you've lost another reader (and writer for Linux sites and magazines -- I'll reference K5 in future instead).

I'll keep a look out for Anonymous Coward within the linux circles.

The guy who wanted to drive a fortified SUV INTO a tornado shouldn't be allowed to breed. We will be hearing more about him in the Darwin awards, rest assured.

Look, I live in Tornado alley, and up to a few months ago lived in "pre-fabricated housing", a.k.a. a trailer home (a.k.a. "tornado bait"). I'm a part-time storm spotter, and I've seen the damage a "little" F-1 gustnado can cause, let alone an F-5 monster. An F-5 will quite literally suck the asphalt off a highway.

If I were out tooling around in, say, an M1A1 Abrahms Tank, and I saw a tornado coming, I would turn tail and run (at right angles to the path of the tornado) as fast as that tank's treads would take me. Wind speeds in the vortex of a tornado have been measured at OVER 300 miles per hour with Doppler radar. Even a tank will be blown over.

This fool, in his SUV, will be waking up wondering what all these midgets are doing around him. Either that, or wondering where all the harp music is coming from.

I just dodged around a storm last night trying to get home. By local standards it wasn't anything much, but it left the roads covered in hail, dropped over an inch of rain in thirty minutes, and had 60 MPH sustained winds. I was driving, listening to the two local storm spotter nets on 2 meters, and trying to spot the rain and hail shafts in the lightning. It wasn't fun.

I've seen the shows about tourists coming to the US to see a tornado - they spend 2 weeks driving from Texas to South Dakota to see a storm, covering over 3000 miles! Word of advice folks: just come over in the spring, and plan a normal vacation. See the
sights and enjoy yourselves. The tornados will find you. Trust me.

Not yet, no. That will come.

It's tough dealing with the "creative" ways companies express data in 10-K and 10-Q filings. VA Software filed a nice, clean statement, but many others are far worse. Worst case: a money-losing company that filed a 10-Q with a line labelled "net loss", followed by a positive number, creating the illusion to the unwary that they're profitable.

The SEC used to require companies to file an SGML-encoded "financial data schedule" that was straightforward to parse. Now, that data has to be pulled out of the filings with AI programs. Three such programs now exist (ours, PriceWaterhouse Coopers', and one from the University of Kansas). S&P has an army of clerks doing it manually.

The programs have varying degrees of success. PWC's has been around for a while. It's in Prolog, of all things, with some C and an Oracle back-end. PWC hired a Prolog heavy, who wrote the thing, and then left. It doesn't really understand the newer HTML filings; it renders them into a monospace font, then treats them as text. Ours is in Perl (should have used Java; it doesn't really use regular expressions much, and it's very object-oriented and tree-structured.) backed by MySQL. The server is a Linux system. Ours prefers HTML filings, and hammers plain text into something that looks like an HTML table before processing. The Kansas one doesn't seem to be as far along. None of them do as good a job as Standard and Poor's army of clerks.

Dealing with the variations in format is a pain, but possible. The big problem is variations in line item names. That's where the "creative accounting" comes in. Many companies would prefer not to report things in the standard categories, because this makes direct comparisons with other companies easy.

There's some lobbying from the XBRL people for tightening up on this. They have a whole XML-based scheme for representing this stuff (and, in fact, the data from Downside's engine is automatically tagged in XML with their tags; do a View Source.) The idea is to get the SEC to mandate filing in a more rigid format. XBRL would be nice, but just insisting that the line items use names drawn from the XBRL representation of Generally Acccepted Accounting Practices for U.S. companies would be sufficient.

In the current regulatory climate (i.e. post-Enron) there's a good chance of getting some tightening up here.

I've had OK luck in the past with MIX:

http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/docs/MIX-HOWTO. html

The "right" system design language is currently a heated discussion in the chip design community. A design language based on a mainstream software language (like JHDL on Java, or SystemC on C++) means that each of us already has the compiler installed to run a simulation. Proposals made on proprietary syntaxes (like SpecC, Rosetta , Superlog , Esterel, ECL ) mean that you have to set up a new environment off the beaten path.
On the other hand, in chip design a language is used to express a model. In a proprietary language, the compiler errors will related directly to that model (like 'port not connected'), while with a mainstream software language you will see C++ or Java errors that might have nothing to do with a modeling error. So the answer to your question would be: if you are a hardware newbie, stick to an environment that supports you: VHDL, Verilog, or one of the new ones. If you like software engineering, go for C++ or Java.

Ummm... how about, never?
Think again. What a lot of people in the United States don't know is that the Espionage Act of 1918 limited free speech, and made illegal for people to speak out against the United States' involvement in WWI. Dozens of people were arrested and put in jail under this act for merely speaking, including Eugene V. Debs who later ran for president from jail. Luckily the act was later repealed (but not for a few years after the war actually ended).

Simply to say that because we live in the United States our freedom of speech is ensured is an ignorant comment. We must contantly fight and support groups like the ACLU and EFF to make sure that the Second Patriots Act isn't a another Espionage Act.

I think that you prehaps have some of your facts screwed up about Pearl Harbor. It is a common misconception that the president knew all about what was going to happen and let it happen to stimulate the economy, drag us into the war, etc... There are several theories about what happened that day - I don't think anyone will know for sure, but these links should clear up a little of it. Theory one(it's about halfway down the page) - (history place.com): We broke the code in time to prevent the attack, but then we sent the information by commercial telegraph. Something we need to remember is that the president couldn't just pick up the phone and call Pearl Harbor at the time - there were very few means of communication with the mainland. According the the link, we had lost radio contact with Pearl Harbor at the time, and this delayed the message until about noon Hawaii time -- approximately four hours after the attack had begun.
Theory Two: (ukans.edu) Stephen Budiansky is a historian who's written a book on code-breaking in WWII - his theory is quite simply, we couldn't read the codes. The japanese had evidently been changing their codes quite frequently - or at least frequently enough the confuse our code-breakers. I'll leave a further explanation to reading the link - it sounds to me like he's saying the Navy really didn't decode the relevant messages until 1946, almost five years after the attack.
The main thing we have to remember here is that communications at the beginning of WWII were really bad. Nowdays we have ways to get messages and information across the globe in seconds - it's very easy to forget the fact that if a coded message was broken in the evening in Washington, in 1941 there was literally a very good chance it would not get to Hawaii by the following morning. This makes the most sense to me as an explanation for what happened - not saying the president and all his generals and code-breakers knew about this far enough in advance to prevent it and all conspired together to keep the base commander in Pearl from knowing.
There is a slightly more sinister idea that makes more sense to me than saying the president knew all about it. The code-breakers may well have known - as I mentioned earlier, there's some dissension on that point. The code-breaking community in the military is EXTREMELY secretive. There could very well have been an admiral or captain(I believe it was the navy running it at the time) who was told and simply decided not to pass the information on. In that case, he would have had to make a decision based on, first of all, how likely he thought it was that the information was accurate, and secondly, on how badly it would affect his intelligence gathering capabilities in the future for the japanese to find out that we knew about the attack in advance. That's the biggest problem with intelligence - frequently, when you use it, you compromise its source, and then you have to start all over again, either breaking a code, or compromising a foreign agent, etc... so it's a tough call for someone in that position - one I would never want to have to face.

You got lucky.KU[ku.edu] is changing from the more memorable ukans.edu[ukans.edu] domain.
Why they picked ukans.edu in the first place, I have no idea, but I like it better than the generic ku.edu

Pearl Harbor?! My God, man! Get your priorities straight! How can you possibly think about something like that so soon after the Hundred Years War??

I wonder how many of us have been threatened with lawsuits by our educational institutions because of Internet activities? Or by individuals?

I personally was threatened with criminal and civil action by the University of Kansas back in 1995 because of a website on a school computer. It was very hard for me, as a 19 year-old, to take. I was scared.

The second time I was threatened with civil action was by a student's lawyer-dad and I was scared.

The third time I was threatened with civil action was from a competitor with a lawyer-sister. By that point, I wasn't scared any more.

Kind of like meeting the police. They scared the shit out of me the first few times. Last time they came to my door was 97 and I didn't let them in. All I said, standing in my door, was "I'm not going to talk to you" over and over and over again, as the guy got more and more pissed off. He went away, just like the losers threatening civil suits.

I think a lot of dealing with lawyers and police is standing your ground and saying nothing.

In the case of this Utah fiasco, I think any lawyer will be able to get him his degree, but since his site was on a uni network and server, he's kind of out of luck. As I learned from Kansas, any state funded school is going to be really protective of their servers and network, because once a website is even remotely publically funded, a lot of people have asses to cover if a webpage served says something un-pc.

It's probably time for him to cut his losses, and walk away, fighting only for his degree. (free speech aside because there is no free speech when you're borrowing a soapbox)

Don't forget to take a look at this paper by Hunter Christophersen. Woohoo, I'm replying to my reply to my own post!

The language taught should not matter at all. What is important is the concepts presented in a number of different languages and applying those concepts to other languages. If too much emphisis is placed on what is cool and high tech then students suffer because they don't understand concepts when moving onto new or older languages. Cool languages are like the soup de jour. They're only really around for a day or so. After graduation, do you really think you'll be given a course on the new lanuage the boss wants to program in? No, he or she will just say go program in it and it will be up to you to learn it.

20 years ago the cool languages were Fortran and Cobol. 10 years ago it was C and Pascal, now it's C++ and Java. What will be cool 10 years from now who knows. The important to learn and understand how the machine works and how data, instructions, and devices are handled. Specific language skills are generally worthless in a few years, because you'll either forget them from lack of use. or the language will be obsolete for new stuff and legacy for everything else.

That being said, teaching in C++ to begin with introduces a number of ideas including object oriented programming, some structural programming, and things that Java doesn't teach such as pointers and memory management. My university, KU, is moving away from Java and back to C++, because Java hides so many details the new students don't understand how things work.

Like you stated, learning on your own you gained more knowledge. I agree, but the vast majority of students are only in the classes to get a grade and not to learn. All that matters is the A, and not C++.

• WWI: The Sinking of the Lusitania This got the US into WWI, which the US had previously been avoiding. The historical judgement is that the Lusitania was a legitimate military target.
• WWII: The Pearl Harbor Message The Japanese declaration of war reached the U.S. Department of State after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was supposed to reach it an hour or two before, but the Japanese Embassy in Washington had trouble getting it typed fast enough. Roosevelt made a big deal out of this.
• Vietnam War: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident This started the Vietnam War. The historical judgement is that the US set things up so there would be an incident to justify a war.
• Gulf War: The Kuwait Baby Incubator Incident This was the excuse for the Gulf War, which passed Congress by a very slim majority. The whole story about baby incubators being stolen from Kuwait hospitals by invading Iraqui troops was put together and packaged by Hill and Knowlton Public Relations under contract to the Kuwaiti government. The 15-year old girl who testified before the U.S. Congress turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador.

There are also reports that some of the atrocities in the recent troubles in Bosnia were faked, but it's too early for a firm conclusion on that.

Keep this history in mind when you hear news about justifications for war in future.

Similarly, smartgdb has long claimed to have improved thread support, although I don't know if it's been kept up to date. The web site doesn't appear to have been updated in a while.

"Yelling fire in a crowded theater" makes a good slogan. Too good.

I wish people knew more about the case behind it -- Shenck vs. US (1919). Then maybe they'd be ashamed to use it as a rallying cry.

Schenck was only informing the public of their constitutional rights (and no one accused him of not portraying those rights accurately). he was accused of yelling firw in a crowded theatre THAT WAS ACTUALLY ON FIRE. The Justices of the time(many of whom I regard highly) wanted to avoid public tumult at any cost. Shenck spent (IIRC) over a decade in prison for simply pointing out constitutional rights, and he wasn't alone. There were several cases of 'grass roots' leaders being arrested for this. I believe even the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Upton Sinclair was arrested -- for reading the text of the Constitution to a lawfully asembled crowd. The Vietnam anti-war protests (or Slashdot) could easily be shut down under both the spirit and the letter of Schenk -- if it weren't considered, even within the legal community a dangerous and even bad precedent.

Here's a readable summary of Shenck and many other classic precedents involving the First Ameendment topics we see on Slashdot -- and for completeness and accuracy, you can check the actual ruling in Schenck, too -- no one is slanting the facts. The truth actually is that disgraceful

Remember, there are still plenty of places, in and out of the US where peace and order are considered more important than truth or justice. Not in your town? Oh yes - check your local high schools, for example (I have a kid in HS, just for the record). It's a basic human instinct going back to the monkeys

As they used to say during the Counterreformation,
Kill them all, and let God sort them out.

According to some discussions, it was during the , a (now) Southern French fortress of the Albigensians, 13th century, I think.
__

As they used to say during the Counterreformation,
Kill them all, and let God sort them out.

According to some discussions, it was during the , a (now) Southern French fortress of the Albigensians, 13th century, I think.
__

They most certainly are indicators of a thriving, healthy economy. When the titans do battle, it means that they're faced with real competition from each other, which, in turn, makes it possible for mere mortals to find niches, do business, and possibly become, themselves, titans.

When it turns sour is when there are no titans slugging it out, but just one titan, making all of the rules. Past examples include United States Steel Corporation, J.P. Morgan's railroad empire, and AT&T's monopoly over the telephone system. These are all examples of the monopolies Woodrow Wilson railed against.

Some people seem to be missing the point of FOCI, and for that, I must take responsibility, as the primary author of the letter, the petition, and most of the content of the site.

The point is competition. The point is that, of the proposals on the table at ICANN, over half are related to either Afilias or Melbourne IT. The point is not whether .web is or isn't a good idea, or whether TLDs or the DNS are or are not good ideas. The point is that, given a world that is this way (which is currently is), can we keep competition alive long enough to make real change?

If Afilias and Melbourne IT are allowed to dominate the DNS any more than they already do, all the Karl Auerbachs in the world won't do us any good.

I'm not saying that Image Online Design are heroes. I'm saying that they represent competition to Afilias and Melbourne IT, and for that, you should consider supporting their bid.

And, as I said in the letter:

As a final note, we encourage you to be critical of what you hear on this issue (even from us!).

So I fully agree with you that people should do research and make up their own minds. There's plenty of public record of the entire history of .web. Furthermore, there's a lively discussion in the ICANN comments area, in which plenty of skeptics, critics, or outright IOD detractors are posting alternative viewpoints. Of course, not all of them are using their names, but that's the 'net for ya'.

Please, though, don't try to make it out like John Mitchell or I are hiding anything. We've made our affiliations clear from the first moment. When we changed the wording of the petition after realizing what Melbourne IT was up to, we mailed all of the existing signatories to let them choose whether or not to apply their signature to the new wording, or let it stand with the old.

We, FOCI, have worked very hard to be precisely the sort of effort on behalf of a company that we'd like to see more of. We're not trying to snow you, or convince you that we don't have, ultimately, capitalist interests at heart. We're trying to be straight with you, and let you decide what is important to a Competitive Internet.

I suspect that the technique used to copy the athlete's DNA was most likely PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction).

This technique apes the human DNA replication.

For more information, read here or here
.
..

My school's engineering dept. works on propane cars.. They're very clean/efficient and quite powerful.

Our chemE dept. also does fuel cell research. i dont understand why these things havent made it to the maket yet.

There is more info about the author, Bob Shaw here.

Orbitsville also won 3rd Prize in the 1976 John W. Campbell award for science fiction.

Periodically, I feel obligated to remind people that the famous phrase "shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic" (actual quote) is not only prone to abuse, it was born of judicial abuse

Justice Holmes coined this memorable phrase in Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). Schenck printed 15,000 leaflets: the front contained the text of Section I of the 13th
Amendment, and the flip side of the leaflet had phrases and slogans like: "Do not submit to intimidation", "Assert your Rights", "your right to assert your opposition to the draft", and "If you do not assert and support your rights, you are helping to deny or disparage rights which it is the solemn duty of all citizens and residents of the United States to retain."

Schenck spent 10(?) years in jal for merely telling his citizens their constitutional rights The 'fire in a crowded theater' argument was used to allow the Supreme Court uphold his conviction

This is not a precedent that should be blithely tossed around without noting the history of abuse that it engendered.

This court ruling, and others explicitly based on it led to the Pulitzer Prize winning author Upton Sinclair was arrested for trying to read the text of the First Amendment at a union rally (1923) and many others being arrested for belonging to, or participating in, groups espousing views regarded as "radical" by the government in this period (I'm talking about unions and religious societies, not the Communist Party or subversive groups)

In short -- "the crowded theater" can and has been something as seemingly innocuous as Slashdot, and the cry was not false Better put a lawyer - a criminal lawyer - on retainer before expressing any opinions in public ;->
_____________

The Microsoft Word file format has been documented. An HTML version can be found here. The problem is that it is complicated, ugly, and dependent on OLE 2.0.

Thank you.
//Frisco
--
"At the end of the journey, all men think that their youth was Arcadia..." -Goethe

Once I built a network, I made it run
I made it race against time
Once I built a network, now it's done
Brother, can you paradigm?

Once I built an OS, just like Sun
Bits and coders and lines
Once I built a OS, now it's done
Brother, can you paradigm?

There are two more stanzas for which I can't think of anything just yet. Look here for the original words. Once I've burnt up all my karma, I think I may quit /.

Your answer lies in the fact that Microsoft has been known to just throw NT at a school with a massive discount. At my school, it's happened in the EECS department. We're overrun with NT. We actually have two different EECS accounts. One's for the NT system, one's for the *nix system. The introductory Programming courses (Prog. I, II) are taught in Java (don't ask, that's another bone of contention), using CodeWarrior on kludgy NT boxes in the labs.

And using CodeWarrior was even a bit of a kludge. I took Programming I my first semester here, last year, and we used MS Visual J++. This was because Microsoft gave the Professor a free copy, and he decided to try it out. A lot of students went out and got a copy to put on their home computers, so they could work at home. Guess what happened next semester? EECS realized how bad J++ was, and switched to CodeWarrior. Those of us who'd bought J++ now had to go buy a copy of CodeWarrior. Not cheap, even considering the academic pricing. Ah well, such is the *business* of education...

Some people believe that it is economically unfeasible to pirate a DVD at full quality. And yes this is probably true right now. However, with better (wavelet?) compression, fatter pipes, and bigger hard drives, in the future it will not be.

I've read through all the source I could get my hands on, but I wasn't sure if what I was looking at was DeCSS or css-auth. The source files said 'css-auth.c' and css-auth.h' etc, so I'm not sure. Is this css-auth, or DeCSS? (or is css-auth just a part of LiViD)?

And as for pirating VCDs, trust me, its happening. I got a copy of American Pie 3 weeks before it came out in theaters. I got my 'good' copy of the matrix about a month before the DVD release. A friend of mine, who at the time still had an analog modem would go to public computer labs and span the files on 10 or so zip disks. Go to #vcd on efnet and tell me then that it isn't happening.

[ c h a d o k e r e ]

I posted this recently, but I'd like to post it again, because the Linux Journal article is related to my point here. I think that, no matter whether linux users choose to move that way, we will be pushed towards stronger radicalism, in our beliefs, our tactics to retain our right to free speech/code, etc.

The good thing is that, unlike most activists and radicals, we're in a *very* strong position, because the stock market, and the economy in general has bet the farm on the industry we work in...

Imagine what were to happen if, in protest of the recent attacks against the linux community, we were to coordinate a general strike?

Even more powerful is another possibility, what if great portions of the industry took large paycuts in order to work on free software?

We may not always be at the forefront of our economy, IT jobs may move wholesale to India where wages are much lower. If you don't think it'll happen, I'm sure I could introduce you to a GM worker in Flint, MI who thought the same thing about his job in the 70's. But for the time being, we are a very strong force in the economy, and because of that we have a responsibility to protect freedom.

In any case, here's my post from a while ago. Think about it, and remember that whether you consider yourself a right-Libertarian, a liberal, a conservative, or an Individualist Anarcho-Syndicalist, you and your peers (the linux community) will have your freedoms attacked, and it will radicalize you. Think about it...

--

Which means you should prepare to face a barrage of court orders, attacks on individual freedom, attempts to bottleneck the Internet, and arrests of prominent Open Source gurus.

It's quite possible. I'm not saying it's definite, but the possibility exists. Keep in mind that Food Not Bombs gives away free vegetarian food to anybody who's hungry. Their reason? Because "food grows on trees."

Despite this wonderful example of altruism, they've had numerous encounters with the police, and are a constant target of brutality and harrassment. Strange, no?

Maybe not. Food Not Bombs are very progressive and radical (as opposed to being liberal, and just whining about poverty), and have decided to take matters into their own hands. Becuase of this, they also use the opportunity to hand out flyers, organize protests, meet other social activists, etc. Most probably, this is what scares the government and corporations into repressing them.

Probably open source's saving grace is the fact that most of it's members are not equating the sharing of code with political ideologies. Regardless, it will be targetted by the corporations it threatens, but in the first wave of repression, you'll see very IP-oriented attacks (such as the actions by RIAA), lobbying to forbid the use of open source software in government institutions, along with future attempts to use the antiquated patent and intellectual property laws against the open source community. As this begins happening, you will start seeing open source advocates becoming increasingly more radical in order to challenge the powers that be.

More protests, more electronic civil disobedience, etc. Once people start using the freedom of open source as a point of advocacy towards a more free and equitable society is when you will see the real repression by the elites. Not because giving away code (or food) is inherently dangerous to them, but because it represents a flaw in their dominance that they will go to great lengths to conceal. What is that flaw? That we don't need them!

One of the popular Linux slogans has been "Welcome to the Revolution." So welcome - and welcome to the front lines. Prepare to duck!

Make no mistake, Open Source is a revolution, but what most "Linux zealots" don't realize is that the people in control never welcome a revolution of any kind.

--

gcc -o -Wall society.cc
society.cc: Classes 'government' and 'capitalism' not found!

society.cc: Derived classes, 'greed', 'oppression',
society.cc: 'hierarchy', and 'violence' will no longer
society.cc: function.

Proceed with compilation? Y/n

Michael Chisari

Which means you should prepare to face a barrage of court orders, attacks on individual freedom, attempts to bottleneck the Internet, and arrests of prominent Open Source gurus.

It's quite possible. I'm not saying it's definite, but the possibility exists. Keep in mind that Food Not Bombs gives away free vegetarian food to anybody who's hungry. Their reason? Because "food grows on trees."

Despite this wonderful example of altruism, they've had numerous encounters with the police, and are a constant target of brutality and harrassment. Strange, no?

Maybe not. Food Not Bombs are very progressive and radical (as opposed to being liberal, and just whining about poverty), and have decided to take matters into their own hands. Becuase of this, they also use the opportunity to hand out flyers, organize protests, meet other social activists, etc. Most probably, this is what scares the government and corporations into repressing them.

Probably open source's saving grace is the fact that most of it's members are not equating the sharing of code with political ideologies. Regardless, it will be targetted by the corporations it threatens, but in the first wave of repression, you'll see very IP-oriented attacks (such as the actions by RIAA), lobbying to forbid the use of open source software in government institutions, along with future attempts to use the antiquated patent and intellectual property laws against the open source community. As this begins happening, you will start seeing open source advocates becoming increasingly more radical in order to challenge the powers that be.

More protests, more electronic civil disobedience, etc. Once people start using the freedom of open source as a point of advocacy towards a more free and equitable society is when you will see the real repression by the elites. Not because giving away code (or food) is inherently dangerous to them, but because it represents a flaw in their dominance that they will go to great lengths to conceal. What is that flaw? That we don't need them!

One of the popular Linux slogans has been "Welcome to the Revolution." So welcome - and welcome to the front lines. Prepare to duck!

Make no mistake, Open Source is a revolution, but what most "Linux zealots" don't realize is that the people in control never welcome a revolution of any kind.

--

gcc -o -Wall society.cc
society.cc: Classes 'government' and 'capitalism' not found!

society.cc: Derived classes, 'greed', 'oppression',
society.cc: 'hierarchy', and 'violence' will no longer
society.cc: function.

Proceed with compilation? Y/n

Michael Chisari