Years ago, SUN microsystems promoted a nonlinear quantization, called "mu-law." A key problem is that the nonlinear function has to be applied to the sum of many frequency components, so it causes cross-modulations between them. A particular example: a low amplitude high frequency signal component may appear and disappear as a high amplitude low frequency component varies between 0 and its maximum. Since a high frequency component is much louder than a low frequency component of the same amplitude, the effect can be quite dramatic.
Nyquist Theorem guarantees perfect replicability for signals with no Fourier components above 1/2 the sampling rate. Fourier components are infinitely long unmodulated sine waves. The problem isn't harmonics above the Nyquist limit. The problem is modulation sidebands above the Nyquist limit. A modulated sine wave at an audible frequency has Fourier components as high as you please, and some of the Fourier components at inaudible frequencies can have an audible impact on the modulation of the audible frequencies.
That is ridiculous to the nth degree. There is no mathematical basis for what you say. When you sample, all below nyquist is reproduced 100%. Peaks and valleys do not need to line up. To the extent that an analog source has frequencies above nyquist they will simply alias, and one can easily predict whether they will be audible. Your "phase" concept has no signal processing basis.
No, in fact the previous post had the math right. Your phrase "all below nyquist" is muddled and misleading. The Nyquist limit applies to infinitely long unmodulated sine waves---the Fourier components of a signal. A modulated sine wave at an audible frequency can have Fourier components at inaudible frequencies with audible impact on the modulation.
For most people, there is no place where sounds above 20 kHz will irritate a nerve ending enough to send an impulse to your brain. Thus, no sound higher than 20 kHz is audible, and 20 kHz corresponds to a 40 kHz sampling rate. (One sample at the low point on the wave, the next sample at the next high point, etc.
The problem in your analysis is that a "sound higher than 20 kHz" may be inaudible, in the sense that you don't detect a sustained sine wave at such a high frequency. But the Nyquist theorem applies to Fourier components---infinitely long unmodulated sine waves---rather than intuitive "sounds." Modulated sine waves at audible frequencies have Fourier components above audible frequencies with audible effects on the modulation.
Well you are misinformed, or you simply remember incorrectly. As long as you follow the Nyquist you can represent the actual source wave to 100%. This is common knowledge.
Well, it's sorta true with the caveat, "As long as you follow the Nyquist [theorem]." But, the requirements of the Nyquist theorem are impossible to follow. The theorem requires infinitely many infinite precision samples and no Fourier components above 1/2 the sampling rate. This never happens. Fourier components above audible frequencies can have audible effects on the modulation of audible frequencies.
The common knowledge, as normally applied is wrong. A careful reading of the Nyquist Theorem, and the widespread (but not common) knowledge about its application, are required in order to use it well.
Here's what I sent them. If I had been wider awake, I would have skipped the last paragraph. I enjoyed writing it, but sarcasm is almost always counterproductive.
Dear SOCA,
When I saw the takedown notice at RnBXclusive, I was sure that it was a spoof. The bald statements about the guilt of "the individuals behind this website," apparently unproved in court, the threats of prosecution to myself, and the speculative claims about the "future of the music industry," seemed too absurd to be written by a serious law enforcement agency. Then, the advertisement for pro-music.org at the end made it clear that this was either a spoof by pro-music, or more likely by an opponent trying to embarrass pro-music.
I was astonished to find acknowledgment on your own web site that this absurd text was indeed your own.
I never heard of RnBXclusive before, and have no opinion whatsoever regarding the legality of the behavior of "the individuals behind" that website, nor your takedown of the site and reported arrest of the "individuals." But I hope that you will be more careful in the future to post only relevant and sensible notices that stay well within the scope of your legal mission.
I recommend to you the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) as a source of careful analysis of online behavior by individuals, corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies. They do not appear to have posted any specific comments about RnBXclusive, SOCA, or your recent arrest and DNS takeover, but they can provide some of the best advice available when consulted.
If you must advertise legal sources of music downloads, let me recommend my favorite, magnatune.com, which is not represented by those "behind" the pro-music.org website, and which will perhaps suffer competitively from your public endorsement of pro-music.org.
I have some experience trying to teach the way that you proposee, which I described in a separate thread on "Experience with open projects, no exams" before I noticed this thread.
In a number of classes that I taught, I eliminated in-class timed tests entirely, and substituted open projects.
I encouraged, but did not require, collaboration.
As much as possible, I defined in advance how much accomplishment constituded C, B and A work, respectively. I was never able to make this perfectly objective, and the clarity varied according to the material and my own imagination in the project assignment.
To evaluate each student's individual accomplishment, I interacted with the students. Sometimes I did this in scheduled individual face-to-face interviews. It was OK for a student to talk about other people's work as well as her own. But I only gave credit for insight explained to me through description of work, not for work that just sat there on paper (or online). Once in many years of this practice I encountered a student who appeared for the interview and seemed unable to express himself in a clear sentence. I made a wild guess for that guy's grade, and vowed to have midterm interviews as well as final interviews as much as possible.
Later, when I had a Wiki server, I required projects to be displayed incrementally on the Wiki. I had a very difficult time convincing students not to wait until the last day and dump lots of material out of the blue (nobody who did so got a good grade). In (thankfully only) one case, a student who failed to attend class (attendance and participation in discussion was mandatory according to written posted instructions) sent me a "project" 1 hour after the absolute final deadline, and seemed shocked that I awarded a D (the only grade below C I ever had to assign in this system).
I never achieved 100% understanding of the ground rules (in spite of posting them in explicit instructions on the Web and discussing them in class). There were always students who failed to understand that only iteration could produce a good result on these sorts of projects, and a few who understood but failed to act (sometimes requesting incomplete grades at the last minute). I was working on intermediate deadlines to eliminate such behavior as much as possible, but stopped teaching before I worked it all out. One student who understood, but failed to perform, in one class signed up for another topic taught in the same way, and did quite well.
For the students who understood, and acted upon, the instructions, the results were very good. I could tell students as they went along what progress they had made toward C, B, A, and avoid the end-of-term suspense that I find counterproductive. Evaluations at the time of the classes varied a lot, from those who loved the system to those who couldn't stand it. A few students got in touch years later, and were very positive. These were all students who had done well, and it is very unusual to hear from dissatisfied students long after class, so I have insufficient information about students for whom my approach did not work.
The principle that I tried to follow was to avoid completely any requirement in which the possibility of cheating was relevant. I tried to design all assigned work so that the accomplishment required worthwhile learning while using all available resources, including fellow students and outside consultants. I believe that this principle is good for pedagogy, and not just a way to avoid worrying about cheating (although my experience in a few cases of cheating in classes with conventional assignments and exams was painful enough that I might choose to avoid the possibility even if it were not good pedagogy).
I found this principle to require a lot of rethinking, and the application to each topic, context, instructor, and type of student is different. I'm not convinced that conventional assignments and exams are better in this respect, I think that they only make it easier to avoid feeling bad about the failure by attributing it entirely to the student.
I also think that there are particular topics and contexts for which my approach is not appropriate, but I tend not to like teaching those topics in those contexts.
My heart rate is controlled by a pacemaker at this moment.
I do not have access to the specifications, so I cannot determine directly whether it contains a real-time clock. But the behavior seems to require one. The pacemaker stores records of its behavior and its sensor readings, and transmits them whenever its short-range radio can reach a satellite/cellular interface. It is extremely likely that a real-time clock in the pacemaker is used to time-stamp the data that are transmitted at unpredictable times hours after they are recorded.
The pacemaker that is controlling my heart rate at this moment has two communications interfaces that I know about. One is short-range radio of some sort, and the other is normally connected through a device placed externally within an inch of the device. I have no information about the actual effective range of either interface.
I am appalled at the willingness of a number of people, not only this anonymous one, to post speculations with no apparent basis in real observation.
I am a moderator for arXiv, and I am quite sure that submissions are filtered only for prima facie relevance, and do not have to be "accepted in a journal."
The format of arXiv is probably not suitable for all sorts of data, but lots of data can be presented as text and can be placed in arXiv.
Jesse Shapiro has done some real research on the segregation of political groups online. Here's the abstract:
We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideologi-
cal segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline
news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in
each domain using standard indices from the literature on racial segregation. We find that
ideological segregation of online news consumption is low in absolute terms, higher than the
segregation of most offline news consumption, and significantly lower than the segregation of
face-to-face interactions with neighbors, co-workers, or family members. We find no evidence
that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.
Cass Sunstein got rather famous for books Republic.com and Republic.com 2.0, warning that, "as... the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger of dissolving. I listened to Mr. Sunstein speak on his topic, and heard only loose speculation, unsupported by research or rigorous reasoning, so I never read the books. Perhaps there is something more substantial in the books.
> ARPANET or NSFNET (expansion of arpanet to universities) would have been term widely used or recognized in 1985 by users
I'm not sure what source you have for your "would have been." I am reporting my personal experience. I called it "Internet" in 1985, as did all of the other users I knew at Johns Hopkins, Purdue, and a number of other universities. At Hopkins, I was never connected through NSFNET (a program that started in 1985 according to theWikipedia article). The EECS department had an early connection through the Cypress service of CSNet, and then a peered connection through MILNET at the Ballistics Research Lab of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. There was another peered connection arranged by the university, but it was overloaded and I can't remember how it was negotiated.
In all of my discussions in the early 80s, we understood CSNet to be a project extending the Internet, and in the late 80s we understood NSFNET in the same way.
Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful essay explaining why he does not protect his wireless node. There are pointers to other essays agreeing and disagreeing with him.
I personally agree with Schneier. I consider myself the steward of my Internet connection, more than owner.
In order to understand our reactions to deaths attributable to machines/computers/robots, we should notice the different reactions in different cases.
Several killings by industrial robots were reported in the news although they were in many ways more like accidents with chainsaws and snowblowers and other dangerous power tools than the "robot kills human" sort of headline suggests.
On the other hand, the Therac 25 delivered therapeutic radiation controlled by very badly designed and constructed software, and it killed at least 6 patients in a rather gruesome way. These incidents seem much more like automated manslaughter than the accidents with industrial robots, but I never found any mention in the newspapers. The killings went on for more than a year, and early investigations focused on hardware problems, mostly ignoring the software.
We need a few good dissertations and more careful studies of more incidents before drawing conclusions. But, it seems that our irrational reactions to machine/computer/robot killings are driven by something more subtle and complicated than a mere autophobia. I would hazard a guess that we prefer to get excited about relatively unimportant incidents with a nice dramatic presentation, while ignoring the rationally scarier incidents that expose real systematic safety problems.
I use Speakeasy DSL service, in spite of the fact that it has less capacity than cable, because they don't have nastiness in the license. In particular, they allow servers. I run an HTTP server as a symbolic act, to share material with a few friends, and to test things (there's not enough capacity to use the server for anything substantially public). Speakeasy also allows me to share my connection (I run a free unprotected hotspot), and even offers to split the monthly bill between me and any neighbors I share with.
"Compared to previous studies, these results imply that long term negative feedback from CO2‐induced increases in vegetation density could reduce temperature following a stabilization of CO2 concentration."
I encourage more attention to the last phrase in the last sentence of the abstract of the report (http://europa.agu.org/?view=article&uri=/journals/gl/gl1023/2010GL045338/2010GL045338.xml&t=gl,bounoua). It doesn't appear to even ameliorate the temperature change until after CO2 stabilizes.
"What methods did they have before that date that allowed the almost flawless recreation of works?"
The more I ponder this phrase, the more I am puzzled how it is supposed to bear on the hypothesis that there was music before copyright or RIAA. I am pretty sure that this refers to some particular level of audio frequency waveform recording technology. I'm not sure whether it kicks in with the earliest paper recording, wax cylinders, platters, or 16-bit samples taken at 44.1 KHz.
I'm pretty sure that it rules out written musical scores, although I challenge techhead to point out the serious flaws in any of the scores that we still have from J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart, L. van Beethoven. Player piano rolls?
No matter, none of these recording methods is required in order to have music, not even the written scores.
Please, someone stop me before I start quibbling about the word, "recreation," to say nothing of "works"!
"copyright law in the US at least was created in 1790. What methods did they have before that date that allowed the almost flawless recreation of works?"
According to what I have read, there was a lot of unrecorded music. Even before 1790. Some of it has come down to me in musical notation, some passed through the oral/aural tradition, some is just a rumor. Probably a lot of it served to lift the spirits of those living at the time, and does nothing directly for me today. But I don't begrudge those ancients their own music.
In my Historical Anthology of Music, by Davison and Apel, the first piece is a Chinese "Entrance Hymn for the Emperor," estimated at 1000 B.C. The earliest ones that I can attempt to sing are newer: only about 1,800 years old.
What is this "flawless"? I love recorded music, even when it flawlessly records the flaws. There are different sorts of flaws. When my mother sings "Kayro Kymo Deemo Wep," I consider that to be a flawless transmission of my ancestral music, even if the waveform may be different from the one produced by her mother's mother.
Thank you xtrafe for reminding us of this crucial point.
Let us also remember that Music is not at all the same thing as The "Music" Business. I have read a bit of history, and it seems that there was music, nay MUSIC, before there was copyright law, and long before there were copyright brokers.
I am having the musical time of my life listening to Canon Rock on YouTube, to the entire line of Magnatune CC-licensed music (http://www.magnatune.com/), for which I paid a flat fee to download past, present, and future selections, local live concerts, all sorts of things on Internet Archive, some Nine Inch Nails, and nothing touched by RIAA.
I founded one of the early online journals before the invention of HTML/HTTP. It's the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science, providing articles in copy-edited LaTeX source, as well as precompiled PS and PDF.
At first, the journal served papers through anonymous FTP.
Then, I crafted a Gopher structure to make browsing easier.
As soon as HTML/HTTP came along, I created the HTML version of the journal. It was much more maintainable than the Gopher version, because the hyperlinks decoupled the document structure from the file-system tree structure just enough. In a few years, I stopped maintaining the Gopher version, because it required an order of magnitude more work than the HTML, and readers all preferred the HTML anyway.
Adding pictures and stuff is rather trivial for the data architecture, although demanding for the network implementation. With a more maintainable structure, Gopher would have added the extras. It was the Hyperlinks that made HTML work better.
HTML also has some serious maintenance problems, but they appear later when the archive gets large, and they can be addressed with things like PHP compiling and content management systems.
From another point of view: Gopher essentially made file trees visible over the network (which is what I thought I wanted at first). HTML/HTTP provides a crude network database model distributed over the network.
Future advances in data architecture (as opposed to the types of data within that architecture) will have to do with other database models, and with other sorts of commitments between distributed servers, and with looser coupling between data ownership and server ownership. E.g., a way to provide reasonable assurance of future access to a particular data item (access includes being able to find it, not just its existence), without depending on a particular server at a particular registered domain name (the Wayback machine ameliorates the problem, but doesn't solve it).
Well, I'm glad that I followed my own suggestion, and reread the story of the Zenger case. It was weirder than I remembered, and perhaps more interesting than the current Staples thing, which is still in a bit of a fuzzy state.
It appears that in English law at least through 1735, truth was no defense whatsoever against a libel charge. Yup: completely irrelevant. That's exactly what the judge told the jury in Zenger. Once Zenger admitted to publishing the pamphlets in question, the judge told the jury that they had nothing to decide, and must return a verdict of "guilty."
Alexander Hamilton defended Zenger successfully, essentially by convincing the jury to nullify the law, a power that juries appear to possess through the present day, but which prosecutors and judges often seem to try to obscure.
I hope that someone can post more factual information regarding the history of this trial, and later libel law in the US. In particular:
1. I wonder whether the judge's instruction in the Zenger case constitutes what they call a "directed verdict," in which case the jury apparently defied the direction. Or was it just strong advice? Anyone know exactly how directed verdicts work? Does the jury have an opportunity to ignore the direction?
2. Can anyone clarify the subsequent English and US history of libel law? To what extent, and how, is truth established as a defense? Has the first amendment to the US constitution been deemed relevant?
The notion of truth as a defense against libel came up most famously in the case of Zenger, a newspaper publisher sued for libel by the colonial governor of Massachussetts in 1735:
Slashdot Mirror
Years ago, SUN microsystems promoted a nonlinear quantization, called "mu-law." A key problem is that the nonlinear function has to be applied to the sum of many frequency components, so it causes cross-modulations between them. A particular example: a low amplitude high frequency signal component may appear and disappear as a high amplitude low frequency component varies between 0 and its maximum. Since a high frequency component is much louder than a low frequency component of the same amplitude, the effect can be quite dramatic.
Nyquist Theorem guarantees perfect replicability for signals with no Fourier components above 1/2 the sampling rate. Fourier components are infinitely long unmodulated sine waves. The problem isn't harmonics above the Nyquist limit. The problem is modulation sidebands above the Nyquist limit. A modulated sine wave at an audible frequency has Fourier components as high as you please, and some of the Fourier components at inaudible frequencies can have an audible impact on the modulation of the audible frequencies.
That is ridiculous to the nth degree. There is no mathematical basis for what you say. When you sample, all below nyquist is reproduced 100%. Peaks and valleys do not need to line up. To the extent that an analog source has frequencies above nyquist they will simply alias, and one can easily predict whether they will be audible. Your "phase" concept has no signal processing basis.
No, in fact the previous post had the math right. Your phrase "all below nyquist" is muddled and misleading. The Nyquist limit applies to infinitely long unmodulated sine waves---the Fourier components of a signal. A modulated sine wave at an audible frequency can have Fourier components at inaudible frequencies with audible impact on the modulation.
For most people, there is no place where sounds above 20 kHz will irritate a nerve ending enough to send an impulse to your brain. Thus, no sound higher than 20 kHz is audible, and 20 kHz corresponds to a 40 kHz sampling rate. (One sample at the low point on the wave, the next sample at the next high point, etc.
The problem in your analysis is that a "sound higher than 20 kHz" may be inaudible, in the sense that you don't detect a sustained sine wave at such a high frequency. But the Nyquist theorem applies to Fourier components---infinitely long unmodulated sine waves---rather than intuitive "sounds." Modulated sine waves at audible frequencies have Fourier components above audible frequencies with audible effects on the modulation.
Well you are misinformed, or you simply remember incorrectly. As long as you follow the Nyquist you can represent the actual source wave to 100%. This is common knowledge.
Well, it's sorta true with the caveat, "As long as you follow the Nyquist [theorem]." But, the requirements of the Nyquist theorem are impossible to follow. The theorem requires infinitely many infinite precision samples and no Fourier components above 1/2 the sampling rate. This never happens. Fourier components above audible frequencies can have audible effects on the modulation of audible frequencies.
The common knowledge, as normally applied is wrong. A careful reading of the Nyquist Theorem, and the widespread (but not common) knowledge about its application, are required in order to use it well.
Here's what I sent them. If I had been wider awake, I would have skipped the last paragraph. I enjoyed writing it, but sarcasm is almost always counterproductive.
Dear SOCA,
When I saw the takedown notice at RnBXclusive, I was sure that it was a spoof. The bald statements about the guilt of "the individuals behind this website," apparently unproved in court, the threats of prosecution to myself, and the speculative claims about the "future of the music industry," seemed too absurd to be written by a serious law enforcement agency. Then, the advertisement for pro-music.org at the end made it clear that this was either a spoof by pro-music, or more likely by an opponent trying to embarrass pro-music.
I was astonished to find acknowledgment on your own web site that this absurd text was indeed your own.
I never heard of RnBXclusive before, and have no opinion whatsoever regarding the legality of the behavior of "the individuals behind" that website, nor your takedown of the site and reported arrest of the "individuals." But I hope that you will be more careful in the future to post only relevant and sensible notices that stay well within the scope of your legal mission.
I recommend to you the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org) as a source of careful analysis of online behavior by individuals, corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies. They do not appear to have posted any specific comments about RnBXclusive, SOCA, or your recent arrest and DNS takeover, but they can provide some of the best advice available when consulted.
If you must advertise legal sources of music downloads, let me recommend my favorite, magnatune.com, which is not represented by those "behind" the pro-music.org website, and which will perhaps suffer competitively from your public endorsement of pro-music.org.
Sincerely Yours,
Michael J. O'Donnell
The University of Chicago
I have some experience trying to teach the way that you proposee, which I described in a separate thread on "Experience with open projects, no exams" before I noticed this thread.
I encouraged, but did not require, collaboration.
As much as possible, I defined in advance how much accomplishment constituded C, B and A work, respectively. I was never able to make this perfectly objective, and the clarity varied according to the material and my own imagination in the project assignment.
To evaluate each student's individual accomplishment, I interacted with the students. Sometimes I did this in scheduled individual face-to-face interviews. It was OK for a student to talk about other people's work as well as her own. But I only gave credit for insight explained to me through description of work, not for work that just sat there on paper (or online). Once in many years of this practice I encountered a student who appeared for the interview and seemed unable to express himself in a clear sentence. I made a wild guess for that guy's grade, and vowed to have midterm interviews as well as final interviews as much as possible.
Later, when I had a Wiki server, I required projects to be displayed incrementally on the Wiki. I had a very difficult time convincing students not to wait until the last day and dump lots of material out of the blue (nobody who did so got a good grade). In (thankfully only) one case, a student who failed to attend class (attendance and participation in discussion was mandatory according to written posted instructions) sent me a "project" 1 hour after the absolute final deadline, and seemed shocked that I awarded a D (the only grade below C I ever had to assign in this system).
I never achieved 100% understanding of the ground rules (in spite of posting them in explicit instructions on the Web and discussing them in class). There were always students who failed to understand that only iteration could produce a good result on these sorts of projects, and a few who understood but failed to act (sometimes requesting incomplete grades at the last minute). I was working on intermediate deadlines to eliminate such behavior as much as possible, but stopped teaching before I worked it all out. One student who understood, but failed to perform, in one class signed up for another topic taught in the same way, and did quite well.
For the students who understood, and acted upon, the instructions, the results were very good. I could tell students as they went along what progress they had made toward C, B, A, and avoid the end-of-term suspense that I find counterproductive. Evaluations at the time of the classes varied a lot, from those who loved the system to those who couldn't stand it. A few students got in touch years later, and were very positive. These were all students who had done well, and it is very unusual to hear from dissatisfied students long after class, so I have insufficient information about students for whom my approach did not work.
The principle that I tried to follow was to avoid completely any requirement in which the possibility of cheating was relevant. I tried to design all assigned work so that the accomplishment required worthwhile learning while using all available resources, including fellow students and outside consultants. I believe that this principle is good for pedagogy, and not just a way to avoid worrying about cheating (although my experience in a few cases of cheating in classes with conventional assignments and exams was painful enough that I might choose to avoid the possibility even if it were not good pedagogy).
I found this principle to require a lot of rethinking, and the application to each topic, context, instructor, and type of student is different. I'm not convinced that conventional assignments and exams are better in this respect, I think that they only make it easier to avoid feeling bad about the failure by attributing it entirely to the student.
I also think that there are particular topics and contexts for which my approach is not appropriate, but I tend not to like teaching those topics in those contexts.
My heart rate is controlled by a pacemaker at this moment. I do not have access to the specifications, so I cannot determine directly whether it contains a real-time clock. But the behavior seems to require one. The pacemaker stores records of its behavior and its sensor readings, and transmits them whenever its short-range radio can reach a satellite/cellular interface. It is extremely likely that a real-time clock in the pacemaker is used to time-stamp the data that are transmitted at unpredictable times hours after they are recorded.
The pacemaker that is controlling my heart rate at this moment has two communications interfaces that I know about. One is short-range radio of some sort, and the other is normally connected through a device placed externally within an inch of the device. I have no information about the actual effective range of either interface. I am appalled at the willingness of a number of people, not only this anonymous one, to post speculations with no apparent basis in real observation.
I am a moderator for arXiv, and I am quite sure that submissions are filtered only for prima facie relevance, and do not have to be "accepted in a journal." The format of arXiv is probably not suitable for all sorts of data, but lots of data can be presented as text and can be placed in arXiv.
Jesse Shapiro has done some real research on the segregation of political groups online. Here's the abstract:
Cass Sunstein got rather famous for books Republic.com and Republic.com 2.0 , warning that, "as ... the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger of dissolving. I listened to Mr. Sunstein speak on his topic, and heard only loose speculation, unsupported by research or rigorous reasoning, so I never read the books. Perhaps there is something more substantial in the books.
> ARPANET or NSFNET (expansion of arpanet to universities) would have been term widely used or recognized in 1985 by users
I'm not sure what source you have for your "would have been." I am reporting my personal experience. I called it "Internet" in 1985, as did all of the other users I knew at Johns Hopkins, Purdue, and a number of other universities. At Hopkins, I was never connected through NSFNET (a program that started in 1985 according to theWikipedia article). The EECS department had an early connection through the Cypress service of CSNet, and then a peered connection through MILNET at the Ballistics Research Lab of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. There was another peered connection arranged by the university, but it was overloaded and I can't remember how it was negotiated.
In all of my discussions in the early 80s, we understood CSNet to be a project extending the Internet, and in the late 80s we understood NSFNET in the same way.
> If you want to show somebody what the Arpanet looked like (you didn't call it the "Internet" until the late '80s)
In 1985, I had already been calling it the "Internet" for some time.
Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful essay explaining why he does not protect his wireless node. There are pointers to other essays agreeing and disagreeing with him. I personally agree with Schneier. I consider myself the steward of my Internet connection, more than owner.
MAC addresses are easy to spoof.
In order to understand our reactions to deaths attributable to machines/computers/robots, we should notice the different reactions in different cases. Several killings by industrial robots were reported in the news although they were in many ways more like accidents with chainsaws and snowblowers and other dangerous power tools than the "robot kills human" sort of headline suggests. On the other hand, the Therac 25 delivered therapeutic radiation controlled by very badly designed and constructed software, and it killed at least 6 patients in a rather gruesome way. These incidents seem much more like automated manslaughter than the accidents with industrial robots, but I never found any mention in the newspapers. The killings went on for more than a year, and early investigations focused on hardware problems, mostly ignoring the software. We need a few good dissertations and more careful studies of more incidents before drawing conclusions. But, it seems that our irrational reactions to machine/computer/robot killings are driven by something more subtle and complicated than a mere autophobia. I would hazard a guess that we prefer to get excited about relatively unimportant incidents with a nice dramatic presentation, while ignoring the rationally scarier incidents that expose real systematic safety problems.
I use Speakeasy DSL service, in spite of the fact that it has less capacity than cable, because they don't have nastiness in the license. In particular, they allow servers. I run an HTTP server as a symbolic act, to share material with a few friends, and to test things (there's not enough capacity to use the server for anything substantially public). Speakeasy also allows me to share my connection (I run a free unprotected hotspot), and even offers to split the monthly bill between me and any neighbors I share with.
"Compared to previous studies, these results imply that long term negative feedback from CO2‐induced increases in vegetation density could reduce temperature following a stabilization of CO2 concentration."
I encourage more attention to the last phrase in the last sentence of the abstract of the report (http://europa.agu.org/?view=article&uri=/journals/gl/gl1023/2010GL045338/2010GL045338.xml&t=gl,bounoua). It doesn't appear to even ameliorate the temperature change until after CO2 stabilizes.
Mike O'Donnell
"What methods did they have before that date that allowed the almost flawless recreation of works?"
The more I ponder this phrase, the more I am puzzled how it is supposed to bear on the hypothesis that there was music before copyright or RIAA. I am pretty sure that this refers to some particular level of audio frequency waveform recording technology. I'm not sure whether it kicks in with the earliest paper recording, wax cylinders, platters, or 16-bit samples taken at 44.1 KHz.
I'm pretty sure that it rules out written musical scores, although I challenge techhead to point out the serious flaws in any of the scores that we still have from J.S. Bach, W.A. Mozart, L. van Beethoven. Player piano rolls?
No matter, none of these recording methods is required in order to have music, not even the written scores.
Please, someone stop me before I start quibbling about the word, "recreation," to say nothing of "works"!
"copyright law in the US at least was created in 1790. What methods did they have before that date that allowed the almost flawless recreation of works?"
According to what I have read, there was a lot of unrecorded music. Even before 1790. Some of it has come down to me in musical notation, some passed through the oral/aural tradition, some is just a rumor. Probably a lot of it served to lift the spirits of those living at the time, and does nothing directly for me today. But I don't begrudge those ancients their own music.
In my Historical Anthology of Music, by Davison and Apel, the first piece is a Chinese "Entrance Hymn for the Emperor," estimated at 1000 B.C. The earliest ones that I can attempt to sing are newer: only about 1,800 years old.
What is this "flawless"? I love recorded music, even when it flawlessly records the flaws. There are different sorts of flaws. When my mother sings "Kayro Kymo Deemo Wep," I consider that to be a flawless transmission of my ancestral music, even if the waveform may be different from the one produced by her mother's mother.
Thank you xtrafe for reminding us of this crucial point.
Let us also remember that Music is not at all the same thing as The "Music" Business. I have read a bit of history, and it seems that there was music, nay MUSIC, before there was copyright law, and long before there were copyright brokers.
I am having the musical time of my life listening to Canon Rock on YouTube, to the entire line of Magnatune CC-licensed music (http://www.magnatune.com/), for which I paid a flat fee to download past, present, and future selections, local live concerts, all sorts of things on Internet Archive, some Nine Inch Nails, and nothing touched by RIAA.
Oh, and singing.
"Living in the heart of music,"
I founded one of the early online journals before the invention of HTML/HTTP. It's the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science, providing articles in copy-edited LaTeX source, as well as precompiled PS and PDF.
At first, the journal served papers through anonymous FTP.
Then, I crafted a Gopher structure to make browsing easier.
As soon as HTML/HTTP came along, I created the HTML version of the journal. It was much more maintainable than the Gopher version, because the hyperlinks decoupled the document structure from the file-system tree structure just enough. In a few years, I stopped maintaining the Gopher version, because it required an order of magnitude more work than the HTML, and readers all preferred the HTML anyway.
Adding pictures and stuff is rather trivial for the data architecture, although demanding for the network implementation. With a more maintainable structure, Gopher would have added the extras. It was the Hyperlinks that made HTML work better.
HTML also has some serious maintenance problems, but they appear later when the archive gets large, and they can be addressed with things like PHP compiling and content management systems.
From another point of view: Gopher essentially made file trees visible over the network (which is what I thought I wanted at first). HTML/HTTP provides a crude network database model distributed over the network.
Future advances in data architecture (as opposed to the types of data within that architecture) will have to do with other database models, and with other sorts of commitments between distributed servers, and with looser coupling between data ownership and server ownership. E.g., a way to provide reasonable assurance of future access to a particular data item (access includes being able to find it, not just its existence), without depending on a particular server at a particular registered domain name (the Wayback machine ameliorates the problem, but doesn't solve it).
Well, I'm glad that I followed my own suggestion, and reread the story of the Zenger case. It was weirder than I remembered, and perhaps more interesting than the current Staples thing, which is still in a bit of a fuzzy state.
It appears that in English law at least through 1735, truth was no defense whatsoever against a libel charge. Yup: completely irrelevant. That's exactly what the judge told the jury in Zenger. Once Zenger admitted to publishing the pamphlets in question, the judge told the jury that they had nothing to decide, and must return a verdict of "guilty."
Alexander Hamilton defended Zenger successfully, essentially by convincing the jury to nullify the law, a power that juries appear to possess through the present day, but which prosecutors and judges often seem to try to obscure.
I hope that someone can post more factual information regarding the history of this trial, and later libel law in the US. In particular:
1. I wonder whether the judge's instruction in the Zenger case constitutes what they call a "directed verdict," in which case the jury apparently defied the direction. Or was it just strong advice? Anyone know exactly how directed verdicts work? Does the jury have an opportunity to ignore the direction?
2. Can anyone clarify the subsequent English and US history of libel law? To what extent, and how, is truth established as a defense? Has the first amendment to the US constitution been deemed relevant?
3. Any further stuff on jury nullification?
The notion of truth as a defense against libel came up most famously in the case of Zenger, a newspaper publisher sued for libel by the colonial governor of Massachussetts in 1735:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/zenger.html
http://www.ryanteaguebeckwith.com/eng214/libel.html