Anyone know if KDE/Gnome or even Xfree is planning something like this? I heard talk about multiple X servers, but its not out of the box simple use, of even possible.
If you use gdm to login, add the line "1=Standard" after "0=Standard" in your gdm.conf. If you use kdm I think you just add the line ":1 local@tty1/usr/X11R6/bin/X vt8" after the line ":0 local@tty1/usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7", but I don'y use kdm, so your milage may vary. (xdm is more complicated, so google if ya use that). As suggested by the kdm config to start a new X server on another virtual terminal just specify the vt you want to use. I think this has been around since shortly after XFree86 was first ported to Linux, maybe earlier on the BSD's. Recently it's been possible to program virtual terminal switching to keys other than the basic F1-F12, so easy switching isn't limited to just 12 users anymore. I never understood why multiple X servers haven't been used in the Linux distro's, at least on a "allocate one X terminal per 256 MB of RAM the computer has" basis. My desktop has had a gigabyte or more of RAM for years, I'm not really concerned about a few extra buffers eating up a tiny bit of memory. Even my laptops with 256MB-512MB in the last 5 years can handle an additional X server without batting an eye.
You can also give the different servers different configurations, which is the traditional use for this. But by default the X server started by kdm/gdm requires a login and uses the same config, so it is exactly what you want. BTW if you want to be able to login with the same user twice you will have to enable that, by default it is not permitted to prevent remote users from starting lots of X servers and consuming all your resources... (though this is also limited by the number of virtual terminals you allow.)
Not, they don't. There's a small fraction of the kurds making a hell of a racket about this, but the fact is that most (we're talking 4/5s here) of turkish kurds just want to live in peace and is pissed off at the noisy kurds for destrouing their chance.
Look I've never met a Kurd, I've only met three non-Kurd Turks and they all had hated Kurds more than the average KKK grand dragon hates blacks. One put me in quite a shock because I had been friends with her for years and never heard her say anything that even hinted at bigotry before. I'll concede my sampling wasn't anything near scientific, but it's not like I read some article by a Kurd about their misstreatment. I didn't even know there was any conflict between the groups until I got to know some Turks.
I hope things have changed as much as you and the other poster on this topic believe, I think Europe will benefit greatly from integrating the young entreprising population of Turkey into it's system.
My Persian roommate just exploded at you calling Iran a democracy. Very very sad that you think such a thing. Vetted candidates, jailed dissenters, and a clerical stranglehold that just seems to get stronger as they ger more challenged is not a democracy.
I'm very glad he exploded. I get the same feeling when America is called a democracy. Undoubtedly true in a sense, but it's not like a simple majority can do anything, and I can't say I enjoy voting for the candidates vetted by the Republicrats. The plutocrat's stranglehold just seems to get stronger as they get more challanged. But if we had more Americans like your roommate we would have some hope.
When I grew up we all thought the world would be devastated by an all out nuclear war, my guess at your age suggests the Russian tank commanders finally refused to fire at the democratic protesters before you were concerned with politics. We do ultimately have control over our governments, people hold those guns and eventually always have the courage to disobey their orders. Iran already has a just constitution in place, but their "Guardians" are much like the Supreme Court that decided Plesy vs. Fergison. While they are undoubtedly an inherently conservative group they are less so than our court because they serve for six years and not for life. It won't take 62 years like Judge Harlan's courageous single man minority opinion that "In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law." The current backlash against liberalism in Iran is generational, and that of the outgoing generation.
Hmm, Israel must be an awful big democracy to warrant a double mention. Either that, or someone is going around and renaming countries to conflict with existing countries...
Heh, well I meant to write "Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Iran." After previewing, I went back to reverse the order of the last to from "Iran and Israel" to "Israel and Iran" to make the structure of the post better, but I screewed up. But it's not entirely off base as is. The occupied territories did hold an election as part of the Oslo accords. Not that one election gives you a democracy.
If you read on I qualified the democraticies of all those countries I meant to name. These four do have constitutions and regular elections where there is no heriditary ruler with a veto like in the other countries "on the road to democracy" like Qatar, Jordan and the UAE. Of those, only Qatar seems to have at least paved the road. The other countries in the region have complete sham parliments, they have no power and are only there to satisfy American and European businesses who want to say their presence helps the people in region. These sham parliments have no significance to their citizens except for breading contempt of western governments and encouraging the belief that we (the citizens of the west) are all dumb fucks.
Lebanon is the country Muslims and Christians flee to when things get really rotten at home and obviously most Jews fled to Israel in 1968 after the six day war. (The seven day war in '48 didn't affect Jews living in other middle eastern countries as much, though many did go anyway for the same hopeful reasons some Americans went. Though I think the tolerance for Jews was much higher in Arabia than America at the time, this has obviously completely reversed since then.) I have no idea if Zoroastrian's fled to anywhere, but I have met one Zoroastrian who left Saudi and Bahai that fled Iraq to the west so maybe other minorities did the same. Or maybe India? There are very old Zoroastrian and Jewish sects there, though the race thing might be a problem (Iranians are white and blue eyed and Semites, well neither looks very Asian.)
I understand it there's a really big stumbling block called the "right of return".
Yes, but Arifat has stated he'd go along with the UN resolution, which calls for return OR compensation. It's pretty obvious Israel will not accept a unencumbered right of return so this really means a negotiated compensation regime with courts deciding if someone really did live in the house or on the land they claim. This might be resolved with immigration quotas and the option for palestinians to accept cash compensation in leu of their personal right of return (which in reality would mean being placed on a long waiting list.) I generally don't believe in immigration quotas, but in this case I feel like a liberterian that loves public libraries...
Additionally, you've got a minority of Israelis.. & a large number of (but it's not exactly clear how many) Palestinians who want to wipe Israel off the map.
There are very ideological factions on both sides. They are a tiny fraction of the population though, for historic reasons they have a significant influence in politics. Most of the settlers are recent immigrants who are there for economic reasons not idealogical ones. You will hear many palestinians talk of an eventual re-unification of Israel and Palestine, but if you follow up on it they see it as a peaceful unification of common interests. If you read the writings of many early Zionists you will see the same hope expressed, but years of lukewarm war have made it seem implausable. Much of that isn't from fear of their muslim and christian neighbors in the former Palestine, but fear of the neighboring countries. The Israeli extreemists see this as proof of their real desire to wipe Israel of the map, but I think no level headed person would see this hope this way, though some might say it is so for cynical reasons. Personally, I don't think this unification will ever happen, except maybe in the form a of a free trade agreement, and then probably only after a significant portion of the middle east is democratic. I don't think it will ever go further because we won't see democracy in the region until the oil is all gone, and by then it might be a hundred years since 1948, the generation that grew up as next door neighbors will be long dead.
I'm also not making the arguement that the extreemists won't make this very difficult, Yitzhak Rabin was killed by a right winger, Yigal Amir, who wasn't even a settler. It's been reported by Israeli's and some American's that Arifat kept repeating "they will kill me"(meaning muslim terrorists) when the Oslo process was falling apart. But I've talked to dozens of Israelis and Palestinians and never one that held those extreemists views you see on television. My book buyer is a guy who grew up in an extreemist settlement and he once introduced me to someone who lost his friend to the Israeli armi in a peaceful protest. One of my coworkers once talked about his service in the Israeli army and told me there is much more resentment for the settlers than the palestinians in the ranks of the army. He personally seemed to hold resentment for all Orthodox Israeli's. Their idealoges benefit most from the occupation, but the Orthodox don't have to serve in the army like all other jews (Israeli muslims and christians are not subject to the draft during "peacetime").
They have to do it themselves. We have to sit by and watch, there is nothing we should do other than that. The intense hatred of anything US backed would simply do what it has always done in that region... make the people we back look like flunkies for the infidels.
There is plenty reason to be hopeful too. There are only four democracies in the region Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Israel. They are all flawed, Turkey has a huge military industrial complex corrupting their politics and think of they Kurdish minority as subhuman. Lebanon is democrartic but most parts of the country are still occupied by Syria, a monarchy -- purportedly to protect them from another invasion by Israel which no one really thinks will attack again. Israel which refuse to give most of their Palestinian population the vote. And, Iran which has popular elections, but gives religious leaders a veto. Plus the religious leaders run most charities and schools, and have their own militia.
They all have some hope, the Turkish parliament recently rejected the military's approval of US transit rights. They needed 90% approval of their action from the populace, but it should build their backbone. Unfortunately I don't see the Kurdish situation improving. They really need to be given their own country, I've known Turks that were perfectly reasonable and intelligent human beings that seemed possessed with evil when the topic of Kurds came up. I don't think the desire to join the EU will overcome this hatred.
Lebanon's benefactor Syria got a moderate dictator by peaceful succession a few years ago that will probably leave Lebanon as soon as they get a peace treaty with Israel. Even without a peace treaty this may happen as the main opposition party in Lebanon wants to disinvite Syria and the current dictator there would likely accept that, if only grudginly.
Both sides in Israel's civil war want peace and accept each others terms pretty much except for some details like compensation for siezed property and water allocation. There are plenty of foreign donors willing to pay for all but symbolic portions of the bill. What really holds them back is that 70-90% on each side completely distrusts the other side. They have perfectly valid reasons seen close to the ground, but from any other vantage point these two semitic tribes have more common interests than anyone else in the middle east, and as soon as the old warriors like Sharon die (from natural causes) the very young population on both sides of the conflict will have every reason to make up.
Finally, Iran probably has the best hope of all. If you read their constitution you see it's pretty decent, it even guarantees representation for tiny minorities, Zoroastrians and Jews each get a seat each in parliment and three seats go to Christians, the biggest problem is the guardian council which can reject any law with a simple majority. But, half guardian council which interprets the constitutionality of laws, who usually reject laws from the currently liberal parliment, is appointed by the judiciary. They serve 6 year terms instead of the four that the parliment's members serve, and while right now it's packed with very conservative clerics that keep rejecting reformist laws, this will change because the generation that has just started voting was born after the revolution and have only known the excesses of the Iranian government and don't accept it just because it's better than the dictator that ruled thirty years ago. Really, the only thing that could screew things up is if we start mucking with their internal politics and the liberals get associated with the foreign interlopers. All that's needed is few years to rotate out older appointments and everything changes for the better. Even "The Leader" is elected from candidates selected by experts appointed by the guardians, but if the majority grows just a little bigger for reform the leader doesn't need to change because he won't dare do anything to get in the way of reform for fear of complete overthrow, sorta lik
So how do they do this? I've always been under the impression that with digital cable and cable internet, all of the data has to be sent to everyone (in the same neighborhood anyway), so how can they handle the hundereds of channels (some of which are actually lower quality than others), the multiple VOD streams (even for the same movie), and eveyone's porn and mp3 activities all at the same time?
This one is simple they ran fiber to the curb a few years ago. They even ran new coax to our apartments to handle more bandwidth. There is effectively infinite bandwidth running into your apartment.
A large electric shock across my hand (ie both contacts on my hand) may cause temporary numbness and some pain, but quite probably no lasting damage.
I've had one of these, both contacts on fingers on one hand. While there was no lasting damage, I wouldn't catagorize the pain as "some pain." More like incredible pain in my whole arm lasting for hours followed by a day of numbness.
I've also caught one of those ring tones through my body. Sharp pain, but it only while the current was flowing. It was a very different type of pain, the large current through my hand didn't hurt while I was being electrocuted, but hurt a lot afterward, the ringtone "shocked" me but didn't hurt afterward at all.
Its when this is possible on a non-windows platform that people will look.
Hehe, I was doing that when MS Windows was still at like version 3.0, I don't even think they had a TCP/IP stack for another five years. As far as I'm concerned that's always been possible in Unix (Linux didn't exist yet). Worship thy google.;)
It turned out that he got all his info from public domain sources.
I saw Tom Clancy's interview on C-SPAN, he said he gets most of his info from the local library. He's been offered consulting jobs by the whitehouse but refuses them because if he had a secret clearance he could no longer divulge info in the public domain since it's all classified.
I had a prof. that once got in hot water because he didn't return a book to the safe at the end of the day, but left it on his desk. He said all it contained was stuff he learned in his freshman year in engineering. (Pressure tables and the like.)
Personally, I think everything should be declassified by default after 5-10 years unless a civil servant expert reads it and renews the classification. It really hinders historical research and political analysis if you don't know who knew what when, it's not like you can keep physics secret. The assasination, overthrow crap isn't really a secret once you've done it. I for one would like to know what the thought process was when we installed Pinochet or why Bush Sr. gave all those weapons to the terrorists in direct contradiction of the law. Was there something we didn't know, was it for personal financial gain, or was it political maneuvering? You could release the info but give retired assasins code names, or just blank them out if they are still in the field. Code names are better because you could see if someone had a personal agenda.
The things aren't transmitters..... they are just receivers that can draw more or less power from the transmitter. Spoofing would be dead easy.
No.... the RFID draws power from the powered transmitter and transmits a number on another frequency, which can be a licensed frequency. Just like cell phone networks use licensed frequencies, the manufacturer just had to buy a tiny bit of spectrum.
How hard would it be to build a RFID spoofing tool that emits gazillions of random RFID numbers whenever it is polled?
Not very, but it's highly illegal. FCC hunts down tiny 100 watt FM transmitters in the wild, imagine their reaction to unlicensed microwave transmitters. How many of those cell phone jammers in the US?
Creating a derivative work for commercial use is clearly copyright violation.
Nope, not if it's parody, or substancially transformative, or fits any legion of other exceptions. Fair use is fair use, except the more money you make the less you can take advantage of it. I can Xerox say a third of the little prince and hand it out in class, no problem. But someone writing a history book can copy maybe three or four pages of the little prince verbatim under fair use.
If you are a television network and your program has no redeeming social value, say you are CBS or ABC, then the rules are much tougher, you could read maybe a page of the little prince without troubles.
And then there is music. Just don't touch that dung heap at any cost. The courts seem to have held that music has no value to society and should be treated with less respect legally than hardcode child pornography viewings at the local crackhouse, a purely profit driven venture.
Since the only way to circumvent a PC BIOS, OpenFirmware, or OpenProm password is to open the case, a security-conscious person would inspect the lock to ensure it hasn't been tampered with. If it hasn't, then it is extremely unlikely an attacker could have, for instance, booted their own OS and installed a trojan horse to the computer's disk which intercepts passwords and passphrases.
An $8 hardware keyboard logger can get someone a long ways unless you take more than a cursory look at your hardware. Not that you shouldn't do all those very common sense things you suggested. When I was a kid I had a bad habit of breaking into machines that looked "secured." The tougher ones took all the measures you suggested and then encased the machine in metal or plexiglass. Those machines took up to an hour to break into. Unfortunately, when it comes to these things the kid will break into more of those machines than the totally unsecured ones because your machines present some challenge. The easy machines will be accessed only for convenience.
Lock the door to your office, and worry about someone running NFS or a Windows machine on your network.
Maybe you could, like, lock the door to the room with the Mac in it...
Well that is sort of the point, the screensaver feature won't bite you in the ass if you lock the door, same as all the other much easier ways for someone to gain access to a machine when she has physical access.
Personal computers and workstations make no attempt to be secure against physical access. I just changed two Mac OS X root passwords so I could create an account for myself on some pc's last week. I'm not a regular mac user, I just did a google search and found three or four ways to do it, the easiest was to just boot into single user mode, turn on the standard password authentication mechanism, and then type passwd... I've never met a Sun workstation that didn't give you fully fledged debug console at Meta-A.. Lilo lets you enter single user mode with just a kernel parameter to linux... You can overwrite the password files in Windows, etc.
You could encrypt the root filesystem, then on boot authenticate the machine (to make sure someone didn't just clone the startup to harvest your decryption key) and then enter the decryption key based on a one time response from the computer. That level of paranoia would justify caring about this "exploit." Even so someone could just install a sniffer inside the computer since our hardware is not hardened in the least.
I saw the prototype at Sony's keynote at GDC last year. It looked like a lot of fun. They composited the player into an interactive world and you could control it with a "magic wand" (orange nerf ball on a stick.) and it would show all kinds of special effects eminating from your wand. It was basically a game of make believe that the kid can play without the adult around. Or, a party game for the lightly stoned. Or, an amazing virtual reality existence for acid heads.
I think it's smart of them to release this now considering that many of the playstation players are at that age where they start making poop-machines.
In any event, I far prefer the idea of a small number of trained armed policemen to the idea of every man/woman in a police uniform having a gun at his/her hip....
So would I. I was at that big anti-war protest in New York earlier last March, at one point I was in a crowd a couple miles from the protest where there were about 25,000 people severely crowded around four cops with guns and big 10 gallon cans of pepperspray. They were literally shaking in their boots, if one of them had panicked and used some of the pepperspray someone could have been shot when the cop was jumped. Or someone nuts in the crowd could have easily pickpocketed a gun and shot it. There were a lot of families with their children, some would have probably been trampled. Later as me and my friends finally extricated ourselves from the crowd a half dozen cops on horses came into the crowd and trampled some protestors, presumably coming to pick up the cops. I saw one horse trip on of the people it trampled and fall on the rider. If those cops in the crowd hadn't been carrying all that weaponry I'm sure they could have just walked out of there.
The whole protest was a mess, apparently they only expected 100,000 people and over 500,000 tried to get to the protest. There is an investigation apparently, but aside from the poor planning just the fact that they ruitinely carry guns causes problems. (That mini-crowd was caused by barriers on three sides that one of the feeder marcheres walked into, apparently it was supposed to just stage entry into the march, but they never let anyone past them because they were already full to capacity by straglers before the 40 organized marches to the protest even started, add to that that some vandal cut the phone cables to the protester's organizing office..big mess, the cops knew nothing, the organizers knew nothing, I think the fact that it was a peace march saved us from rioting, small kids were held above the crowd and people who really needed to get out were passed overhead if the people in the way couldn't move out of the way.)
It was my first protest so I had to confirm with the former office mate I went with that this wasn't normal. It took us 6 hours of walking to get to the protest, it was actually officially over by the time we got there. We were tired, cold, hungry and in need of a bathroom and left after we spied one of the screens showing the stage and taking a picture..actually one of the four of us gave up and went home three hours earlier, it was her first protest too and she just couldn't take it.
Actually, USPS refuses to drive up my driveway to deliver a package, then leaves a postcard in my mail box telling me they attempted delivery.
Heh, my mail carrier doesn't even bother to buzz my doorbell, about two feet away from the box. Yet he still says he takes the package with him. What is the point in that? What really annoys me is that my post office arranges their packages by day of arrival instead of address so there is always a huge line, then you get up there and they can't find the package.. this is especially true if it is something small like certified letter. I have a sneaking suspicion they don't separate these and just pile hundreds of packages on top of letters.
The upshot is I meet a lot of my neighbors, for better or worse, and we trade snail-mail horror stories. Two women told me about a sting operation her family ran that had one person standing by the mailbox, one at the post office, another chasing the delivery van.. and finally a last person conveying messages between them. They managed to get the package in just one day of work. It really was on the van despite stringent denials by the mail carrier, but the post office kept saying things like "oh, the package just went out to the van," "oh, I just left it back at the post office," "we just sent someone out to deliver it, you better hurry home so you don't miss the delivery!" This didn't happen to me, but with my experiences I do believe it. When I get a package notice at home half the time I just ask who ever made the mistake sending it there to send it to my work or to my local package service, when it eventualy gets returned.
As I see it, the GPL allows me to "publish" my code, yet anyone who wants to make money with it by basing proprietary software on it will have to come to me (more like my university) for a license to do that.
That's pretty much how I see GPL too, but I don't release everything under it. Though I try to stick to open libraries so I can eventually.
The lab I work at now has made a little over 2 million on licensing on code I worked on with others as a definately less than the lab has seen in government grants in that time. Still it's not nothing and while I haven't seen any of that filthy lucre myself, it has made it easier for me to work on something more interesting without any objections for not having a grant for it yet. That is the lab pays me out of current funds in semi-reciprocation for the money delivered earlier and perhaps in some hope I strike gold, even if I suspect I might request a small royalty now.
Read my reply to someone else's comment of the same nature. I've signed over my copyright to ACM which I hesitated at despite their good reputation, although I don't recall Visual Computer asking me to sign over anything and I believe IEEE just asks you to give them non-exclusive irrevokable distribution rights. It's not the copyright on the papers I care about, I just want em cited properly and not published under someone else's name, it's the copyright on my code that I care about. I'd like to be able have some control over that. For a certain sum of money I would even license it under GPL, as long as I retained copyright and so the right to license it and it's derivative works under another license. At least with GPL, if someone decided to enter my market with my code I would have their improvements in addition to my own to market. The government would have to insist on paying graduate students at least double what they are paid now for even GPL to be acceptable to many prospective students. For public domain, unless you rewarded very well, you would only get communists and the independently wealthy to get Ph.D's in CS, considering how few of those there are in grad school for CS now I don't see that as a very promising future.
I would be extreemly rare for any researcher to make much money by retaining the copyright to federally funded research. Maybe if somebody wrote a "thesis of the year" but most academic research books make little money for their authors.
In computer science the code can bew very valuable. The papers are too, but here it is more important that your name be attached to it than any other aspect of copyright be ahered to. Often we sign our copyright away to a reputable member organization such as the ACM, while retaining distribution rights to our own papers. You gain from this from a legal standpoint in the common instance of multiple author papers.
I know the patent issue wasn't mentioned, but I still think I'd much rather give up the patents, which are mostly a hinderance, than give up the copyright which actually can be useful. I'd also be glad to give up the exclusive copying privledge of copyright after say five years, if I could retain the right to say "this paper must be copied in it's entirety if need to excerpt more than say 30% of the paper and the original paper must be referenced if you use more than 10% of it and it constitutes a significant part of your work." Academic principles would be stricter than this anyway, but this would allow me to go after true scalawags. Copyright lengths themselves are insane, I have no financial interest after 2-3 years in even the code, it's evolved greatly or I've dropped that pursuit by then, and I have no financial interest in papers what so ever. I can't for the life of me see why I need copyright protection in the grave either, for me a term of five years whether I'm dead or alive is more than enough for publishers to feel comfortable making a book, and a right to have my name attached to significant derivative works would be nice (though it won't motivate or dismotivate me any either way, plagarism is usually caught in the peer review process.) Honestly three years of copyright would be plenty good motivation in our field, but as an author I prefer more, but I also see great harm in making it more than five years. On the other hand I think five years for fiction books would be the minimum and ten years a good compromise in length. I don't see much harm in even a twenty year copyright in the developed world, but there is with anything more than ten in the developing world.
I don't think copyright is the right tool for music or software binaries. Here a compulsary licensing scheme would work much better than leaving the copying policies in the hands of the "creators." In music there are so few tunes you can actually make in the 12 note system that the copyright act more like patents. Software binaries are not written to be understood so don't really qualify as creative works, but the still require protection so that their software development can be compensated. I'm not sure what the right thing is, but the courts should not have made law and turned them into creative works. I'm sure the legislative system, as broken as it is, would have come up with something better.
I actually have two original IBM PS/2 keyboards, bought from used computer stores nearby... but the noise annoyed the hell out of my wife and I recently switched to a Memorex multimedia keyboard. It's really not all that bad, and every once in a great while I even remember to use some of the extra keys on it.
Man I threw out my IBM PS/2 four years ago cuz the girlfriend couldn't sleep and I was moving so I felt carrying one more 10 lb computer component was a bit too much (I threw away other computer things like all those ISA bus components in the junk drawer, except for the Soundblaster..) Now the girlfriend is gone, something about needing to sow her oats and not being ready for marrage in addition with a high disregard for the idea of someday living in Silicon Valley, where she now lives. I really miss the keyboard. I bought one of those "Hacker" keyboards. I like the form factor but it's too light and the feel is all wrong.
Of coures maybe things are different in America? Are grad students in funded exclusivly by the government as they are here?
Grad students aren't funded directly. Professors apply for grants in various fields and then pay the university to employ the student at a fixed rate. But the university doesn't care where the money comes from, the university might take a 60% cut for overhead and a cut on any purchases over $300. Where I was the professor also paid a health insurance co-pay for students even though students weren't given health insurance. Professors also get money from industry, Microsoft, IBM, Unilever... but except for Microsoft these are on an entirely different league, a lab might get a few million from the government and a 100k from the other sources. Microsoft gave us money for some patent rights to stuff developed with government money, but the much smaller grants from others were completely unrestricted. They just wanted to visit and have an inside track on hiring graduate students for summer internships. Government money, especially military money, has very few restrictions and is often more than you can spend. The universities don't allow spending this on the students, presumably to avoid the apperance that well funded departments pay better than the pure and social sciences, and the humanities. (Part of the "Contract with America" when the Republicans swept congress was the elimination of government funding for the humanities(NEH), so those departments are funded (badly) out of that 60%+ overhead..The arts funding (NEA) still exists in limited form, but generally this is less relevant as there are large private donors to fund these, and they do not grant many Ph.D's)
As for IP, patents usually belong to the university, but you have the copyright. Some universities take all the money from patents, but most have some give the inventor 50%+ of the royalties. Unfortunately since they own the patent you can't release your code without their permission. Your copyright gives you some leverage, as the patent is less valuable to them without it, but I've yet to ever hear back from legal when I wanted to release anything patented I wrote without a direct cash payment to the university.. A couple of the very best Uni's give you patent rights.. I don't think there is any move toward this. Though I think I might have patented some things if I had been given control of the patent with royalty obligations to the university. As the system is currently you'd be a fool to do it, you won't ever be able to use your own code legally again except at their approval. Well unless you move to some country where the patent doesn't apply.
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Anyone know if KDE/Gnome or even Xfree is planning something like this? I heard talk about multiple X servers, but its not out of the box simple use, of even possible.
/usr/X11R6/bin/X vt8" after the line ":0 local@tty1 /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7", but I don'y use kdm, so your milage may vary. (xdm is more complicated, so google if ya use that). As suggested by the kdm config to start a new X server on another virtual terminal just specify the vt you want to use. I think this has been around since shortly after XFree86 was first ported to Linux, maybe earlier on the BSD's. Recently it's been possible to program virtual terminal switching to keys other than the basic F1-F12, so easy switching isn't limited to just 12 users anymore. I never understood why multiple X servers haven't been used in the Linux distro's, at least on a "allocate one X terminal per 256 MB of RAM the computer has" basis. My desktop has had a gigabyte or more of RAM for years, I'm not really concerned about a few extra buffers eating up a tiny bit of memory. Even my laptops with 256MB-512MB in the last 5 years can handle an additional X server without batting an eye.
If you use gdm to login, add the line "1=Standard" after "0=Standard" in your gdm.conf. If you use kdm I think you just add the line ":1 local@tty1
You can also give the different servers different configurations, which is the traditional use for this. But by default the X server started by kdm/gdm requires a login and uses the same config, so it is exactly what you want. BTW if you want to be able to login with the same user twice you will have to enable that, by default it is not permitted to prevent remote users from starting lots of X servers and consuming all your resources... (though this is also limited by the number of virtual terminals you allow.)
Not, they don't. There's a small fraction of the kurds making a hell of a racket about this, but the fact is that most (we're talking 4/5s here) of turkish kurds just want to live in peace and is pissed off at the noisy kurds for destrouing their chance.
Look I've never met a Kurd, I've only met three non-Kurd Turks and they all had hated Kurds more than the average KKK grand dragon hates blacks. One put me in quite a shock because I had been friends with her for years and never heard her say anything that even hinted at bigotry before. I'll concede my sampling wasn't anything near scientific, but it's not like I read some article by a Kurd about their misstreatment. I didn't even know there was any conflict between the groups until I got to know some Turks.
I hope things have changed as much as you and the other poster on this topic believe, I think Europe will benefit greatly from integrating the young entreprising population of Turkey into it's system.
My Persian roommate just exploded at you calling Iran a democracy. Very very sad that you think such a thing. Vetted candidates, jailed dissenters, and a clerical stranglehold that just seems to get stronger as they ger more challenged is not a democracy.
I'm very glad he exploded. I get the same feeling when America is called a democracy. Undoubtedly true in a sense, but it's not like a simple majority can do anything, and I can't say I enjoy voting for the candidates vetted by the Republicrats. The plutocrat's stranglehold just seems to get stronger as they get more challanged. But if we had more Americans like your roommate we would have some hope.
When I grew up we all thought the world would be devastated by an all out nuclear war, my guess at your age suggests the Russian tank commanders finally refused to fire at the democratic protesters before you were concerned with politics. We do ultimately have control over our governments, people hold those guns and eventually always have the courage to disobey their orders. Iran already has a just constitution in place, but their "Guardians" are much like the Supreme Court that decided Plesy vs. Fergison. While they are undoubtedly an inherently conservative group they are less so than our court because they serve for six years and not for life. It won't take 62 years like Judge Harlan's courageous single man minority opinion that "In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law." The current backlash against liberalism in Iran is generational, and that of the outgoing generation.
Hmm, Israel must be an awful big democracy to warrant a double mention. Either that, or someone is going around and renaming countries to conflict with existing countries...
Heh, well I meant to write "Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Iran." After previewing, I went back to reverse the order of the last to from "Iran and Israel" to "Israel and Iran" to make the structure of the post better, but I screewed up. But it's not entirely off base as is. The occupied territories did hold an election as part of the Oslo accords. Not that one election gives you a democracy.
If you read on I qualified the democraticies of all those countries I meant to name. These four do have constitutions and regular elections where there is no heriditary ruler with a veto like in the other countries "on the road to democracy" like Qatar, Jordan and the UAE. Of those, only Qatar seems to have at least paved the road. The other countries in the region have complete sham parliments, they have no power and are only there to satisfy American and European businesses who want to say their presence helps the people in region. These sham parliments have no significance to their citizens except for breading contempt of western governments and encouraging the belief that we (the citizens of the west) are all dumb fucks.
Lebanon is the country Muslims and Christians flee to when things get really rotten at home and obviously most Jews fled to Israel in 1968 after the six day war. (The seven day war in '48 didn't affect Jews living in other middle eastern countries as much, though many did go anyway for the same hopeful reasons some Americans went. Though I think the tolerance for Jews was much higher in Arabia than America at the time, this has obviously completely reversed since then.) I have no idea if Zoroastrian's fled to anywhere, but I have met one Zoroastrian who left Saudi and Bahai that fled Iraq to the west so maybe other minorities did the same. Or maybe India? There are very old Zoroastrian and Jewish sects there, though the race thing might be a problem (Iranians are white and blue eyed and Semites, well neither looks very Asian.)
I understand it there's a really big stumbling block called the "right of return".
Yes, but Arifat has stated he'd go along with the UN resolution, which calls for return OR compensation. It's pretty obvious Israel will not accept a unencumbered right of return so this really means a negotiated compensation regime with courts deciding if someone really did live in the house or on the land they claim. This might be resolved with immigration quotas and the option for palestinians to accept cash compensation in leu of their personal right of return (which in reality would mean being placed on a long waiting list.) I generally don't believe in immigration quotas, but in this case I feel like a liberterian that loves public libraries...
Additionally, you've got a minority of Israelis.. & a large number of (but it's not exactly clear how many) Palestinians who want to wipe Israel off the map.
There are very ideological factions on both sides. They are a tiny fraction of the population though, for historic reasons they have a significant influence in politics. Most of the settlers are recent immigrants who are there for economic reasons not idealogical ones. You will hear many palestinians talk of an eventual re-unification of Israel and Palestine, but if you follow up on it they see it as a peaceful unification of common interests. If you read the writings of many early Zionists you will see the same hope expressed, but years of lukewarm war have made it seem implausable. Much of that isn't from fear of their muslim and christian neighbors in the former Palestine, but fear of the neighboring countries. The Israeli extreemists see this as proof of their real desire to wipe Israel of the map, but I think no level headed person would see this hope this way, though some might say it is so for cynical reasons. Personally, I don't think this unification will ever happen, except maybe in the form a of a free trade agreement, and then probably only after a significant portion of the middle east is democratic. I don't think it will ever go further because we won't see democracy in the region until the oil is all gone, and by then it might be a hundred years since 1948, the generation that grew up as next door neighbors will be long dead.
I'm also not making the arguement that the extreemists won't make this very difficult, Yitzhak Rabin was killed by a right winger, Yigal Amir, who wasn't even a settler. It's been reported by Israeli's and some American's that Arifat kept repeating "they will kill me"(meaning muslim terrorists) when the Oslo process was falling apart. But I've talked to dozens of Israelis and Palestinians and never one that held those extreemists views you see on television. My book buyer is a guy who grew up in an extreemist settlement and he once introduced me to someone who lost his friend to the Israeli armi in a peaceful protest. One of my coworkers once talked about his service in the Israeli army and told me there is much more resentment for the settlers than the palestinians in the ranks of the army. He personally seemed to hold resentment for all Orthodox Israeli's. Their idealoges benefit most from the occupation, but the Orthodox don't have to serve in the army like all other jews (Israeli muslims and christians are not subject to the draft during "peacetime").
They have to do it themselves. We have to sit by and watch, there is nothing we should do other than that. The intense hatred of anything US backed would simply do what it has always done in that region... make the people we back look like flunkies for the infidels.
There is plenty reason to be hopeful too. There are only four democracies in the region Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Israel. They are all flawed, Turkey has a huge military industrial complex corrupting their politics and think of they Kurdish minority as subhuman. Lebanon is democrartic but most parts of the country are still occupied by Syria, a monarchy -- purportedly to protect them from another invasion by Israel which no one really thinks will attack again. Israel which refuse to give most of their Palestinian population the vote. And, Iran which has popular elections, but gives religious leaders a veto. Plus the religious leaders run most charities and schools, and have their own militia.
They all have some hope, the Turkish parliament recently rejected the military's approval of US transit rights. They needed 90% approval of their action from the populace, but it should build their backbone. Unfortunately I don't see the Kurdish situation improving. They really need to be given their own country, I've known Turks that were perfectly reasonable and intelligent human beings that seemed possessed with evil when the topic of Kurds came up. I don't think the desire to join the EU will overcome this hatred.
Lebanon's benefactor Syria got a moderate dictator by peaceful succession a few years ago that will probably leave Lebanon as soon as they get a peace treaty with Israel. Even without a peace treaty this may happen as the main opposition party in Lebanon wants to disinvite Syria and the current dictator there would likely accept that, if only grudginly.
Both sides in Israel's civil war want peace and accept each others terms pretty much except for some details like compensation for siezed property and water allocation. There are plenty of foreign donors willing to pay for all but symbolic portions of the bill. What really holds them back is that 70-90% on each side completely distrusts the other side. They have perfectly valid reasons seen close to the ground, but from any other vantage point these two semitic tribes have more common interests than anyone else in the middle east, and as soon as the old warriors like Sharon die (from natural causes) the very young population on both sides of the conflict will have every reason to make up.
Finally, Iran probably has the best hope of all. If you read their constitution you see it's pretty decent, it even guarantees representation for tiny minorities, Zoroastrians and Jews each get a seat each in parliment and three seats go to Christians, the biggest problem is the guardian council which can reject any law with a simple majority. But, half guardian council which interprets the constitutionality of laws, who usually reject laws from the currently liberal parliment, is appointed by the judiciary. They serve 6 year terms instead of the four that the parliment's members serve, and while right now it's packed with very conservative clerics that keep rejecting reformist laws, this will change because the generation that has just started voting was born after the revolution and have only known the excesses of the Iranian government and don't accept it just because it's better than the dictator that ruled thirty years ago. Really, the only thing that could screew things up is if we start mucking with their internal politics and the liberals get associated with the foreign interlopers. All that's needed is few years to rotate out older appointments and everything changes for the better. Even "The Leader" is elected from candidates selected by experts appointed by the guardians, but if the majority grows just a little bigger for reform the leader doesn't need to change because he won't dare do anything to get in the way of reform for fear of complete overthrow, sorta lik
So how do they do this? I've always been under the impression that with digital cable and cable internet, all of the data has to be sent to everyone (in the same neighborhood anyway), so how can they handle the hundereds of channels (some of which are actually lower quality than others), the multiple VOD streams (even for the same movie), and eveyone's porn and mp3 activities all at the same time?
This one is simple they ran fiber to the curb a few years ago. They even ran new coax to our apartments to handle more bandwidth. There is effectively infinite bandwidth running into your apartment.
A large electric shock across my hand (ie both contacts on my hand) may cause temporary numbness and some pain, but quite probably no lasting damage.
I've had one of these, both contacts on fingers on one hand. While there was no lasting damage, I wouldn't catagorize the pain as "some pain." More like incredible pain in my whole arm lasting for hours followed by a day of numbness.
I've also caught one of those ring tones through my body. Sharp pain, but it only while the current was flowing. It was a very different type of pain, the large current through my hand didn't hurt while I was being electrocuted, but hurt a lot afterward, the ringtone "shocked" me but didn't hurt afterward at all.
If it's the word of a cynical Slashdot regular against one of the most experienced intelligence agencies in the world, I'll take the latter, thanks.
So the KBG has never done anything dishonorable? They don't have a cynical view of people do they?
Send an email and it becomes a fax.
;)
Its when this is possible on a non-windows platform that people will look.
Hehe, I was doing that when MS Windows was still at like version 3.0, I don't even think they had a TCP/IP stack for another five years. As far as I'm concerned that's always been possible in Unix (Linux didn't exist yet). Worship thy google.
It turned out that he got all his info from public domain sources.
I saw Tom Clancy's interview on C-SPAN, he said he gets most of his info from the local library. He's been offered consulting jobs by the whitehouse but refuses them because if he had a secret clearance he could no longer divulge info in the public domain since it's all classified.
I had a prof. that once got in hot water because he didn't return a book to the safe at the end of the day, but left it on his desk. He said all it contained was stuff he learned in his freshman year in engineering. (Pressure tables and the like.)
Personally, I think everything should be declassified by default after 5-10 years unless a civil servant expert reads it and renews the classification. It really hinders historical research and political analysis if you don't know who knew what when, it's not like you can keep physics secret. The assasination, overthrow crap isn't really a secret once you've done it. I for one would like to know what the thought process was when we installed Pinochet or why Bush Sr. gave all those weapons to the terrorists in direct contradiction of the law. Was there something we didn't know, was it for personal financial gain, or was it political maneuvering? You could release the info but give retired assasins code names, or just blank them out if they are still in the field. Code names are better because you could see if someone had a personal agenda.
The things aren't transmitters ..... they are just receivers that can draw more or less power from the transmitter. Spoofing would be dead easy.
No.... the RFID draws power from the powered transmitter and transmits a number on another frequency, which can be a licensed frequency. Just like cell phone networks use licensed frequencies, the manufacturer just had to buy a tiny bit of spectrum.
How hard would it be to build a RFID spoofing tool that emits gazillions of random RFID numbers whenever it is polled?
Not very, but it's highly illegal. FCC hunts down tiny 100 watt FM transmitters in the wild, imagine their reaction to unlicensed microwave transmitters. How many of those cell phone jammers in the US?
Creating a derivative work for commercial use is clearly copyright violation.
Nope, not if it's parody, or substancially transformative, or fits any legion of other exceptions. Fair use is fair use, except the more money you make the less you can take advantage of it. I can Xerox say a third of the little prince and hand it out in class, no problem. But someone writing a history book can copy maybe three or four pages of the little prince verbatim under fair use.
If you are a television network and your program has no redeeming social value, say you are CBS or ABC, then the rules are much tougher, you could read maybe a page of the little prince without troubles.
And then there is music. Just don't touch that dung heap at any cost. The courts seem to have held that music has no value to society and should be treated with less respect legally than hardcode child pornography viewings at the local crackhouse, a purely profit driven venture.
Since the only way to circumvent a PC BIOS, OpenFirmware, or OpenProm password is to open the case, a security-conscious person would inspect the lock to ensure it hasn't been tampered with. If it hasn't, then it is extremely unlikely an attacker could have, for instance, booted their own OS and installed a trojan horse to the computer's disk which intercepts passwords and passphrases.
An $8 hardware keyboard logger can get someone a long ways unless you take more than a cursory look at your hardware. Not that you shouldn't do all those very common sense things you suggested. When I was a kid I had a bad habit of breaking into machines that looked "secured." The tougher ones took all the measures you suggested and then encased the machine in metal or plexiglass. Those machines took up to an hour to break into. Unfortunately, when it comes to these things the kid will break into more of those machines than the totally unsecured ones because your machines present some challenge. The easy machines will be accessed only for convenience.
Lock the door to your office, and worry about someone running NFS or a Windows machine on your network.
Maybe you could, like, lock the door to the room with the Mac in it...
Well that is sort of the point, the screensaver feature won't bite you in the ass if you lock the door, same as all the other much easier ways for someone to gain access to a machine when she has physical access.
Personal computers and workstations make no attempt to be secure against physical access. I just changed two Mac OS X root passwords so I could create an account for myself on some pc's last week. I'm not a regular mac user, I just did a google search and found three or four ways to do it, the easiest was to just boot into single user mode, turn on the standard password authentication mechanism, and then type passwd... I've never met a Sun workstation that didn't give you fully fledged debug console at Meta-A.. Lilo lets you enter single user mode with just a kernel parameter to linux... You can overwrite the password files in Windows, etc.
You could encrypt the root filesystem, then on boot authenticate the machine (to make sure someone didn't just clone the startup to harvest your decryption key) and then enter the decryption key based on a one time response from the computer. That level of paranoia would justify caring about this "exploit." Even so someone could just install a sniffer inside the computer since our hardware is not hardened in the least.
I saw the prototype at Sony's keynote at GDC last year. It looked like a lot of fun. They composited the player into an interactive world and you could control it with a "magic wand" (orange nerf ball on a stick.) and it would show all kinds of special effects eminating from your wand. It was basically a game of make believe that the kid can play without the adult around. Or, a party game for the lightly stoned. Or, an amazing virtual reality existence for acid heads.
I think it's smart of them to release this now considering that many of the playstation players are at that age where they start making poop-machines.
In any event, I far prefer the idea of a small number of trained armed policemen to the idea of every man/woman in a police uniform having a gun at his/her hip....
So would I. I was at that big anti-war protest in New York earlier last March, at one point I was in a crowd a couple miles from the protest where there were about 25,000 people severely crowded around four cops with guns and big 10 gallon cans of pepperspray. They were literally shaking in their boots, if one of them had panicked and used some of the pepperspray someone could have been shot when the cop was jumped. Or someone nuts in the crowd could have easily pickpocketed a gun and shot it. There were a lot of families with their children, some would have probably been trampled. Later as me and my friends finally extricated ourselves from the crowd a half dozen cops on horses came into the crowd and trampled some protestors, presumably coming to pick up the cops. I saw one horse trip on of the people it trampled and fall on the rider. If those cops in the crowd hadn't been carrying all that weaponry I'm sure they could have just walked out of there.
The whole protest was a mess, apparently they only expected 100,000 people and over 500,000 tried to get to the protest. There is an investigation apparently, but aside from the poor planning just the fact that they ruitinely carry guns causes problems. (That mini-crowd was caused by barriers on three sides that one of the feeder marcheres walked into, apparently it was supposed to just stage entry into the march, but they never let anyone past them because they were already full to capacity by straglers before the 40 organized marches to the protest even started, add to that that some vandal cut the phone cables to the protester's organizing office..big mess, the cops knew nothing, the organizers knew nothing, I think the fact that it was a peace march saved us from rioting, small kids were held above the crowd and people who really needed to get out were passed overhead if the people in the way couldn't move out of the way.)
It was my first protest so I had to confirm with the former office mate I went with that this wasn't normal. It took us 6 hours of walking to get to the protest, it was actually officially over by the time we got there. We were tired, cold, hungry and in need of a bathroom and left after we spied one of the screens showing the stage and taking a picture..actually one of the four of us gave up and went home three hours earlier, it was her first protest too and she just couldn't take it.
Actually, USPS refuses to drive up my driveway to deliver a package, then leaves a postcard in my mail box telling me they attempted delivery.
Heh, my mail carrier doesn't even bother to buzz my doorbell, about two feet away from the box. Yet he still says he takes the package with him. What is the point in that? What really annoys me is that my post office arranges their packages by day of arrival instead of address so there is always a huge line, then you get up there and they can't find the package.. this is especially true if it is something small like certified letter. I have a sneaking suspicion they don't separate these and just pile hundreds of packages on top of letters.
The upshot is I meet a lot of my neighbors, for better or worse, and we trade snail-mail horror stories. Two women told me about a sting operation her family ran that had one person standing by the mailbox, one at the post office, another chasing the delivery van.. and finally a last person conveying messages between them. They managed to get the package in just one day of work. It really was on the van despite stringent denials by the mail carrier, but the post office kept saying things like "oh, the package just went out to the van," "oh, I just left it back at the post office," "we just sent someone out to deliver it, you better hurry home so you don't miss the delivery!" This didn't happen to me, but with my experiences I do believe it. When I get a package notice at home half the time I just ask who ever made the mistake sending it there to send it to my work or to my local package service, when it eventualy gets returned.
As I see it, the GPL allows me to "publish" my code, yet anyone who wants to make money with it by basing proprietary software on it will have to come to me (more like my university) for a license to do that.
That's pretty much how I see GPL too, but I don't release everything under it. Though I try to stick to open libraries so I can eventually.
The lab I work at now has made a little over 2 million on licensing on code I worked on with others as a definately less than the lab has seen in government grants in that time. Still it's not nothing and while I haven't seen any of that filthy lucre myself, it has made it easier for me to work on something more interesting without any objections for not having a grant for it yet. That is the lab pays me out of current funds in semi-reciprocation for the money delivered earlier and perhaps in some hope I strike gold, even if I suspect I might request a small royalty now.
Read my reply to someone else's comment of the same nature. I've signed over my copyright to ACM which I hesitated at despite their good reputation, although I don't recall Visual Computer asking me to sign over anything and I believe IEEE just asks you to give them non-exclusive irrevokable distribution rights. It's not the copyright on the papers I care about, I just want em cited properly and not published under someone else's name, it's the copyright on my code that I care about. I'd like to be able have some control over that. For a certain sum of money I would even license it under GPL, as long as I retained copyright and so the right to license it and it's derivative works under another license. At least with GPL, if someone decided to enter my market with my code I would have their improvements in addition to my own to market. The government would have to insist on paying graduate students at least double what they are paid now for even GPL to be acceptable to many prospective students. For public domain, unless you rewarded very well, you would only get communists and the independently wealthy to get Ph.D's in CS, considering how few of those there are in grad school for CS now I don't see that as a very promising future.
I would be extreemly rare for any researcher to make much money by retaining the copyright to federally funded research. Maybe if somebody wrote a "thesis of the year" but most academic research books make little money for their authors.
In computer science the code can bew very valuable. The papers are too, but here it is more important that your name be attached to it than any other aspect of copyright be ahered to. Often we sign our copyright away to a reputable member organization such as the ACM, while retaining distribution rights to our own papers. You gain from this from a legal standpoint in the common instance of multiple author papers.
I know the patent issue wasn't mentioned, but I still think I'd much rather give up the patents, which are mostly a hinderance, than give up the copyright which actually can be useful. I'd also be glad to give up the exclusive copying privledge of copyright after say five years, if I could retain the right to say "this paper must be copied in it's entirety if need to excerpt more than say 30% of the paper and the original paper must be referenced if you use more than 10% of it and it constitutes a significant part of your work." Academic principles would be stricter than this anyway, but this would allow me to go after true scalawags. Copyright lengths themselves are insane, I have no financial interest after 2-3 years in even the code, it's evolved greatly or I've dropped that pursuit by then, and I have no financial interest in papers what so ever. I can't for the life of me see why I need copyright protection in the grave either, for me a term of five years whether I'm dead or alive is more than enough for publishers to feel comfortable making a book, and a right to have my name attached to significant derivative works would be nice (though it won't motivate or dismotivate me any either way, plagarism is usually caught in the peer review process.) Honestly three years of copyright would be plenty good motivation in our field, but as an author I prefer more, but I also see great harm in making it more than five years. On the other hand I think five years for fiction books would be the minimum and ten years a good compromise in length. I don't see much harm in even a twenty year copyright in the developed world, but there is with anything more than ten in the developing world.
I don't think copyright is the right tool for music or software binaries. Here a compulsary licensing scheme would work much better than leaving the copying policies in the hands of the "creators." In music there are so few tunes you can actually make in the 12 note system that the copyright act more like patents. Software binaries are not written to be understood so don't really qualify as creative works, but the still require protection so that their software development can be compensated. I'm not sure what the right thing is, but the courts should not have made law and turned them into creative works. I'm sure the legislative system, as broken as it is, would have come up with something better.
I actually have two original IBM PS/2 keyboards, bought from used computer stores nearby... but the noise annoyed the hell out of my wife and I recently switched to a Memorex multimedia keyboard. It's really not all that bad, and every once in a great while I even remember to use some of the extra keys on it.
Man I threw out my IBM PS/2 four years ago cuz the girlfriend couldn't sleep and I was moving so I felt carrying one more 10 lb computer component was a bit too much (I threw away other computer things like all those ISA bus components in the junk drawer, except for the Soundblaster..) Now the girlfriend is gone, something about needing to sow her oats and not being ready for marrage in addition with a high disregard for the idea of someday living in Silicon Valley, where she now lives. I really miss the keyboard. I bought one of those "Hacker" keyboards. I like the form factor but it's too light and the feel is all wrong.
Of coures maybe things are different in America? Are grad students in funded exclusivly by the government as they are here?
Grad students aren't funded directly. Professors apply for grants in various fields and then pay the university to employ the student at a fixed rate. But the university doesn't care where the money comes from, the university might take a 60% cut for overhead and a cut on any purchases over $300. Where I was the professor also paid a health insurance co-pay for students even though students weren't given health insurance. Professors also get money from industry, Microsoft, IBM, Unilever... but except for Microsoft these are on an entirely different league, a lab might get a few million from the government and a 100k from the other sources. Microsoft gave us money for some patent rights to stuff developed with government money, but the much smaller grants from others were completely unrestricted. They just wanted to visit and have an inside track on hiring graduate students for summer internships. Government money, especially military money, has very few restrictions and is often more than you can spend. The universities don't allow spending this on the students, presumably to avoid the apperance that well funded departments pay better than the pure and social sciences, and the humanities. (Part of the "Contract with America" when the Republicans swept congress was the elimination of government funding for the humanities(NEH), so those departments are funded (badly) out of that 60%+ overhead..The arts funding (NEA) still exists in limited form, but generally this is less relevant as there are large private donors to fund these, and they do not grant many Ph.D's)
As for IP, patents usually belong to the university, but you have the copyright. Some universities take all the money from patents, but most have some give the inventor 50%+ of the royalties. Unfortunately since they own the patent you can't release your code without their permission. Your copyright gives you some leverage, as the patent is less valuable to them without it, but I've yet to ever hear back from legal when I wanted to release anything patented I wrote without a direct cash payment to the university.. A couple of the very best Uni's give you patent rights.. I don't think there is any move toward this. Though I think I might have patented some things if I had been given control of the patent with royalty obligations to the university. As the system is currently you'd be a fool to do it, you won't ever be able to use your own code legally again except at their approval. Well unless you move to some country where the patent doesn't apply.