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• Nerual Networks
• Transputers
• Quantum Computing
• Multi-processor clusters (Beowolf, ect.)
• Networked CPUs
• Timeshare systems

• operate the engine of your car
• monitor usage of gasoline at a gas station, and run a cash register
• build an automobile from the ground up, controlling robots in a factory
• act as an interactive toy for toddlers
• act as a sports medium to play games for older folks (like most /. readers)
• respond as a really beefed up typewriter that even helps proofread your content
• monitor your house for security/fire protection

The article states that this procedure is only for retinitis pigmentosa, but in the end, it is not a treatment for RP, but an early biocompatibility test. RP is only a useful physiological test bed that renders the patient blind over large areas of the retina, while leaving most of the retinal structure intact. The patient was undoubtedly a research volunteer, and was aware of all this, and should probbaly more properly be coinsdered a 'subject' (but I hate calling patients that).

As you probably recall from elementary school, there are two types of receptors in the eye. Rods handle B/W vision, are more sensitive to light, and are responsible for night and peripheral vision. Cones handle color vision, and are only found in the central areas of the visual field, especially the area of best vision in the eye, fovea centralis. (not to be confused with a nearby region of *no* vision, the macula lutea or 'blind spot' where the optic nerve enters the retina). Simple layman diagrams and links to useful concepts (but not *absolutely* accurate) can be found at:
http://hyperphysics.p hy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/retina.html
http://hyperphysics .phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html
Here's a good anatomical overview of the eye

RP is a group of genetic diseases which cause the rods to degenerate. about ten different mutation have been linked to forms of RP, which can be dominant, recessive, or X-linked. Initially, the patient loses their peripheral vision, beginning in a single region, then gradually spreading. The fovea centralis is the last region to be affected, if ever, because there are few rods in the fovea. It is not clear if loss of sharp central vision is due to 'pure' RP at all, since mutations in some 'RP' genes can cause macular degenerations or other retinal conditions. It appears that the loss of central vision is dependent on the individual's particular mutation.

The retina is laid out in layers, and in very different way that you might imagine. The photo sensors are in the *back* of the retina, and in front of them are several layers of neurons that allow the sensors to integrate (share info between nearby sensors, etc) and in front of that are the blood vessels a snd the neurons that go from the interneurons into the optic nerve, etc. Light passes through all these layers before hitting the rod and cone sensors. The only things that are 'behind' the sensors are the pigmented (choroid) layer, a black layer that absorbs all leftover light to keep it from bouncing around the eye; and the sclera, the tough "white of the eye" that provides support.
[Slides and images]
[Good slide, exlanations, links, but a bit technical]

So why use this implant in RP? Well, by prying apart the layers of the retina as described, the sensors can be placed where the cones used to be, and with a bit of luck, the overlying layers of interconnecting neurons will remain intact (they are presumably unaffected by the rod-destroying mutations, since 'cone' vision is preserved in RP) All this is done in the periphery of the eye, away from the delicate Fovea and macula. Here it can be tested, through the (largely) intact eye, without significantly affecting the patient's remaining natural vision (though there's always some risk)

This implant links into the web of interneurons in the retina, instead of having to be connected to the optic nerve as the native rods and cones do. You can see how this is easier than trying to do delicate neurosurgery on the optic nerve, and then re-training the patient's visual cortex. This is the most 'natural' process for th patient, since all position info is preserved and the preprocessing of the retina is present (ther preprocessing has two purposes: feedback to nearby sensors, which is lost in man-made sensors, and pre-processing of the visual impulses, which is preserved)

However, a low resolution 'pinhead' sensor on the periphery won't help an RP patient at all. In fact, patients sometimes find patchy remnants of peripheral vision distracting and annoying. Clearly this is not a treatment for RP but an early stage biocompatibility test for later work (that is more likely to be useful in other conditions).

Here's a review article on progress and challenges in similar subretinal implant technologies

(Disclaimer: I published some research on retinal layers as an undergrad, but that was almost 20 years ago, and before I went to medical school)

Mr. Garfinkel also was known at the conference for harassing the poor presenters at the sessions. The presenters were talking about a web program their students just wrote for them, showing how good and valuable student help was. Simson however kept interrupting and askinga bout how secure the program was and how much access the students had to the data saying that a verbal consent to not release the info was not enough. All in all, he did not leave a very good impression.

The conference overall was great though. You can see the many ResNet admins and how much they care about and want to improve the situations for students in their dorms. All the presentations and more infor on the conference can be seen online at: http://www.rescomp.upenn.edu/resnet2000/

Someone else gave a link to the text of UCITA.

Looking at that, section 406 (c) makes it utterly clear that a claim of "as is" or something similar to that (eg what the GPL does) is sufficient to disclaim all warranties except that of section 401. Section 401 only applies to information, not programs. (ie Software is in the clear, geographica databases are not.) And that can be disclaimed with words to the effect of, "There is no warranty against interference with your enjoyment of the information or against infringement."

Cheers,
Ben

(I'm just waiting until someone releases a plug-in compatible replacement for my head.)

We are discussing U.S. copyright term here.

Works published with a copyright notice between 1923 and 1963 are in the public domain unless the copyright owner filed a renewal form with the copyright office at the correct time.

Probably only some 20% of works published between 1923 and 1963 were renewed--the rest have fallen into the public domain. Determining whether or not a work was renewed requires checking the Catalog of Copyright Entries from the Registrar of Copyrights in the Library of Congress--see, for books, online lists at the On-Line Books page at UPenn. You can determine registrations and renewals after 1977 online at telnet:locis.loc.gov.

Works that did expire were retroactively given their copyright back

Although jms is correct in the case of this film, it is also true that many works that had entered the U.S. public domain were placed back under copyright by means of the Uruguay Round of GATT, if the work was first published outside the U.S. more than a year before U.S. publication, and other complicated terms such as failure to renew when the author was not a U.S. citizen or resident.

Determining copyright status is not easy now. The Nolo Press book on Copyright by Stephen Fishman is excellent, and there are online resources at the web site mentioned above.

The general point, though is very good--copyright term is too long now. Larry Lessig is my lawyer in the suit Eldred v Reno to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. You can learn more and you can help us at http://eon.law.harvard.edu.

You don't seem to understand the impact of the UCITA. It is a law proposal that will exactly do that: put the magic in cellophane.

Short version of UCITA: The developer has FULL liability unless waivered by a shrink-wrapped license.

You're right, at the moment. But with the UCITA in action, your no warranty clause in the GPL would be overruled by law. Underestimating this is exactly the danger we're facing!

I've often heard that view espoused, however, I do not see any language in UCITA, or its predecessors CITA and UCC Article 2B that specify "shrink-wrap". That term does not appear in UCITA The terms I do see apply equally to all mass market licenses, whether they are read pre- or post-sale, shrink-wrapped or not, etc. (with one exception, below)

UCITA does 'firm up' some standards that were previously ambiguous or inconsistently interpreted. These include reaffirming a few principles of implied warranty, and weakening others. They also include reaffirming the inpplicability of outrageous terms in licenses. This has been interpreted variously as saying 'full waivers may be void' and 'full waivers are affirmed'. Whichever interpretations wins out, will apply equally to all mass market licenses.
The only clause I have seen that differentiates SWL from GPL is the refund clause for SWL which allows a right of refund, with or without cause, if the license was not available until after purchase. Some have taken to mean that SWL products are *only* liable for refund (a claim that is difficult to support in the light of the whole law: either Section 809 and similar sections may properly be waived by a SWL and GPL; or they are both equally unconscionable and void. I cannot read the refund clause as a privileged state of limited liability)

However, I am eager to learn. Here's the UCITA text in a variety of formats, and 48 legal articles commenting on the law. Please quote the appropriate text supporting your claim. Otherwise I may suspect you accused me of not understanding UCITA, when I've done my homework and you haven't.

I despise UCITA, but I feel that ignorant babbling serves our cause very poorly.

BTW, I think badsoftware.com is an interesting and site, but their slideshow is ambiguously worded on the SWL disclaimer. If you re-read it, you will find that it says the offensive disclaimers are allowed in 'shrink-wrap' (terms hidden until after purchase) licenses but NOT that such disclaimer can ONLY be exercised by an undisclosed license.


IANAL. I just invested time and effort before I made my comments. I trust you did, too, and that I will be reading a response soon

If you would like to reduce the risk of having your book spread across the internet, you could consider using an "on-line" publisher. People who use electronic book readers connect directly to the publisher's network (with the book's built-in modem) where they can browse, purchase and download books from a selection of titles. Authors who would like to make their work free on the internet should consider adding it to an on-line library.

(This was on Dave Farber's list.)

If the press release is to be believed, it's a patent on
using a wireless handset to deliver information that's
dependent on where you are, such as telling you the nearest MacDonald's.
- handset-based services granted now, network-based pending.
I'm not sure how broad their patent claims are,
as opposed to their marketing PR (:-), but it sounds like it's
way over-broad, steps on lots of things that should be obvious enough
to anyone skilled in the trade, and sounds like Yet Another
Stupid Patent Office Trick.

Their Press Release www.cell-loc.com

..."U.S. patent office has conditionally allowed Cell-Loc to claim the
delivery of handset-based wireless location content and services over
the Internet as its property, regardless of technological method employed."


Unfortunately, after downloading the half megabyte of animated Web Designer Candy
that serves as their main web page, it wasn't possible to get to any
real information, but YMMV... :-)

Recent editions of the book (sorry, I don't have my copy to hand) contain an appendix that details how Fahrenheit 451 was censored by the publisher in some editions, without the author's permission. Seems a bit ironical, doesn't it?

The first film version of 1984 (not the Hurt-Burton color one) was disliked by Orwell's widow. She bought up all the copies, the rights returned to her, and now that film is difficult or impossible to view. (She died before the second version was produced.)

Censorship need not be by the government, and bad laws are not the only way it is implemented. The film version of Fahrenheit 451, by Francois Truffaut points this up very well in just the initial frames: one sees telescopically a lot of television antennae over an English suburb. It is television that is the technology that causes these social changes, not the government. Montag in the film (but not the book) tries to explain why books are burned--it boils down to "books make people unhappy."

Neither Fahrenheit 451 nor 1984 is likely to be read freely online soon--their copyrights will extend for a long time. But their spirit of freedom and aim in preserving our book culture does motivate those of us "bookpeople" who scan books and place them online to share. Please join us! and please boycott those locked-up e-books being announced today!

Nobody seems to have brought this up, so here's one direct answer to the original question, grounded in basic linguistics:

Esperanto and Loglan/Lojban are not full human languages at least because they have no native speakers.

Someone brought up pidgins in another post, pointing out that they're not full languages, either. Scientific language study has shown that when children grow up in a community where a pidgin is spoken, they will invent words to complete a new language, called a creole.

It's hard to think of a situation where children could be brought up with Loglan as their native language that wouldn't be abusive to those children.

Nobody seems to have brought this up, so here's one direct answer to the original question, grounded in basic linguistics:

Esperanto and Loglan/Lojban are not full human languages at least because they have no native speakers.

Someone brought up pidgins in another post, pointing out that they're not full languages, either. Scientific language study has shown that when children grow up in a community where a pidgin is spoken, they will invent words to complete a new language, called a creole.

It's hard to think of a situation where children could be brought up with Loglan as their native language that wouldn't be abusive to those children.

I would point out:

No one wants to throw out the original books. They are historical artifacts with value beyond the mere text.

E-archives such as the aforementioned Guttenberg Project, the English Server at Carnegie Mellon, and The Online Books Page at UPENN are tremendously useful and popular. These university libraries still get lots of paperphiles, who aren't even students.

If you don't want to read on a screen, buy a printer.

As for digital media storage, any hard drives, CDs, etc. that the Library used would decay in a few decades - unless they go for some real high end stuff, like some experiemental optical drive. Either way, the cost and upkeep would, presumably, be a fairly large multiple of the library's current budget. I would love to have a digital library of congress, but the costs would be huge. How would we pay for it? Fees would undermine the whole notion of free public libraries, and be fodder for the argument of a "digital divide". Banner ads at the Library of Congress website would probably be a poor solution. And I don't think tax increases would be well received. Nonetheless, our librarian said none of these things, which makes me wonder if he needs to get out of that musty labyrinth of shelves and breath a little fresh air. He sounds downright crotchty.

You can find most online books that exist at upenn, though obviously they aren't on CD.

Copyright law in the U.S. does need an overhaul, but we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Much of what RMS argues could be achieved by returning law to what prevailed before 1976, thus revoking DMCA, NET, and the popular concept of "property rights" to creative expressions.

These eBook gadgets (what I called "antibooks" at http://www.eldritchpress.org/battle.html) are indeed bad for everybody, because they deny fair use, the right of first sale, lending by libraries, resale by bookstores, reading by blind readers, and they invade our privacy.

But they should not be confused with the 11,000 FREE electronic books now available on the Internet, that are not so locked up. And many unencrypted books are being sold on the Internet now, although not by the media giants.

Copyright does not imply locking up books, and selling books on the Internet does not imply encrypting them and denying readers' rights. Copyright should imply open publication with fair use by the reader, for a limited time, then it enters the public domain.

Now, what should we do? First, we can join a battle in the courts to change copyright law: see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno. Second, we can boycott these encrypted "antibooks," just as we did DIVX.

But, most importantly, we need to assemble a POLITICAL coalition of citizens around the "intellectual property" issues of digital media (music, books, video, etc.) including the human genome (now just a database), and issues of globalization and domination of our popular culture by rent-seeking media giants based in the rich countries. We may need to change campaign contribution laws first, as one example.

However, we cannot rely on strictly technological responses any longer, and we cannot rely on a free market to solve problems either--the market has been captured by media monopolists with government backing, and copyright infringement has been criminalized. The public has been taught to call us "pirates" for not being compliant consumers. We need an education campaign comparable to that of Hollywood's. Only if the universities (not the "run-as-a-business" type) and the great institutions of our society charged with preserving science and the humanitites join in this education campaign can freedom truly prevail.

That isn't just some generic name, it's a reference to Jonathan Swift, author of (among other things) Gulliver's Travels. He wrote an extremely funny essay titled A Modest Proposal, which has not at all modest recommendations about how best to feed Ireland. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what these authors had in mind when they chose the title of their paper...

I don't know if "more with less" is always a good mantra

Back in eary March, there was a /. article on optical switches with a response from interiot who linked to an interesting article:

The Coming of the Fibersphere

It made a pretty convincing argument that when a resource becomes cheap enough, success will go to those who can waste the resource.

Damon

Work as if you don't need the money,
Love as if you've never been hurt, and
Dance as if no one's watching.

Unix-like systems give you a lot of flexibility in letting things talk to each other, including keyboards and their substitutes, processes, etc.,
and they're not picky about what hardware really exists as long as it's not too weird.
The critical issues for porting voice to Unix are things like making sure the scheduler has enough hard real-time support that the voice recognizer doesn't starve, working within a multi-process environment, and dealing with kernel-userspace boundaries. For instance, if your voice recognizer provides context-sensitive vocabularies, how do you keep track of which context(s) belong to which processes, and if they're in the kernel or other protected storage space, how do you pass vocabularies to them efficiently?

But most of that's pretty straightforward, and application level, and can't be worse than adding X Windows or NeWS was, and certainly not as difficult as adding TCP/IP had been.

More importantly, if you want to build voice applications, what kind of services do you think an OS will need to support them? Are they available in Linux? Do you need to add them? Is there anything big you have to get rid of to make them work? Sure, you could junk it all and use a capability-based system like the

Extremely Reliable Operating System
or some microkernel thing. But what do you need?

So far results are promising:

-- http://www.sas.upenn.edu/biology/facult y/rea/

For obvious reasons the EPA is very interested in this work as a means of very cheaply processing abandoned toxic dump (so-called "Superfund") sites. After growing a field of modified Arabidopsis, the material can be harvested and incinerated, separating the compounds for re-use or safe disposal.

Not all biotechnology is about Monsanto taking over the world!

See The Coming of the Fibersphere, a great essay about something that this switch makes possible.

For cripes' sake. You are rehashing cliches 1500 years old.

Well lets see... take a peek at kvoicecontrol for KDE, compliments of Daniel Kiecza.
I haven't checked in a while (may a bit outdated), but heres some linux speech apps
For those that really wanna play, check out IS IP 's ASR project.
For those that are interested in aquiring speech corpa (training data) check out The LDC-online. Get the free guest account, use your perl skills and your imagination, and suddenly the TIMIT corpus is yours :) Granted for non profit use only...

Email me if you're interested in this kinda stuff (or want my timitgrab.pl script)... its not my primary address, but I check it from time to time.

You`d probably be interested in kvoicecontrol for your particular demands.
Oh yeah for my email, the 00 in r00t is two zeros.

Incidentally what level of math expertice are they assuming? I have taken up through differential calculus and still hardly know a damn thing contained.

Here's the Amazon link for reference (buy it wherever you want).

The part on hypergeometic series has been mostly obsoleted by later work. See the book A=B (Amazon or FREE download).

Email me if you're interested in this kinda stuff (or want my timitgrab.pl script)... its not my primary address, but I check it from time to time.

The full text of UCITA, as passed by the NCCUSL (Nat'l Council of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws) is available online, as is a FAQ-type document written up by the NCCUSL.

It seems to me that this is once again a case of law being drafted by idiots. It really seems to me like the NCCUSL thinks they're doing the right thing by consumers, that they haven't thought through the implications of things, or how courts would be forced to rule on the issues. They claim that they are giving lots of new rights to consumers, that they are not outlawing reverse engineering or license transfers.

There are a couple of things in the FAQ that it seems to me can be universally agreed upon as being obvious.

• Federal law supercedes state law. This means that if any provision of the UCITA contradicts Federal law, then that provision is invalid.
• Unreasonable terms of a contract cannot be enforced. This means that if a provision of a software contract states that you shall never eat tomatoes again, it can be thrown out. It is up to the courts to determine what is "unreasonable".

After reading through the section on transfers, it seems to me (IANAL) that it does not outlaw transfers of licenses. Rather, it says that such transfers may be outlawed by a term in the license. AFAIK, this has always been the case. In the case of mass-market license, any such transfer-prohibiting term must be "conspicuous" (i.e. one of those annoying SECTIONS IN ALL CAPS).

Reverse engineering: UCITA explicitly states that it does not supercede existing "trade secret" laws. I'm having a hard time finding other areas of UCITA that would apply to reverse engineering (IANAL). Anybody care to help out on this one?

Mostly, I just tend to be a bit wary of things that scream, "THIS LAW IS EVIL!" I like to check them out. It doesn't seem to me that UCITA is as evil as it is cracked up to be. (IANAL) If people would refute this, I would appreciate it.

Summary or details.

And how do you know we don't have altered personality as we age? Perhaps you haven't known people, and yourself, for decades. Remember, there probably is no single neuron controlling anything, and we're referring to replacing some with similar neurons.

Religously minded political orginizations fear the internet because it is a forum of reason, and much of it goes against their morals based on blind faith.

Can we have an example, please?

Corporations fear the internet.

Again, can we have an example?

Today any country is frowned upon for regulating books. Now is the time we must speak up, and secure the rights on the internet, that we have for printed materials.

Look here for many examples of the regulation of books.

One of the things that has not yet been decided, in my view, is whether the legal structures that have grown up around printed material, for instance, are appropriate for the Internet. I would say "no", but many would disagree.

We must speak up. We must also be aware that a long process has just begun (not necessarily in elapsed time, but in issues to be resolved), the outcome of which is far from clear.

We will also be releasing the trainer, and Sphinx 3, but it's coming out in steps. Sphinx 2 is the real-time engine, and while Sphinx 3 is more accurate, it's still slower.

As far as releasing Data, we will be releasing whatever we can. It's OK for us to release models derived from data from, for instance, the LDC (linguistic data consortium), because their licensing terms explicitly allow it, but much of our data comes from other sources. We'll be able to put some data out, but i think we'd be better off creating a public repository of contributed data, explicitly stating that all contributed data will remain free.

Think about it, the internet and I'm thinking of specifically wireless means that potentially any electronic thingy can be a distribution channel. You want a sunhat with radio, no problem, scuba mask with music, doable, electronic teddy bear that plays your favourite loony tunes, etc ...

With the number of channels expanding exponentially, the normal retail constrictions lose their pricing power. Parallel imports, recirculating radio shows over the net, MP3 servers, mobile phone, whatever.

The only way to to become big enough that your catalog is comprehensive enough (what most e-commerce sites are mostly at this stage) that people will put up with some sort of rental (which could be hidden in the normal telecom/connection charges). I would estimate minimum 20% to the total market, and total includes all music back to the prehistoric-age beating on stones (with effectively inifite storage, anything and everything could be eventually digitised). So you'd probably end up with 3-5 major comprehensives and a raft of niche specialists. The infrastructure IMHO will be coming under incredible deflatory pressures because you will be able to fit a complete radio station into a briefcase. Take a look at Gilder's Inventing the Internet Again. Essentially you can replace local storage with bandwidth (think of the time/space the bits spend in the air as the memory) which means reduction in costs/weight of the receiver. Something like the Transmeta chip would be able to decipher software as it flows from the air, dragging the MP3 stream after it. Given another few years, you'd be able to set up a jukebox at home, then listen to your favourites all day. Implication, severe market erosion by any ad-based distribution network (like radio/e-commerce). Also once people discover that one internet radio station is much the same as another (not surprising when they are all owned/programmed by clones of the same marketing droids ... can we say one-stop-shop for ads?) then they'd start looking for alternatives (ie fringe groups). That's is IMHO people are so scared of MP3 as it gives exposure to non-mainstream groups whom they can't control with company shop (ie artifically inflated to put people in debt) prices to produce/flog music. Given that the average joe can put together (admitted rather low quality) mix on a cheap home system, anyone and his dog will be able to composite stuff ... expect new business model of give away the CD/MP3, sell the DVD/master. Technology is cheap enough such that it is not a differentiating factor (and music companies don't have a lock on the creative types that actually create the new wealth, except maybe some games shops).

There's a consumer revolution coming and people are rearranging chairs in a mad rush so they're not the ones left standing when the bullets start flying.

LL

I took the time to read the article he linked to and I must say that I would recommend that everyone should do as I did and read it. Very informative and educational, unless of course you knew all about this sort of stuff already (dumb 'dark fibre' networks).

I wonder though at the fact that it was published in 1992 and we havn't really heard of this sort of thing. Yes I realize that the telcos would be running big obfuscation and FUD campaigns against something this threatening to their power, but one would think that some more information would be widely available as it seems like such a positive thing.

Of course it could all be a pipe-dream technology along the lines of pure vapourware, but it just seems too logical and "right" IMHO. If anyone can point me to more resources along these lines, I'd be very grateful. Please feel free to email me, as this forum is not the proper place for responses to my enquiry. Thanks.

-- kwashiorkor --
Pure speculation gets you nowhere.

It's interesting to read what Dave Farber, recently Named FCC Chief Technologist, has to say about Internet 2. You can read his position paper on Internet 2, which he calls NII2000. Even if you don't agree with his position, it's an excellent paper.

Hopefully it means that if universities want to continue building their ivory tower, they won't be doing it with my tax dollars (or not as many, anyway).

People might be interested in reading George Gilder's "The Coming of the FibreSphere". Basically he calims that you can substitute mass cheap bandwidth for switches (which being electronic only add latency) creating a design of dark fibre with all the intelligence at the peripheral. Now while this may appeal to customers, certain telcos suddenly find themselves in the commodity bandwidth business with nothing to support their big expensive time-based, distance-function bills. Guess what their natural response is? How can they justify the $n per megabyte when they can't control the marginal costs and thus segment the market by imposing deliberate latencies or constraints. Remember that in the IT industry, the value migrates to the complex and difficult areas (e.g. CPU, complex software) so with companies investing in voice-activated smart phones, they lose control unless they can corner any new markets and introduce delaying tactics. Why bother with switching when you can tune to 1 of thousands of fibre frequencies, especially when you can't use more than a few hundred home shopping categories anyway. Anyway, the hope is that by giving the smart universities some taste of what is possible, they will develop bandwidth-hungry applications that will drive consumer demand and thus make large-scale cost effective infrastructure investment. Life will be interesting.

It is rather interesting that the base human desires seem to dominate new technology. I've heard an urban ledgend that the vibrator was the third patented invention that used the new minature electric motors (after sewing machine and something else I can't recall at the moment), the porn industry is leading with DVD and the porn sites (and gambling) are one of the few profitable internet enterprises. Not sure whether this is a commentary on applied technology or human nature though :-).

LL

Uri Geller has a long history of filing lawsuits against anyone who criticize him, debunk him, or even just incorrectly describe his past. Witness, for example, his various suits against James "Amazing" Randi, who published The Truth About Uri Geller . I don't recall all the details of Geller's suits against Randi, but you can probably find more info at randi.org. Fortunately, Randi is a bulldog who doesn't let Geller intimidate him. The long and the short of it is that Geller is a fraud and will sue anyone who dares to say so.

--Jim

John W. Mauchly (1907-1980) - Inventor of the first large-scale general-purpose electronic computer. Check it out here

Here's some more info found on the webb.

Ya know, some people wonder why a large body of us stick around and criticize Jonathan Katz rather than just go away. Here's why.

One, his Columbine columns were quite insightful and they raised the expectation that more insight would come from the individual who could write such material. Two, Katz is front page material here on /. and three, this stuff just gets more and more surreal with today's tirade against scientists and theologians as the source of evil in our society. Sound familiar anyone?

In reality, BioEthics is a well-established field. All of the questions raised murkily in this essay were long ago considered by theologians, bioethicians, and scientists. If Jonathan were to do a web search rather than go to Wired News or watch the BBC, he'd find the debate has been underway for decades.

And if he occasionally read a book (a non-volatile storage medium for you young'uns), then he'd even find out that some of those guys supposedly behind most of human suffering have been much too busy thinking about these very same subjects to subjugate humanity.

So very right, but at the same time, so very wrong. In an ideal world, you are perfectly right: a democracy is ruled by the majority(who are presumably right, kind, and just) delegating their powers to representatives(who are presumably even kinder and juster). However, in practice things don't always work out this way. Sometimes, you have what is known as "tyranny of the majority", where the majority uses their democratic power to oppress the minority. The Jim Crow laws that sprang up after the Civil War typify this. Certainly this was pure democracy in action -- the legislators doing what their constituents wanted. These laws, coupled with the resurgence ofThe KKK, made it very uncomfortable to be a political(and, in this case, racial) minority in much of this country for quite a time. Democracy in Action!

However, the founders of the US had thought of this, and set down the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is specifically intended to preserve individual liberty, even at the cost of pure majority rule.

Of course, in practice, this hasn't always worked so well (see above). It seems that no matter how many times freedoms are written down, even on real paper, they can be stolen by the government and/or antagonistic fellow citizens.

Only one thing stands between the black sharecropper and the Klan, between the Warsaw Jew and the Nazis, between any oppressed minority and the pogrom. It is the one thing the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto tried desperately to aquire, the one thing that was immediately taken from free blacks in the South, the one thing that every tyrant fears: a gun.

All too often, in America and elsewhere, personal weapons have meant the difference between liberty and slavery, between life and death. Remember the words of Martin Niemoller: "In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."
Do you think this would have happened if every Communist, Jew, trade unionist, Catholic, and Protestant had had a gun and ammunition? Of course, one of the first things Hitler did was register, and then later confiscate, almost every priately-owned firearm in Germany.

Maybe I'm just another crazy American obsessed with guns. Maybe this time, for real, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, government is really kind and benevolent. Maybe you will put your faith in them, and vote, and hope that this time, they won't take away quite so many of your rights.

And maybe, it will be because you have no other choice.

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Here's a story about how the Right to Keep and Bear Arms played a part in protecting the lives of citizens in the face of persecution from mob mentality and a complicit local government. It happened in the city where I go to work every day, and it happened less than forty years ago. It's hard to tell, but this article might have been written by a communist or communist-sympathizer, so it should be read with that bias in mind.

Here's another story about how the Right to Keep and Bear Arms prevented another local government (this time in Tennessee) from rigging elections in 1946.

As for the national government, the greatest effect of the 2nd Amendment is hard to judge, as the would-be tyrants are hardly going to inform us of the occasions when they wanted to destroy civil liberties but were too afraid to do so. Certainly, however, it has had some effects. Apparently in the wake of Oklahoma City, the FBI has been more willing to try to negotiate, and find common ground with, various groups that they had previously labelled extremist -- and were surprised to find that they often shared very similar values.

Although not in the United States, it is probably telling that the Afrikaaners in South Africa treated the Zulus (who were willing and able to fight) much differently than the other tribes (who were generally peaceful), and if you read Dr. Livingstone's "Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa", you will discover that those Tswana who learned to resist the Boers were able to maintain more of their freedom than when they had tried to co-exist peacefully. (Search for this book at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books or http://www.ipl.org.

The Spanish and Portuguese colonists both were happy enough to conduct slave raids on the Guarani Indians, until the Jesuits got permission to arm them -- at which point the slave raids miraculously abated. (Read the famous socialist/communist author Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham's book, "A Vanished Arcadia: The Jesuits in Paraguay", also online at the above addresses, for an account. Cunninghame Graham is a two-part last name, which will help when you try to search for it.)

The lessons of history are plain and clear, and we ignore them at our peril.

As George Washington expressed it, "If you wish for peace, prepare for war." It is as true now as it was then.

Alan Light

As far as I know, it is the definitive free book page.

Enjoy. Happy Thanksgiving (for the Americans).

I have been told by an applied math geek friend of mine that STW is another one of those "it's all connected, maaaan..."-type theories along the line of "e^(pi * i) + 1 = 0", although a good deal messier. I've also been informed that STW was used heavily in Wiles' proof, not unlike a load-bearing block in Jenga.

(Never mind "First Post!" I hereby start the new tradition of "Most Links!" After all, it's more productive, and more importantly, it's all connected, maaaaaan....)

Its new location is at:

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/

The CMU address still works for the opening page, but the site manager is recommending that everybody link and bookmark the new URL.

...but they are hardly the only people producing free e-texts. Yes, I remember that in the pre-Web era their ftp site was about the only place on the net for e-texts, but as the existence of huge archive sites like The Online Books page show, PG is just one group among many similar groups these days.

Personally, I think that two large fields of application will stem from a) RNA research (self-modyfying, or even evolving molecules) and b) PNA research (see my other post - "DNA, RNA and BBC"), which are much more stable then DNA molecules itself.

As for DNA, I know that there are people trying to use DNA as a conductor, so you could build molecular-sized wires (see this fascinating artic le from The Scientist about the first DNA nanomachines; another idea is to use nanotubes).

Don't dream about using DNA or RNA attached to anything which could get dirty: there are so much nucleases from bacteria, or even from your fingers, that it wouldn't last more then, say, a couple of hours, maybe minutes.

As for building nanobots repairing DNA in your cell, well, we have them, every living cell has them - complicated repair mechanisms. So it would be a much better idea to use what already works, and maybe make it work a little better - your genes are not as interested in an infinite prolongation of your cells life as you are, they have to care about spreading and replicating as well, so they do not invest all the available energy for repairing what is not supposed to last forever.

Regards,

January

The key to making EROS useful to people running Linux would be to build a "GNU System" atop EROS, parallelling building a "GNU System" atop the Linux kernel.

(Note that I usually call "systems based on the Linux kernel" by the moniker Linux; the use of the RMS term happens to be usefully descriptive here; I'm not trying to do any politically-motivated Newsspeak here.)

I would tend to think that the Debian folks would be the most prepared to create an overall system atop EROS, as they have both

• A set of automated tools for constructing and (to some extent) validating sets of packages, and
• Some experience trying to fit Debian to a non-Linux kernel, namely Hurd

The major alternative that, based on the deployment of predecessor systems like KeyKOS, is likely to take place quite a bit, is that EROS might instead be largely used to construct "somewhat embedded systems" rather than the general purpose system that comes from installing the typical Linux distribution.

This might include:

• Building a really secure little web server package
• Building a really secure little file server package
• Building a really secure network firewall system
• Building a really secure Network Computer
• Building a secure and fast database server

  Which would parallel what Oracle has been working on with the "Raw Iron" Oracle 8i Appliance

I'd kind of like to see both approaches, as that is the most likely way for EROS to become more widely used.

Orthogonal persistence is a wonderful concept but if taken to its logical extreme it could have some problems.

"Bit rot" is a fact of life in big systems. Lots of interconnected components sometimes develop internal inconsistencies in their state and fail. Being able to reboot the system is often the only way to recover.

You can't really reboot a persistent system - it just restores the last state and continues from there. Essentially, it lives forever.

It is true that software today wastes a lot of resources in translating back and forth between the tranisent memory image and the persistent filesystem state, but it gives you the ability to reboot if something goes wrong.

I don't know about EROS but in KeyKOS (EROS's predecessor) there was no way to initialize the system - it was shipped as the memory image of a running copy which was somehow created manually by the deveopers and after that it lives forever. If you experience bit rot the only thing you can do is hope you know when it really started and restore a backup made prior to that time, losing all changes done since.


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35. The CTEA violates the restrictions of Article I, 8 and is therefore unconstitutional. This is because:

a. The CTEA confers benefits retroactively. This can have no rational basis, since no incentive to future individual creativity is provided by conferring an economic reward upon someone who has already created the work in question or upon someone to whom the creator of the work transferred or sold the rights in the work in a transaction that contemplated a shorter copyright term. This is equally true when the author is dead. However, this is exactly what the CTEA does, since it extends the copyright term for existing copyrighted works by another 20 years.

b. The CTEA confers copyright protections for a period of 95 years from the date of a work's creation. This period extends beyond any reasonable expectation of the life expectancy of an author, since few authors begin creating works until they are at least adolescents and since there are few, if any, authors who have lived to an age exceeding 110 years.

Here's a good description of the effect:

http://dept.physic s.upenn.edu/~www/balloon/cerenkov_radiation.html

The weak security of most operating systems permits the proliferation of viruses. The weakness is not in external security, but in the blanket access control given to users and the applications they invoke. An application generally has permission to do anything which the user who invoked it could do. Instead, some operating systems such as EROS and KeyKOS implement the capability security model. This allows users to specify which capabilities they will pass along to objects they invoke. Thus, a user does not grant blanket permission to a program to modify other programs, as is required for virus propagation, or to format the hard disk, as some viruses may do. The user simply grants it permission to create a few objects (files) of a particular type in a particular location (directory).

On another note, one of Knuth's 50-point problems was solved within the last few years. Check out this site to find out more about the problem, and its elegant solution. (The solvers' book, A=B, is available in PDF format until April 2000, I believe.) Knuth was so impressed by their work that he wrote the foreword for their book. Definitely cool stuff.

-jason

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."

ENIAC on a chip (linked from ESR's Retrocomputing museum).