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It's the same problem we're having with Napster, Kazaa, Blizzard, etc. That information can trivially be copied, that certain "copies" of information are absolutely fundamental for a computer to work properly ... these issues eat at the original preconditions to copyright.

My computer needs a copy of your information in its registers, in its L1/L2/L3 caches, in its system RAM. Software may and often does save (archive) copies to a cache on the hard drive -- admins usually appreciate this because it reduces server load. A transparent web proxy to an intranet may cache web requests for its internal clients if it has a slow outgoing connection.

Surely you shouldn't have to "opt in" the first few cases. But, it's all the same principle, caching/archiving. So, as we go out, especially to the transparent web proxy, where do you have to opt in? And what about further out, as computers become just one component in a cluster of computers? Where does broadcasting begin and caching end?

I think there has to be a lot more philosophy than ST:TNG analogies to make a sound decision about copyright ramifications to computers (see Taking the Copy Out of Copyright). It's a very broad issue, and it will siginificantly determine the way we use both information and computers/electronics in the future.

LawMeme also has a Letterman-style "Top Ten New Copyright Crimes".

One of those things that's half funny, half scary because of its ring of truth.

LawMeme has some analysis.

LawMeme has some analysis.

From that page...

In 1955 he met the man who would have the largest impact on his life, the then Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson. Valenti's agency was in charge of the press during the visit of President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson to Texas. Valenti was in the motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Within hours of the murder of John F. Kennedy, Valenti was on Air Force One flying back to Washington, the first newly hired special assistant to the new President.

Indeed, Valenti was present during the swearing in of Johnson after Kennedy was shot.

In the famous picture of his being sworn in, you can see Valenti on the left side of the frame.

(bigger picture here)

W

AA6E

They may be referring to this story on LawMeme.

They may be referring to this story on LawMeme.

• Where do they get these judges?

For those who don't know, federal judges are political appointees. Of course, it's illegal for me and thee to employ people based on their political views, but political affiliation (aka loyalty) is the primary (de facto) criteria for the appointment of federal judges. Another nice example of "Do as we say, not as we do." from our political overclass.

Which, if anything, is an indicator on where things are going.

Welcome to the world of Max Headroom!

No, because then they'd be stealing.

Oh, wait, I guess there is some tolerance for going to the bathroom... ;-)

...does that mean that AOL (of AOL Time Warner, remember?) is now trying to infiltrate the PVR market in order to destroy it?

Adaptive/Active optics can work in two ways. One way is to use a bright (and it has to be damn bright) star near the target that one's hoping to look at. Then, by seeing how the atmosphere distorts this (supposedly point-source) star, we can adjust the mirror to compensate. There are different ways to do this that involve just moving the image around or re-shaping the mirror altogether, but I won't go into that here. The trouble with this plan is that it's hard to find a star bright enough in the part of the sky that you happen to be observing. It has to be damn bright, since you have to read out the CCD several times a second in order to compensate for the atmosphere fast enough. The second method uses a sodium-type laser that excites a layer in the atmosphere very high up (i.e. above most of the clouds/water vapor/crap). This behaves as a sort of artificial bright star that one can have anywhere in the sky.

The Center for Adaptive Optics (at UCSC) has a decent simple explanation here.

All of this aside, this will probably NOT render HST obsolete any time soon, since this is rediculously hard to do and has yet to really be done convincingly in any large-scale way, as people at my institution are finding out.

I've actually been quite sucuessfull in persuading a large quantitiy of French people that personal responsibility and personal accountability are the true choice of a Liberty seeking people

Perhaps you succeeded where Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man failed.

Perhaps they were delighted to have an American explain what their true choice should be as a libery-seeking people. After all, the French had only abolished slavery in France a mere 70 years before it was abolished in the U.S.

Perhaps the French had no paragons of personal responsibility and accountability to match Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton and thus were happy to use your humble self as a working example.

Now perhaps some of your fellow Americans could stand some similar enlightenment.

I think the screaming dude of whom you speak was based on a painting by Edvard Munch.

You can see a copy here:
http://www.yale.edu/hardysoc/VPBOX/Scream.jpg

"Forever Amber" :)

Allow me to explain.

Alan Cox; Richard Stallman; Bruce Perens; Wichert Akkerman; Miguel DeIcaza.

What do you see in this list of names? Are there any African-Americans on it? Absolutely not, none of those names sound like one a self-respecting black person would have! No Maurice, no Luther, no Lil' Kim. There are many other lists such as this, you can see one here. Flip through each page, do you see anything other than white faces? Of course you don't, because Open Source and its adherents are ardent racists and they absolutely forbid access to the sacred 'kernel' by any person of color.

Lets look at another list, this time a compendium of the companies using Linux. Are there any black owned companies on that list? Nooooooo. How about these companies? They all have something to do with Open Source software, any of them owned by an African-American? No again. Here is an extensive collection of photographs from a LUG (Linux User Gathering) meeting, more can be viewed at that link. What is odd about these pictures, and every other photograph I have ever seen of a LUG meeting, is that there is not one single black person to be seen, and probably none for miles.

More racist overtones can be found by examining the language of Open Source. They often refer to 'white hat' hackers. These 'white hats' scurry about the Internet doing good, but illegal, acts for their fellow man. In stark contrast we find the 'black hat' hackers. They destroy the good works of others by breaking into systems, stealing data, and generally causing havoc. These two terms reflect the mindset of most Linux developers. White means good, black means bad. Anywhere there is black, there is uncontrollable destruction and lawlessness. Looking further we see black lists that inform other users of 'bad' hardware, Samba, an obvious play on the much hated Little Black Sambo book, Mandrake, which I won't explain except to say that the French are notorious racists. This type is linguistic discrimination is widespread throughout the Open Source culture, lampooned by many of its more popular sites.

It is also a fact that all Unix 'distros' contain a plethora of racist commands with not so hidden symbolism.

It can hardly be coincidence that the prime operating system of choice of the 'open source supremacists' - Linux, features commands which are poorly disguised racist acronyms. For example: 'awk' (All White Klan) , 'sed' (shoot nEgroes dead), 'ln' (lynch negroes), 'rpm' (raical purity mandatory), 'bash' (bring a slave home), 'ps' (persecute sambo), 'mount' (murder or unseat nubians today), 'fsck' (favored supreme Christian klan). I could go on and on about the latent racist symbolism in Linux, but I fear it would take weeks to enumerate every incidence.

Is there a single unix command out there that does not have some hidden racist connotation ? Suffice it to say that the racism pervades Linux like a particularly bad smell. Can you imagine the effect of running such a racist operating system on the impressionable mind ? I don't have to remind you that transmitting subliminal messages is banned in the USA, and yet here we have an operating system that appears to be one enormous submliminal ad for the Klan!

One of the few selling points of Open Source software is that it is available in many different languages. Browsing through the list I see that absolutely none are offered in Swahili, nor Ebonics. Obviously this is done to prevent black people from having access to the kernel. If it weren't for the fact that racism is so blatantly evil I would be impressed by the efforts these Open Sourcers have invested in keeping their little hobby lilly white. It even appears that they hate the Japanese, as some of these self proclaimed hackers defaced a web site with anti-Japanese slogans. Hell, these people even go all the way to Africa (South Africa mind you, better known as White Africa) and the pictures prove that they don't even get close to a black person.

Of course, presenting overwhelming evidence such as this is a bit unfair without some attempt to determine why these Open Sourcers are so racist. Much of the evidence I have collected indicates that their views are so deeply held that they are seldom questioned by the new recruits. This, coupled with the robot-like groupthink that dominates the culture allows the racist mindset to continue to permeate the ranks. Indeed, the Open Source version of a Klan rally, OSDN (known to the world as Open Source Developer's Network, known to insiders as Open Source Denies Negroes) nearly stands up and shouts its racist views on its demographics page. It doesn't mention the black man one single time. Obviously, anyone involved with Open Source doesn't need to be told that the demographic is entirely white, it is a given.

I have a sneaking suspicion as to why their beliefs are so closely held: they are all terrible athletes.

Really. Much like the tragedy at Columbine High School, where two geeks went on a rampage to get back at 'jocks', these adult geeks still bear the emotional scars inflicted upon them due to their lack of athletic ability during their teen years. As African-Americans are well known for their athletic skills, they are an obvious target for the Open Source geeks. As we all know, sports builds character, thus it follows that the lack of sports destroys character. These geeks, locked away in their rooms, munching on stale pizza and Fritos, engage in no character building activities. Further, they interact only with computers and never develop the level of social skill that allows normal people to handle relationships with persons of color.

Contrasted with the closed source, non-geeky software house Microsoft, Open Source has a long, long way to go.

Join me in my next article where I will lay bare the rampant anti-semitism in the Open Source community.

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

is a good starting place for learning about web design. It's free online, and available via dead tree. You can also try the Lynda books.

The "long piece" link seems to be broken.
("Sorry, such file doesn't exist...")

Here's a link to the LawMeme page.
The Blizzard article is at the top.

Here is the article. Enjoy.

The Correct URL

Try me!

Now that wasn't so hard was it

http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?nam e= News&file=article&sid=149

The article.

is here.

Right here.

This site is a true style manual focused on design principles. I know you guys have said the basics like no pop-unders, etc.. but that doesn't help with aesthetic and functional designs. Just removes the pet peeves some sites put up. Give it a looksie, especially if you are a web designer.

JOhn

Please go back to school.

Thank you.

DEATH to the FRENCH!

The Monroe Doctrine has to do with the United States having authority over the western hemisphere. The Marshall Plan was a program to help rebuild Europe after World War II.

I thought there were building/fire codes that exist where you cannot be locked into a building. Think Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

1) My comments was not in regards to specifically Somalia, but US military as a whole. Look at Afghanistan. Military researchers and analysts have found that by sending in ground troops in full force, they have a better chance a succeeding in their mission with less innocent casualties. However, instead, they decide to pretty much carpet bomb Afghanistan, destroying Red Cross Building and innocent civilians and villages. In addition, instead of using the Delta force or the elite US soldiers, they are hiring Afghans to fight a proxy war for the US. This is mainly because the battle in Somalia was a major turning point in US military history. The idea of losing even one soldier unnecessarily is a political disaster to the politicians calling the shots.

2) I never said the US had bad intentions. However, the politicians were misdirected in providing the necessary supplies to successfully complete their mission. In the book, they discussed that the General requested a number of attack helicopters and military tanks, however, the people in Congress turned down his request because they deemed that the supplies that they were given already was enough to accomplish their mission. [The APC that you saw in the movie was actually "borrowed" from the Pakistani military that was part of the UN.] Secondly, the politicians, including Clinton, made decisions that practically tired their hands of the military in charge in terms of what they can and cannot do.

Lastly, you said "AFAIK the US has (believe it or not) mostly used them only in clearly warlike situations such as in Yugoslavia." Now would you say that what is going on in Afghanistan is a war? If you believe so, you are clearly wrong. There are international regulations on wars, specifically on the fact that it has to be formally declared [Geneva Convention]. As of yet, the US and Congress has not formally declared war. Now, if this is a war, the Prisoners of War must be returned to their countries at the conclusion of battle. If that is the case, the "American Taliban" John Walker cannot be tried in the US Judicial courts and must be returned to Afghanistan when this "war" ends. This is a major dilemma.

Prof. Kasevich at yale has already succeeded (though I'm not sure who did it first or whether they were in collaboration with each other) in making such a state. you can find it at yale AMO website. Such a state might be useful for many things. One thing they have done with it is to tilt the lattice creating a sort of staircase. In this scenario the gas can coherently flow down the staircase. When you have something moving with well-defined phase you have a laser. Lasers are useful for interferometry experiments and many other things.

What the previous poster meant was, that
1 molocule Hydrogen (H2) + 2 of Oxygen (O2) gives 2 of water (H2O).
If Slashdot accepted PRE, SUPER, and SUB tags, this would be a lot clearer.
You are right, it takes a lot of energy to make Hydrogen, but according to Web Elements the normal approch to making Hydrogen is stream + ( carbon or methene), electrolsys of sulphuric acid (SO4+ goes through a complex system, and releases Oxygen, but is far more conductive that water) is too expensive, but it might be different if you want an oxygen supply as well. The reactions above produce carbon dioxide, so unless its aneroibic methene, Hydrogen rockets will still produce excess CO2.

Anyway, for space launchs, the rocket must either be self powered, or doing atleast the escape velocity when it leaves the end of the launch-rails, which, for the Earth, is 11km/sec, well above the speed of sound, so unless you lauch from the top of a mountain, there will be too much atmospheric drag for non-self powered lauches.
To determine the escape velocity use this formulae
sqrt(2 * Gc * M / r) (from Astronomy 120)
Where Gc is 6.6725e-11 kg-1m-1s-4
M is planent's mass 5.9 72e24 kg for Earth
r is distance of launch from planet's centre (6.378e6 m)

This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

• April 17, 1990, posted by Jon Blow:
  ...By this time, the wizards [dungeonmasters] had locked off a few areas that were just spam-for-the-senses...
  
• June 27, 1990, posted by Vintage Mutant Ganja Technerd:
  For example, a delay of 5 to 10 seconds between object creations and logging in, will all do the trick of 'limiting' spamming without the juggling of quotas, login times, keeping track of hosts, et al.
  
• October 4, 1990, posted by A Molitor:
  ...when you run a MUD advertised as having few or no rules, a MUD where you can do anything, players *will* spam it. This is not conjecture, but documented historical fact. Ask around about BloodMUD some time.
  

• From: Jon Blow (blojo@tornado.Berkeley.EDU)
  Subject: Re: Word wrap
  Newsgroups: alt.mud
  Date: 1990-01-22 23:18:55 PST
  Right now my entire adventure is formatted to be easy-readable in 80 columns. This is also a pain, since 1) It takes much longer for me to write it, and I constantly feel a loss of artistic quality when I am forced to reword so that a line will fit; 2) People with wordwrap must turn it OFF, or the adventure will look like Spam. Bummer.

This discussion wouldn't be complete without a link to the online Yale Style Manual. For anyone interested in web design principles, I highly recommend it.

For those of you who have never heard of it, the Yale Style Manual basically came out of the Yale medical school as they started studying what to do with their own website. Some of their stuff is out-dated (they still recommend 640x480), but most of the book is quite informative.

Since I haven't seen it, here are several free programs useful for computational chemistry:

GAMESS Free Electronic Structure Package

ViewmolMany types of visualization

gOpenMolVisualization and property Calculation

RasMolVisualization

EgoMolecular Dynamics Program

TinkerMultifacited Package

X-PLORMolecular Dynamics Tailored for Biological Systems

*sigh*. I love it when people write conspiracy theories when it's really just a standard Dynamic DNS client that is poking around on the network.

Once again, this is a cool idea that Microsoft has implemented if your corporation uses nothing but Microsoft servers. (Note: this is the same dynamic DNS that is used by many websites to give you your own domain name, so you don't have to have a Microsoft server to support it. However, most regular DNS servers do not have this option enabled.) The dynamic DNS option is enabled by default, however, in Windows 2000, and it causes a waste of network services (to the point of becoming a DOS attack on a company's DNS servers) when those DNS servers do not support it. Here is more information (that I wrote when researching it for my company):

Windows 2000 supports something called Dynamic DNS (DDNS), which lets clients automatically update their own A records. This means that a DNS server supporting Dynamic DNS would be almost completely self-maintained, as whenever the computer connects or disconnects from the network, it adds/removes its own records. It basically completely eliminates the need for static IPs (except for things like web servers and such that touch the outside world.)

Unfortunately, Microsoft, in its blind Microsoft-only world, made Dynamic DNS registration turned on by default on all Windows 2000 clients, even in companies without a dynamic DNS server. This creates a lot of unnecessary traffic on the network as every time the computer connects or disconnects, it sends a little message to the DNS server. I've even been told (without proof) that it sends a request to every DNS server on its list, possibly upgrading the request all the way to the root server if it doesn't get its way with the first server on its list.

This had a lot of UNIX admins frightened about job security (my take: if you're sitting there all day updating DNS records, you better find some new job skills anyway) and it has evolved into a fascinating topic of research for me. Some pretty good takes on it can be found here:

(Yale: Making UNIX DNS servers and Windows 2000 play nice)
(eWeek article from 1999 discussing Windows 2000 DDNS and the impact it has on UNIX DNS servers)

This is really interesting because it's one small facet of the many ways Microsoft is subtly pushing UNIX around. ("Hey! We have this cool thing implemented in Windows now! Fire your UNIX sysadmins and throw away your UNIX servers, because our servers are so much easier to maintain!")

Seriously, I once booted a Macintosh and the only thing that came on the screen was a little "Sad Macintosh." Apparently means that your system folder is corrupt. How's that for error handling?

Want to see more? Try this Mac troubleshooting guide. [yale.edu]

My guess would be that Hitler was just fed up with our bogus neutrality, what with Lend / Lease and all that. Yeah, here we go:

The Government of the United States having violated in the most flagrant manner and in ever increasing measure all rules of neutrality in favor of the adversaries of Germany and having continually been guilty of the most severe provocations toward Germany ever since the outbreak of the European war, provoked by the British declaration of war against Germany on September 3, 1939, has finally resorted to open military acts of aggression...

The German Government, consequently, discontinues diplomatic relations with the United States of America and declares that under these circumstances brought about by President Roosevelt Germany too, as from today, considers herself as being in a state of war with the United States of America.

Answer: When war was declared on Japan following the attack on pearl harbor (we never declared war on germany, although the axis pact obligated germany to declare war on the US as a result of our declaration against Hapan, IIRC).

Actually, that is not correct. Japan declared war on Dec 7, 1941 on the U.S. by attacking Pearl Harbor, and the United States Congress responded by declaring war against the Imperial Government of Japan on Dec. 8, 1941. On December 11, 1941, the governments of Germany and Italy, pursuant to the Tri-Axis Pact, declared war on the United States, and the United States Congress responded by declaring war on both Germany and Italy on Dec 11, 1941. (yes, the text on that particular page only contains the declaration against Germany, but see the Avalon Project, which includes some text of the proceedings in Congress, and in particular the votes and motions leading to the passage of all three declarations of war.)

I think that the new interfaces will be voice recognition and voice generation. Like in StarTrek, Commander, I need warp speed now. Its alot faster to talk to the computer than write, also to listen to a computer could be better in some situations. For example if you should read a loooong report or so, just hit the text-to-voice-generation (tm) button, tune in a soft voice and lean back in the couch. But there are several problems, how should the computer get the voice right, depending on situation. for example irony/sarcasm. Or how should it interpret spoken sentences, there are a varity of meanings of the same sentence. Perhaps if it is composed with direct manipulation so gestures can be interpreted to. It could work with a scanning of the face to get facial expressions that can signal emotion, add emphasis to the speech and support the interaction in a dialogue situation.

But inventing that kind of "wheel" is really hard, at least with the technology we have today. But were on the way of getting there, in the mean time check out this link about Talking Heads, and no it's not about that music group.

Not that I don't agree with you -- because I do -- I believe we need retaliation against the perpetrators of this. However, your statement that "no one kills 5,000 innocent civilians without being hunted to the very ends of the earth" got me thinking -- how many innocent civilians were killed int the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Here's a link. Makes you wish we could all just get along...

If you don't quite know what ANZUS means, check this full text of the treaty.

It's a security treaty between the US, Australia and New Zealand struck in 1951.

Actually, they took place on the 17th of September, 1978. You can check it out here:

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/campdav. htm

And when we ship prisoners off planet to small colonies and guard them with these giant roving balls....

Pennyfarthing bicycles on Mars anyone?

No. I don't think people generally want to take from artists, but they don't seem to mind getting what they can from 'the man'. When did this seem acceptable? At what point did a schism between people and corporations occur? I think it is borne from the abrogation of a social contract between corps and people. Once they were perceived to act in their most craven interests to the detriment of people, people turned on them. What the hell, Welcome to the Machine. I don't think corporations know how to restore people's faith in them; in any case it would be bad business. The best way to regain power, for the people, is to undermine that profit-driven system. It is an anti-capitalist concept, but it is not necessarily evil, though it may be a serious threat to the status-quo. For instance, the rise of communism was at least partially a result of the fears of Eastern Europeans about capitalists. If you read Das Kapital you will learn that the persuasive argument of Marx centered on stories of sweatshops and usury and indenture: basically human misery at the hands of capitalists. Only the sound of lady garment workers hitting the sidewalks reached the government's ears. My point is that people perceive corporations as being craven, self-interested, and dangerous, no matter how many "People Do" ads we see.

So we feel justified, nay, in fact Glorified! when we beat the system and stick it to The Man. Tell me: why is Courtney Love suing the RIAA? Why did Pearl Jam try, unsuccessfully, to stop Tickemaster's monopoly on concerts ticket sales?

What true artist who hasn't lost his soul to the capitalist ideal wouldn't attack the current system?

Here, I want you to read what Robert Fripp of King Crimson has to say: Go Here. And then try to understand why we believe that once the distributor is out of the picture, then the artists will be better off than ever.

The reason is, to use Marx's words, that the distributor once possessed the "Ways and Means of Production", whereas in this day and age we all possess them, on our desktops. So the threshhold should have come down. But corps somehow convinced our elected officials to be their personal pit-bull lapdogs. I hope that it is a case of a desperate and futile trying to hold back the floodgates that will soon prove too time- and energy- consuming for our government to continue to fight, but, when I realize that this generation has allowed for more of their rights to be taken away than any other, I have less hope for the outcome. People are losing power daily.

I remember when this Napster thing was in it's infancy, before the dotcom gold rush, the attitude here at /. was one of hubris: "Those idiots can't figure this internet thing out like we can and we can always remain a step ahead of them." But I suspect that that attitude has been mollified somewhat, as the descending team of lawyers, entrepreneurs, con artists, and newbie hackers without a code, without loaylty to an ideal, took the net and re-made it into something I frankly should have, but didn't anticipate: a cultural wasteland as vapid as a TV with a mouse attached.

Well, heh, it's not all that bad just yet; the net is a great source of raw information, but I don't like the trend I'm seeing...

I think something like Linda would be a much better choice for communications in a desktop environment than something like CORBA or COM. Linda is much easier for people to learn, it allows asynchronous communications (very useful in many desktop applications), and it's easy to implement (it gets hard if you want a high-performance implementation for supercomputing, but that doesn't matter on the desktop). It also doesn't have the versioning problems and tight coupling among components that those other systems have.