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There are five ways to increase the processing power of a CPU or the teaching power of a High School.

Raise the clock speed - In the analogy, this corresponds to reducing the time available for each class period. If the teacher can talk faster, and if the students behave and listen more closely, this can work up to a point. Each student gets done with the school day earlier.

Build a Pipeline - A more complicated solution shortens the class period, but then breaks each subject into a sequence of steps. If it takes 45 minutes to cover Algebra, and that time cannot be reduced, then the subject could be covered in three consecutive 15 minute periods. A simpler subject might be covered in just one period. After all, there is no reason other than the convenience of scheduling why every every class for every subject lasts the same period of time. Students get done quicker, but only if some of the subjects are light weight.

Parallelism - Add more classrooms and more students. No one student learns anything faster, but at the end of the day the school has taught more people in the same amount of time. Of course, this only works if you have more students in the school district to teach.

Class Size - double the number of students in each classroom. High Schools don't like to do this. Computers, however, can easily switch from 32 to 64 bit operations. This will not effect most programs, but the particular applications that need processing power (games, multimedia) can be distributed in a 64 bit form to get more work done per operation.

Build a Second School - Sometime in '05 or '06 both Intel and AMD will begin to ship "multi-core" processor chips. This creates a system with two separate CPUs. An individual program won't run any faster, and if these chips have a slower clock may even run more slowly. However, two programs will be able to run at once, and programs that require the most performance (games, multimedia) can be written to use both CPUs at once.

...which places you among a minority so small that it can safely be ignored.

the onus should be on the companies to prove that their content is worth it to the people, for us to continue to maintain their monopoly.

The Incredibles return to date is $640 million world-wide in ticket sales and DVD. 18 million DVD sales domestically in its first release, and currently the gold standard for home theater projection and sound. The odds are approaching 1 in 5 that if you own a DVD player, you will own a copy.

there is no compelling reason why the populace or government should help them.

The industry employs 360,000 waged and salaried workers in the U.S., concentrated in the cultural capitals of New York and Los Angeles. Motion Picture and Video Industry Not counted here are the numbers employed in secondary distribution channels such as cable tv, video rental and sales.

Hollywood has been tremendously successful in exporting culture, no one does it better; the export market for american films is huge and politically significant. Hollywood in the Era of Globalization

You're right that these are i386 limitations (although not all BIOS's are actually limited like this) But you're overstating how big of a limitation it is.

I think the way you said that is misleading, because it sounds like you're saying "OpenBSD must be installed in a primary DOS partition to be bootable"

That is definitely not true. OpenBSD does not necessarily have to touch a primary partition to be bootable.

The limitation is really "SOMETHING has to pick what boots" usually (but not always) the i386 BIOS is pretty dumb about this, so something somewhere has to be on a primary partition.

One of the primary partitions on the first drive must be marked active, and that partition must contain a bootable OS OR boot loader that can find your OS - but that's trivial these days. - THE BOOT LOADER DOESN'T HAVE TO MATCH YOUR OS -

So you could have OpenBSD in a logical partition and have a linux boot loader in a primary partition that lets you select on boot which partition - primary or logical, on any drive - gets booted. You could also have this selection be automatic. You could have it boot OpenBSD if it's Thursday, if you wanted. Except for that last part, this is all very, very common freeware.

http://pclt.cis.yale.edu/pclt/BOOT/PARTITIO.HTM

Actually I had a glance at the Hague Convention Concerning the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers in Naval War recently. I was tolerably familiar with the Arms Control treaties of the Sixties and Seventies.

One provision of those treaties stands out, considering neither the US nor the Soviet Union trusted each other, quoting from SALT I

Article V

1. For the purpose of providing assurance of compliance with the provisions of this Interim Agreement, each Party shall use national technical means of verification at its disposal in a manner consistent with generally recognized principles of international law.

2. Each Party undertakes not to interfere with the national technical means of verification of the other Party operating in accordance with paragraph 1 of this Article.

3. Each Party undertakes not to use deliberate concealment measures which impede verification by national technical means of compliance with the provisions of this Interim Agreement. This obligation shall not require changes in current construction, assembly, conversion, or overhaul practices.

verification by national technical means refers to satellites. Military satellites observing the enemy, verifying that they were in fact keeping their word.

It's also consistent with the Hague Convention referred to above, in practically all its articles, effectively neutralizing NEO. It treats NEO as if it were a Neutral Power

Art. 10.

The neutrality of a Power is not affected by the mere passage through its territorial waters of war-ships or prizes belonging to belligerents.

Art. 5.

Belligerents are forbidden to use neutral ports and waters as a base of naval operations against their adversaries, and in particular to erect wireless telegraphy stations or any apparatus for the purpose of communicating with the belligerent forces on land or sea.

'Nuff sed?

Theft is defined as 'intent to deprive someone of their property'. That's the defination. I quote Black's Law Dictionary: "The felonious taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of depriving the true owner of it; larceny."

It's so old a defination it's part of the shared English common law. 'As if a fervant takes his mafter's horfe, without his knowlege, and brings him home again: if a neighbour takes another's plough, that is left in the field, and ufes it upon his own land, and then returns it: if, under colour of arrear of rent, where none is due, I diftrein another's cattel, or fiefe them: all thefe are mifdemefnors and trefpaffes, but no felonies.' (The felony it's not being is 'larciny' or theft.) That's Blackstone's Commentaries, written in 1765. Which is pre-revolution and legally makes it eligable for American common law, BTW. As I can't find where the US Code defines 'theft' except in special circumstances, English common law is the legal defination, believe it or not. (How the hell do you diftrein or fiefe cattle?)

This form of theft is also known as 'theft by taking', the default form of theft, if you will. You are correct that there are other kinds, such as 'theft by conversion', where you legitimately have possession of someone else's property, but 'use it up' without permission, or 'theft by misappropriation', where, IIRC, you have authority to use someone else's money for one purpose, and instead use it for another. All these require 'intent to deprive'.

Copyright infringenment, legally, has NOTHING to do with theft, at all. It's not called theft, it's not defined using the same terms, it's not in the same section of the legal code. In 1985's Dowling v. United States, the Surpreme Court wrote in the majority opinion: "(copyright infringement) does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud... The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use." And they thus decided that copyright infringement across state lines was not the same thing as transporting stolen property.

And let me quote the Seven Circuit Court:

Judge Noonan: Let me say what your problem is. You can use these harsh terms, but you are dealing with something new. And the question is, Does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that somthing new? And that's a very debatable question. You don't solve it by calling it theft. You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That's your problem.
Ramos: Your Honor...
Judge Noonan: So address that, if you would...
Ramos: Your Honor, I would be, I. . .
Judge Noonan: ...rather than use abusive language.

You can argue it's morally or ethically theft all you want. But it is not, and never has been, legally theft, or anything even vaguely related to theft. Under no law forbiding 'theft' that has ever existed.

"In the fall of 1994, IBM released Warp (OS/2 3.0)..IBM had a product out ten months before Windows 95...OS/2 was technically a better system than Windows 95...with real program integrity, priorities, and server-quality I/O. None of this was discussed in any of the IBM ads or announcements. Instead, IBM concentrated on a "one button connection to the Internet" through IBM's expensive public network. It would be six months before IBM released a version..for corporate and campus use (with LAN support) and IBM never succeeded in capturing market share...among home...users."

O/S2 Warp

Well believe it or not slavery was only one of the rights that the south was fighting for.

This is simply not true. Most Northerners were not abolitionists. Most northerners did not care about slavery in the South, so long as it stayed in the South and didn't wander into their back yards. Northerners were keenly interested in limiting the spread of slavery into the federal territories, which in 1860 was most of the country west of the Mississippi. This was more for economic than moral reasons. Slavery and capitalism simply can't function in the same place. Slavery sucks the life out of capitalism.

It's true that by 1860 abolitionist sentiment was growing in the North, thanks partly to the popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but Northerners generally were not so enflamed about how awful slavery was in the South that they wanted to go to war over it.

At the same time, the plantation class in the South came to believe that they had to expand slavery into the territories in order to protect the institution itself. They were keenly interested in being sure new states entering the Union would be slave states. Otherwise, at some point in the future there might be a big enough majority of "free" states to amend the Constitution and ban slavery.

Also, cotton depletes nutrients in the soil, and if the same fields are used for growing cotton year after year, eventually there will be a reduced yield. Apparently crop rotation didn't occur to anyone back then. So, the plantation class wanted to move slavery into new territories (and not just U.S. territories) in order to keep production up with demand.

Most of the wealth of the antebellum South was concentrated in the hands of the plantation owners. Most southern whites were dirt poor, illiterate farmers, but the plantation class lived in lordly splendor. And the antebellum South was, in effect, a plutocracy controlled by the plantation class.

The southern plantation class believed slavery to be necessary to maintaining their wealth. The U.S. South was the chief supplier of high-quality cotton to Europe at the time. Plantation owners believed that their futures depended on the expansion of slavery into the territories, which Lincoln opposed and pledged to stop. Hence, as soon as Lincoln was elected the Southern states began to secede.

The secession conventions of Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas wrote "declaration of causes" documents that explained their reasons for secession. The reasons were slavery, slavery, slavery, and also slavery. What caused secession is what caused the war. You can find links to these here. This is what Mississippi had to say:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

And that's why there was a Civil War..

In 1998, the average per student expenditure for U.S. elementary and high schools was roughly the same as the per student expenditure at Harvard (NOT the tuition, but Harvard's expenditure).

I find that doubtful.

This page shows that in 1991, the publicly funded portion of education expenditure per primary and secondary students in the United States was $4,605.

This page show's that Harvards's library and information resources expenditure alone per student in 1999 was $3,904.

In 1998, with expenses of $1.6 billion and a student population of 18,500, Harvard's expense per student was...almost $88,000. We probably shouldn't count research expenses toward that, so take away the 23% for that and it's still $68,000 per student for instruction and related support.

I doubt that private expenditures were high enough to make up that $60,000+ difference, or that education spending rose enough during the 90s to catch up.

More importantly, "average" hides many things. Average a kid at an expensive private school with a $16,000 yearly expenditure with a kid at a near-bankrupt inner city school with a $2,000 yearly expenditure, and you've got an average of $9,000 per student year.

Again in 1991, public U.S. expenditures per student ranged from $2,600 in Mississippi to $7,900 in Alaska.

The idea that "American public schools are failing" is false because there is no American public school system - each county can be a radically different case.

That's well illustrated in my area, where within the space of a few miles the Baltimore City school system is on the verge of failing, Baltimore County schools are generally adequate (though that varies significantly in different parts of the county), and Howard County schools are doing well. The pass rates on the High School Assessment tests are 33%, 50%, and 74% respectively - more than a factor of 2 between Howard County and Baltimore City.

Here's some explanation of the art of kancho. With a bonus essay on DodgeDick(tm).

"However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." From

"Let me now... warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it."

-- George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

...but here it's an expectation? Well, I guess this is what you get for giving these places the "rich man's loophole" by making it a nice large (and possibly price fixed) admission fee that's conditionally waived for the undeserving. Now when some Ohio State (or even better, Wright State) students would return the favor for the Wright Flyer stunt at MIT, that'd be news, not some high-tax state that caters to the same crowd as MIT's nearby neighbors, also home to Caltech's evil neighbors.

Ocular dominance columns form by competition between signals from each eye. If there is no visual input during the period when this process takes place, the animal remains blind for life. This is a blindness not of the eye, but of the visual cortex. See here for example. The research won Hubel and Wiesel a Nobel prize in 1981.

This is slashdot, not a university. Instead of peremptorily demanding proof, references, empirical data and analysis, why don't you do the googling yourself?

The 'cute' factor would've gotten more funding. Heck, PETA would fund Voyager if we told them that there was a kitten on-board, if anyone remembers this fiasco.

Discuss amongst yourselves:
The SF show, Star Trek, a show that tries to make its techno-babble sound serious, comes off as imminently mockable because of a lack of scientific grounding among its writers and producers. On the other hand, Futurama, a SF cartoon whose science is meant to sound funny, actually has some serious math and science due to the backgrounds of the executive producer and some of the writers.

SharkJumper

You'd be amazed how many fundies go straight into a planetarium show about the Hubble Space Telescope - in a SCIENCE MUSEUM - and are SHOCKED that it mentions that the Unverse is around 15 billion years old.

Please just keep one thing in mind when this happens. Please understand that these people really, really, really do totally 100% believe what they're telling you. They are just as confident that the universe isn't 15 billion years old as you are that is 15 billion years old.

And the thing is, none of us was, obviously, there when then universe started. So we do not have first hand knowledge of its age. Given that, it all comes down to matters of epistemology. Basically, the point here is that we all believe that we have some sort of knowledge about various topics. But where does our knowledge come from and how do we know we're right about our beliefs? You've got to realize that people operate in such different ways that it's not just that the disagree on the facts -- on a much more basic level, they disagree about HOW you figure out what the facts are.

And, the fact is, finding truth through empirical research (science) is a VERY new idea historically speaking. Yes, it's a very powerful idea, and it has brought us the transistor and the airplane and all that stuff, but still the vast majority of the people who have ever lived are used to finding truth through some other source.

So, when that film says, "the universe is 15 billion years old", it is actually by doing so missing out on a huge segment of the human population: the segment that isn't convinced science has all the answers or that science is correct about all the things it thinks are facts.

One possible way of viewing this person's outrage is that the film is stating the scientifically-determined age of the universe as if scientifically-gained knowledge is not disputed. But it is disputed. Not everyone believes that this is the age of the universe. To imply that it's an undisputed fact means you're ignoring the opinions of billions of people, who aren't as confident in science as you are.

This is not to say these people are right and science is wrong. That's not the point. The point is that, even if it is wrong, this film is ignoring the viewpoint of quite possibly the majority of the people and pretending it doesn't exist.

I can't help you, nor can I add anything to the discussion, but I thought I'd act on my Macbot impulses and point out that OS X includes Chinese text input (both Simplified and Traditional) right out of the box.

And due to the Berne Convention, other countries that have signed the agreement (such as Australia) have to obey other country's copyright laws when it comes to products from that country.

Have you got a cite for that? Because no mention is made here, and this page appears to say different to what you claim.

What are you talking about? In the 19th century, people bound for factory work didn't generally go to high school. They didn't need to. High school was considered a road toward the middle class.

As for the new age being "creativity and knowledge-based" the fact is that for the forseeable future, most jobs will only require a high school education, regardless of their stated requirements.

If there's a problem with American high schools, it's that they tend to emphasize sports over math and science. You don't need to engage in empty political sloganeering like "building a new boat" to fix that. You just need to stop giving out sports scholarships.

I am from India and well your accent is also incomprehensible to me :)
How about you picking up our accent since there are more English speakers in India, than UK and US combined http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=4947 .

And while you are at it, check this out http://forum.education.tas.gov.au/webforum/student /Board/Forum36/HTML/000003.html

OK, so it took me just a few minutes more to find it (not the slashdot story itself, but the correct subject anyways). I guess you could say 'the karma's in the mail' now?

> cMajScale = Tempo 2
> (line [c 4 en [], d 4 en [], e 4 en [], f 4 en [],
> g 4 en [], a 4 en [], b 4 en [], c 5 en []])

> cMajScale = Tempo 2
> (line [c 4 en [], d 4 en [], e 4 en [], f 4 en [],
> g 4 en [], a 4 en [], b 4 en [], c 5 en []])

Anyone see the irony of the comment spam at the bottom of one of the linked articles?

Is it just me or half the story is one big long link??

AttackOfTheDictionaries writes "Project Honey Pot started operating back in November. The Project provides its participants with a script that generates fake webpages with unique honeypot email addresses. The end
result is that Project Honey Pot can connect email harvesters' IP
addresses with the spam received by those honeypot email addresses. Which is pretty nifty, but left some people asking how that would help legal attacks on spam. Well, it seems that some lawyer over at SecurityFocus has an answer."

Food for thought--the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent $10.8 billion on marketing in 1998. I presume that figure has risen since.

$2 billion is one B-2 bomber.

$2 billion is less than two percent of an Iraq invasion. (And heading rapidly towards 1%.)

$2 billion sounds like a lot of money, but as far as government programs go it's pretty trifling. About four hundred thousand Americans have AIDS or HIV. Curing the disease would have significant direct economic and health benefits for a lot of Americans, even if you leave out the warm fuzzy feeling associated with saving the rest of the world.

t would be accurate to say our country was founded on money and God which is why we have on our cash "In God We Trust".

It certainly wasn't founded on any god, which explains why the word "god" doesn't appear in the Constitution. The Treaty of Tripoli further clarifies the issue with regards to the christian religion in article 11, which begins "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,..."

I wish sometimes that we were founded on religious ideals rather than ideology.

Which religion? I certainly wouldn't tolerate living in a country based on any of the Abrahamic religions. Buddhism might be nice.

There are those who believe they should this day wish a Mary Christmas to all *good* people rather than all people.

For their own definition of "good", I'm sure. How nice.

ok here are some examples though some cost a little.

Most IRC servers support ssl. in BitchX do:-

BitchX -SSL irc.foo.com 7000 (could be .com:7000) most servers tell you what the correct port is for ssl.

Xchat has the ssl libraries static so you can use it in windows aswell. /server -SSL irc.foo.com 7000

both clients suffer on openbsd though so just setup stunnel if required I think they are both ok on freebsd now but not checked.

Newsgroups - well this is not a free option www.easynews.com offer secure connections and ssl downloads https://secure.members.easynews.com but can be a bit expensive.. or just use the ssl port on the easynews nntp server.

www
Again only free if you look hard enough but http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Proxying_and_Fi ltering/Hosted_Proxy_Services/ supply some good subscription based proxy services which just setup a vpn through your browser so no need to install a client.
http://red-library.com/ have a proxy section if you don't care about encryption for normal browsing though.

years ago they was a very cool client from http://www.freedom.net/ I have not tried it recently due to staying with linux and openbsd. But it would encrypt any of your traffic through its servers, encrypted in layers which was rather hard to trace...

here is a small writeup on onion routing. http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs490/00-01b/oh.jas on.jeo8/section5.html

they are alternatives some odd p2p implementations floating around ect.

As always things can be used for bad aswell as good.. does not mean such services should seise to exist :)

hope this helps

Damn right, Pay"Pal" is an nice Orweillian name for the pinnacle of financial services sector corporate semi-legalized removal of people's right related to their money.

Even though they are doing plenty of illegal and immoral crap to people, the law enforcement people don't care (and probably protect them from other financial sector companies who want to reign them in) because PayPal bends their customers over for the criminals in cop's clothing.

Hmmm...No, I think it really is nimefurahi rather than nimefuraha; have a look at the Kamusi project. The noun is furaha; -furahi is the verb.

I know that was meant to be funny, but I often wondered about how difficult it would be to modify a distrobution so that the word processor, email client, web browser, and mp3 player would all be in my native Tribal Language.

This would serve a dual purpose:

1. A little Language immersion and preservation

2. A somewhat-encrypted desktop. ;)

The drivers and whatnot all being crammed into the kernel just make it a specific type of kernel called a 'monolithic' kernel, that's all.

In addition, there's nothing special about the kernel accepting commands. It takes commands from programs all the time, there's no reason you can't give it the same commands.

The minute you load another application, such as 'sh', however, you are no longer working with just the kernel - you have an OS.

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense ofrelig ious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Yes

Yeah, but that can be ugly and nonintuitive. For example, in the Perl Cookbook, one of the very first things one reads about arrays is:

So, given this list: @tune = ( "The", "Star-Spangled", "Banner" ); "The" is in the first position, but you'd access it as $tune[0].

Woof... that is ugly to these eyes. And then there's the horrific typing (or lack thereof) issues... Is it really sensible that "Hello" + 2 is a valid value? And is the behavior of something like (3+2) x 4 something that should be clear to a beginner?

Nah... give me something like Haskell as a beginning language. And before anyone starts screaming about monads or I/O, it's possible to introduce them in a gentile, sensible way.

IMO, the best direction for natural programming is embedded domain-specific languages. The best direction for natural debugging is a harder problem. It's well known that many expert programmers still find "printf" debugging the best option, which suggests to me that tracing systems are promising. Of course, powerful type systems eliminate many possible run-time bugs, but then you need a type debugger....

<my guess>
Space has dimensionality; a plane has 2 dimensions, a cube exists in 3, hypercube 4... the numbers here are positive. Mandelbrot said he was using negative dimensions to measure "emptiness". He mentions that only one set is considered "empty" (I presume the null set). My guess (and I only minored in math so don't go betting on this) is that a negative dimension is to a positive dimension what a negative number is to a positive one. I'm thinking that if an object existed in -2 dimensions, it would be capable of having negative area. If you could add that object to an object with positive area, you'd reduce the second object's area.
</my guess>

Here's Mandelbrot's homepage at Yale.

Here's more links.

This was already documented, but it's a good story.

When Nathan Cohen first submitted a paper documenting his fractal antenna research to a scholarly journal, the editors thought it was a practical joke.

Essentially, he had discovered that bending conventional antennas into repeating geometric or "deterministic fractal" shapes helped save space and did not adversely affect reception. It's a very simple idea -- and that simplicity, coupled with the fact that Cohen is a radio astronomer by training, not a fractal mathematician, made the antenna an easy target for expressions of skepticism.

"It seems particularly ironic if you think about what I was really asking people to do: bend a 30-cent piece of wire," he says. "It's not like this is a hard experiment to reproduce."

Indeed, Cohen first conducted it on his own ham radio, which he was trying to operate in an apartment complex with a no-antenna rule. He, too, was something of a skeptic at the time, but that didn't prevent him from giving the fractal a chance.

In addition to making him an entrepreneur, Cohen says, the fractal antenna has made him a student once again. Understanding the subtleties of his discovery has required him to get better acquainted with electromagnetics, a discipline that is not his specialty.

Full Article:
http://www.bu.edu/bridge/archive/1998/12-11/featur es3.html

More photos of fractal antennas:
http://classes.yale.edu/Fractals/Panorama/ManuFrac tals/FractalAntennas/FractalAntennas.html

It's a bad idea to have the people directly elect the president. The electoral college was designed the thwart democracy. Think I'm a nut case? So were the founding fathers. Check out this little piece that Hamilton wrote in the Federalist papers:

The Federalist Papers : No. 68, The Mode of Electing the President

Hamilton makes it clear that the electoral college was designed to prevent just the sort of elections we have today:

The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.

Unfortunately, the founding fathers did not foresee either the ffects of political parties upon the electoral collage, or of states passing laws binding the electors to vote a certain way.

Democracy is bad. Republic is good. Restore the great republic and liberty may reign again. We don't need to change the constitution nearly as much as we need to follow it.

The existence of independent states promotes decentralization of power. This allows for greater liberty and customization of government for subcultures that have differing values and traditions within the union. One size does not fit all.

Strong, centralized power is a facilitator of authoritarianism and fascism. It is a hallmark of Communist governments. States need to maintain their autonomous rights of self-determination and to secede for a worst case scenario.

Look at a world map and notice that our states are closer to the typical size of a country than the USA is. We were founded more as a union of thirteen countries than one country divided into arbitrary provinces.

Our federation of democratic republics is a brilliant and logical system which has served us well for over 230 years. I don't want anybody mucking up this grand system out of reckless ignorance or for perceived partisan political advantages.

I could waste my time refuting these but I really only have to point out one instance of you being wrong to make your whole point invalid.
2. Each Party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the right to withdraw from this Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this Treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests. It shall give notice of its decision to the other Party six months prior to withdrawal from the Treaty. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events the notifying Party regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.
As you can see this treaty was never violated. Add to that the fact that the nation we signed the treaty with no longer even existed and your argument falls short.

Thanks for your response.

Can you add some specifics about the evidence for no bottleneck? Also, what is the later bottleneck you refer to?

Here's the website of the original research: Joe Chang's website

The Joe Chang work I originally is just one thing. There is the NYTimes work we discussed with it's striking parallels in the Bible, there is the evidence to think higher observed mutational rates date mEve earlier, as well as other genetic evidence on recent divergence of populations. There seems to be some evidence for similar acceleration for Y Adam timelines. I recall reading about similar trends for agricultural plant and animal lineages.

There is also a different genetic study (see article) that concurs with the Biblical assertion that Jews and Arabs have a common ancestor. And other genetic studies back a similar assertion for a Jewish "Cohen priestly gene" (also mentioned in the article).

> What is an MCRA?

Me answering myself...
It's "MRCA" - most recent common ancestor.

Here's the website of the original research: link

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/britia n/ghent.htm

Hollywood is claiming that SONICblue is guilty of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. Hollywood's argument is that SONICblue is not violating copyrights itself, but encouraging and assisting others in doing so. In order to make this argument stick, Hollywood must argue that using ReplayTV is itself a crime. Unsurprisingly, the claim is clear in the original complaint:

Use of the ReplayTV 4000 to copy and distribute plaintiffs copyrighted works without authorization is a violation of plaintiffs exclusive rights under 17 U.S.C. 106. Among other things, and without limitation, this conduct amounts to (a) unauthorized reproduction of plaintiffs copyrighted works and (b) unauthorized distribution of copies of plaintiffs copyrighted works to the public.

The rest of the article is here

The petition, which you can find via the article on Lawmeme, says there's some conflice with the Aimster ruling in the 7th Circuit.

Now, I don't know if they're blowing this out of proportion (they distort everything else, I'm not a lawyer to say if this is just a ploy to get the SCOTUS* to grant cert & overturn this), but if true, it would seem to compel them to hear the case (one of the principle duties of the SCOTUS is to harmonize the interpretation of federal laws, like copyright law). But it's true--they don't have to grant cert for much of *anything* unless it has "original jurisdiction" and goes to them first (read your constitution for what they have original jurisdiction over--not much save treaties & some misc. stuff).

Anyhow, since you're probably now wondering what it was in conflict with, read Lawmeme & click on the link to the Aimster decision. The judge there was *not* impressed with the 'cryptographic blindness' to infringement they had created, but he also gave a laundry list of things they *could have* (but didn't) argue to prevail... Things I'd hope these services have paid attention to.

Disclaimer: IANAL, this should not be taken as legal advice, but the people at Lawmeme are lawyers from Yale (though they probably also have disclaimers about what they say not being legal advice).

* It's only well-known in legal circles, but SCOTUS stands for Supreme Court of the United States.

Yet another Slashdotter accuses someone of something he goes on to commit himself.

Have no clue who Twirlip is (since that's who you linked to), nor is associating him with me helpful to your argument.

So the Zionists convince the British Empire to evict the Arabs from Israel, and you think those victims should've argued in defense of their attackers?

Where do you dredge up this crap? The British *never* expelled *any* Palestinian from the areas now controlled by Israel. In fact, Britain restricted the immigration of Jews to Palestine and limited their ability to buy land. You might have had some credibility given to your argument if you had actually brought up actual historical events causing grief to Palestinians. 600-800,000 Palestinians fled Israel in 1947, during the war of Independance (in response, Arab states expelled over 800,000 Arab Jews, most of which now live in Israel). The refugee camps were not in Israel's territory until after the 1967 war (instigated by Egypt and Jordan). In both cases, the Palestianian's losses were a direct result of Arab agression. Arabs (including Arafat and the PLO) have more than their share of the blame for the Palestinian's current plight.

As I already explained, this focus on Israel is not because they're uniquely bad, but because they claim to be better than that. Yes, I do hold them to higher standards. Saudi Arabia doesn't claim to be a land of freedom or enlightenment, so it isn't worth the time to point out that they're not.

I see. It doesn't matter how nicely you play, or how much restraint you show -- it's whether or not you claim the moral high ground -- apparently, words, not actions are important to you. And in fact, if I understand your position correctly, what Israel should have done was just killed/expelled all the Palestinian refugees and then told the rest of the world that it was none of their business. Kinda like Turkey with the Kurds (again, another situation that somehow never causes much outrage?). Perhaps they should have done exactly what the Arabs would have done to them had they lost in 1948, 1967, or 1973? Would that have been satisfactory?

Why don't you allow people to talk about one country without listing off their opinion on every other nation in the world?

To hold up the double-standard by which you judge Israel. Rediculous comments like "You're wrong about that 22 Arab states. Not all of them are systemically racist" just prove my point. There's over 22 Islamic countries, but just one Jewish state, and guess who you set fit to pick on?

Israel as a Jewish state has the right exist. The Palestinians (including the PLO) do not recognize that right. Until they do, why even pretend there's a reason to compromise?

Palestinian bombs still blow up Israeli buses. Rockets still bombard Israeli homes. The major Palestinian organizations (PLO and Hamas) do not recognize Israel's right to exist. Yet you blithely suggest they should be allowed to live well inside Israel's borders. You might as well ask Israelis to slit their throats right now.

All I know about Swahili (or kiswahili, if you will, to distinguish the language from waswahili, its speakers) is what I read about it around thirty-something years ago in a book by Mario Pei (and what I learned from Afro Sheen commercials watching Soul Train :), but OTOH the Kamusi Project online English-Swahili dictionary gives "huruma" for humanity. Looking for possible alternatives like "community" didn't turn up anything looking like "ubuntu."

OTOH, if I remember rightly, Swahili is a Bantu lingua franca with borrowings from Arabic. Since Nbdele and Zulu are Bantu languages, there may well be a cognate in Swahili that I don't know how to find in the online dictionary, or that might not be in it yet.

The electoral college is designed to defend our Federal system: a nation made up of separate states.

Yeah, because citizens today really have a greater loyalty to Georgia than the USA.

That means that there is intrinsic power in being a state, no matter how small

Stating the obvious doesn't prove it is good, only that it is.

Arguing for a number driven entirely by popular vote ignores the realities of separate states in our Federation, and invites secession and the possible dissolution of our nation.

Right. That non-popular vote sure has done a good job at preventing secession.

the dissolution of the United States of America would be so bad for the stability, prosperity, and standard of living for the people of Earth that there aren't words strong enough to convey it.

If that's as obviously true as you say, then nobody will vote for secession, even in a popular election.