There is a lot of great advice listed above. Sometimes, the hard part of having so much great advice is not knowing how to carry out the recommendations. The really important thing is to Take the Initiative.
Don't wait for people to introduce themselves to you, go up to them.
Don't wonder where people are planning to go this evening and how you can be a part of it: make the suggestion that people come with you to a restaurant for pizza or beer.
Don't worry about what to do on a weekend or weekday night. Make your own plans and invite people along to see a movie.
Try new things and be adventurous: try new types of restaurants with groups, go see movies that are foreign with other people who might be interested. Some of the best memories I have from college are of walking across the Longfellow Bridge to go to the European for pizza with ten freshman and a random smattering of upperclassmen or road trips to Louis' Lunch for hamburgers or Hilltop Steak House.
Don't be afraid of trying a new language for the first time; you don't need to have studied French for years in high school to take French in college. They have intro courses. Take anthropology, psychology, sociology, art history; don't just take the requisites.
If you have the opportunity to take classes at other schools, do it! If you're at a tech school, there may be a local liberal arts college that you can cross-register at for a class or two with no extra fees. If you're at a liberal arts college, try to take a tech course.
Do sports and physical activities: join an intramural sports team, try ice-hockey, go watch the volleyball team, and even if you don't qualify for a varsity team hang out with people and play basketball or racquetball. Learn to Sail! This is probably offered and often does not entail any extra fees.
There will be all sorts of free or close to free events going on at your campus and nearby colleges. Attend symphony performances; go watch a dance troupe; pay a few bucks and watch the plays that are performed on campus or at local playhouses; go attend lectures or seminars that may be aimed at grad students in things that interest you or that might interest you. Encourage someone to come to these things with you. Even if no one you know wants to go, go on your own. You'll meet people at these events who have interests that overlap yours, but will also differ from yours. Then you can extend yourself.
There will be a lot of people with a lot of ulterior motives trying to grab a piece of your mindshare. The beginning of college can be a vulnerable time for people: a lot of religious proselytization goes on (and atheistic and humanistic and libertarian and republican and democratic and socialist, etc.), there are many easy avenues for acquiring alcohol and drugs and STDs. Don't be too easily convinced of anything. But DO NOT blindly disagree with everyone who is not just like you! You may not want to be converted, but college is a great time to debate religious and political philosophies with others. Assert your own ideas, but be willing to realize that your view may not be the only view that has to exist.
The benefit of being in a university or college is that, yes, everyone around you is like you in trying to educate themselves, but everyone around you has a lot of great differences that can be of benefit to you. Hang around with the exchange students; hang out with people whose politics and viewpoints are not the same as yours. There's nothing like realizing that people in your dorm are from different countries, too, not just from different states. Take the initiative to meet people, talk to them, argue with them, learn from them, and stay connected with them.
Volunteer if you can, and not just for APO or other services frats or organizations. You're not doing this so that you can put it on your resume. That may have been the thing to do in high school: padding your bio to get you to the next step. Volunteer so you can be a part of the world and see that there is more to the world than just the ivory towers you'll be ensconsed in. Helping out at a pet shelter or a hospital or a crisis center or suicide hotline will let you in on the many options that there are in life.
You get to make your own way and define your own path. It's good to join groups, but don't let yourself be defined just by what others suggest you should do. Take advice with a grain of salt: listen to what your parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and advisors have to say. But even the faculty advisor that may be assigned to you may not know enough about you to give you the right advice about everything. Trust yourself to make decisions about what classes to take and what major you'll be and what nonacademic things to do.
My AD 1100-W does not say VCD on the front, it just has logos for Photo-CD, JPEG, Dolby, and DVD. So I guess I must have gotten one of the new ones. That's a shame. I may have to return it, because the key reason I got it was to give it to my parents so I could send them CDs with photos of the kids and so that my sister could send CDs with videos on them of her kids. Why should Sony care?
Are they worried that the presence of a large base of VCD compatible players may crimp the size of their market for recordable DVD or mini-disks?
I just bought an AD 1100-W this week.
However, I can't get it to read or display any VCDs or CD-i disks. Do I need to flash it and update it to get it to work with CD-i and VCD and SVCD formats?
The manual that comes with it claims Photo-CD, DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3, and JPEG compatibility. I've gotten it to do all of that except Kodak Photo-CD because I don't have one. But the manual makes no claim about VCD or CD-i. ???
I just bought an AD 1100-W this week.
However, I can't get it to read or display any VCDs or CD-i disks. Do I need to flash it and update it to get it to work with CD-i and VCD and SVCD formats?
The manual that comes with it claims Photo-CD, DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3, and JPEG compatibility. I've gotten it to do all of that except Kodak Photo-CD because I don't have one. But the manual makes no claim about VCD or CD-i. ???
This may seem out of style, but why waste energy converting text to MP3 speech if you can have a system that will read it. I honestly used to have the text news read to me by my PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet) from a simpletext file. I'd download a mass of text files in the a.m., saved as plain text, trimmed of everything above the lede and after the copyright, and la voila , plain text ready to be read by my powerbook.
That is what Apple ought to add to the next redo of the iPod: a text to speech reader to read your ebooks or news or email for you. And just consider that instead of wasting 1 MB per minute of MP3 audio news reading, you could have less than 32k of plain text for 5 to 10 minutes of news reading. That would be a kicker.
I first did the Powerbook "read me my news" trick in January of 1999, when it was only a month old for me. I learned quickly to put all of the stories I wanted in either one big text file or in multiple cascaded text files so that I wouldn't have to use the touchpad. Just hitting the Apple-A to select all the text and Apple-H to have it "speak the selection".
Hmmm... I remember logging in via ssh from a powerbook G3 onto university with a Ricochet Modem while riding as a passenger in a friend's car. I didn't have a second friend Ricocheting simultaneously, otherwise I could have done something similar. Supposedly, it's still possible to connect from one Ricochet Modem to another directly, and it could be done car-to-car without needing the Ricochet network. Aah, memories...
Could the real reason be that booting up in OS X necessitates password entry and systel level protection of files under BSD whereas booting up in System 9 allows any user to trash ANY part of the hard drive without any permissions checking at all?
Currently, dual boot OS X and 9 systems can be trashed by booting up in 9. Single boot OS X systems can be "rooted" instead by booting up with a CD that boots up on System 9 with the right key sequence at powerup. I don't deny that not having to support older software on newer hardware may play a role, but the security issue may also be a big part for Admins who want to lock down publicly accesible systems.
I still remember using TBUG to write assembly programs for a TRS-80 and having to reboot and reload TBUG from a cassette tape when the program would hang. Anyone remember the animated bunny rabbits?
My school also had an obscure HP minicomputer that had an eight or nine inch black and white CRT and a cassette tape interface.
Those definitely were not the days!
I also remember doing some punchcard jobs at the local university during some summer classes and flirting with the undergrad who was accepting the cards for the batch jobs.
Not only does this happen all the time, but after a short while these myths take on a life stronger than the truth. A very old canard is that people only use about 10% of their brainpower. The root source of this disappears in the 1920's-1930's, but as far as I've been able to find, there is NO BASIS in fact for such a statement. It appears to rest on the fact that there are non-neuronal elements in the brain: glia and cellular matrix and vascular elements. Well, of course! It's like saying that we only use 10% of a building because look at all of the volume unoccupied by humans. The support structure is a necessary part of the whole. Or it's like saying that matter is effectively not there because the particles that make up atoms do not occupy more than 0.01% of the volume that an atom occupies. Lies, lies, and distorted and un-reviewed statistics!
PARC prior art Re:"Microsoft... responsible" NOT!
on
Tech-Interview Riddles
·
· Score: 1
I don't think so.
These type of "brain teasers" were just as common in 1985 during the interviews for internships at XEROX PARC when I was at MIT as a 6.1/6.3 Junior. IBMs interviewers also asked a brain teaser but HP did not, if I remember correctly.
Any other prior art that others can remember from the ancient days???
--- why has Karma become Qualitative instead of Quantitative?
The more likely use for databases like this is the same use as ICD-9 or DSM coding. These are standard "diagnostic terms" and "utilization terms" that are required to code office visits so that physicians are paid by insurers, HMOs (which really are insurers), and Medicare. If the payers can find a way to say that they have a simple way to diagnose things, then they would want all of their payees to use them. Then the nurse practitions or reviewers that decide whether or not the doctor would get paid (or just as likely whether or not the patient would be reimbursed for paying the doctor) could just rely on a simple flowchart like program or expert system front end to a large database. While this may cover a large portion of diagnoses, it certainly will not work for the obscure diseases or newly emerging syndromes. A neural net or fuzzy logic system that is designed to find the best match WILL find a match. It just may not be anywhere near the correct match at all.
And while the initial protestations may be that this is supposed to be ancillary and optional, it will probably be like the ICD-9 or DSM coding. They were meant to be a way to relate transactions in order to get paid, but they have turned into de facto diagnostic criteria.
Some of the "research" is that writer's belief that the amount of detail in Vermeer's painting is too accurate in rendering the actual shapes of objects. He just doesn't believe that it is possible for an artist to create free-hand images that can be correct. A lot of artists disagree with this conclusion.
Good luck trying to get appropriate control experiments past the IRBs (institute review boards) and Commitees on Human experimentation. The most appropriate control experiments may be a bit dangerous and have greater risk than benefits.
As for control experiments, Neurosurgeons got a lot of people up in arms for doing sham surgery as control experiments in fetal cell transplantation for alleviating Parkinson's Disease. The initial reason for doing the control experiments was the same as this: Is the mucking around in the retina itself, rather than the presence of the implant, responsible for the rescue response? The only way to tell would be to muck around and pretend to implant something but not leave anything in there. This can lead to severe complications. Even just doing a sham burr hole for the Neurosurgical controls, or even a partial burr hole which does not penetrate all of the skull, would create the risk of infection.
Post Retinal Bionics would be good for someone with a functional retina and perhaps a ganglionic or pigmented epithelium problem such as Retinitis Pigmentosa. They would not be much good for those with photoreceptor, horizontal, amacrine, bipolar, or ganglionic cell problems, eh? I agree that we are definitely a LONG way away from retinal implants being as functional and as routine as cochlear implants currently are. And the current cochlear implants are not so impressive considering what Mother Nature gives us.
The problem is simple: given a population of 20k microbiologists and 11 deaths over 5 months, you have an obvious yearly death rate of 12/5*11/20k which is 0.00132 per person. Death rates are usually given in terms of deaths per population of 100000 subjects by the CDC and medical types. The death rate for this pool is 0.132% per year or 132 deaths per year.
If you assumed a flat probability of death for each age for a large population, say only 1% per year for everybody from newborns to the elderly, you'd expect 1000 deaths per 100000 people. With an average life expectancy of 70 yrs (M) - 77 yrs (F) in health-economy-advantaged nations, you can expect a death rate of 1.4% as a decent guess. Higher death rates may apply. And if you realize that morbidity is higher for neonates and the elderly and lower for the teenaged to middle-aged, then the presence of a death rate of 132 per 100-thousand per year for 20-70-to-more years older is in fact NOTHING at all. It is not even a statistical anomaly. It is not anywhere close to being significant.
I haven't bothered looking at the data for actual death rates and your MMV (morbidity may vary). But it is always smart to read numerical data in reports carefully and skeptically. The math does not support any conspiracy in this case. Of course, it does not rule it out. But that's what conspiracy theories are all about.
Problems with this approach: speaking requires the use of four systems:
1 - the lips and face
2 - the tongue
3 - the larynx
4 - the diaphragm
This approach only has access to part 1 above and will not be able to capture the other elements of sound. Lip reading works only partially. Try watching TV muted without closed captioning to see how many things that sound different will look alike.
The diaphragm is controlled by the vagus nerve (Cranial Nerve X). The diaphragm starts the ball rolling and controls the expulsion of air from your lungs. Sighs and the amplitude of your voice are controlled by controlling the strength of the exhalation.
The larynx is controlled by the laryngeal branch of the cranial nerve X, the vagus. Controlled constriction of the larynx provides a vibrating memrane which controls the resonance and dominant frequency output of the voice. Intonation is controlled by changing the frequency. This can change across a sentence, or in Cantonese and many languages even across the length of a single word or syllable.
The tongue is controlled by the hypoglossal nerve (Cranial Nerve XII). The soft palate is controlled by the glossopharyngeal nerve. These two components along with the lips and the cheeks act to change the size and internal shape of the resonance cavity that is your mouth. This filters the sound produced by the lungs and the larynx. Placing your tongue in different places changes a lot of filter characteristics.
Your lips and cheeks are controlled by the facial nerve and by the upper cervical nerves. They help modulate the resonance cavity. The lips also provide an abrupt or gradual start and stop to sounds.
Saying the letter 'B' or 'P' requires that the lips close first, then the lungs start to exhale and pressure builds up in the mouth, then the lips are opened and the larynx resonates as air is quickly allowed to be expelled. You do all of this automatically all of the time. The only part that is visible externally are the lips and the slight facial nuances associated with this. The rest go out of the brainstem via the cranial nerves and are not accesible. (well, you could get to the laryngeal component of the vagus surgically, but that is invasive.)
This won't work easily and will not sound as fluid without all of the other characterstics of sound and voice production being taken into account.
Yes, there is a limit to how many re-edits an artiste ought to do of their work. But the limit is probably more in what the audience tolerates, not really in what they ought to do. Coding of software continues to fine tune the points. And we can't see the defects that Ridley Scott sees in his creation as major: it just doesn't create the story he wanted to tell. So why shouldn't he be allowed to do a re-write or re-edit and try it again? Even if it is just to get a bunch of fans and fanatics to buy yet another version.
Actually, the ITD (interaural time difference) and the IAD (interaural amplitude difference) are both involved in being able to judge the angle of origination of a sound source. The IAD is the old style of stereo effect: if it's louder on the right, the sound source is on the right, and vice versa. The interaural time difference is based on the fact that since the head is ~6 inches across and the ears are ~6-7 inches apart, with sound traveling close to ~1100 feet per second will arrive at most ~1/2000th of a second apart in the right vs. left ear. Under water, with a different speed of propagation for sound vibrations of close to ~5000 feet per second, this difference is divided by ~4.something, so the brain which is accustomed to deciding that something is on the right or the left based on the ITD and IAD does not get enough data to be able to tell the difference. All time delays are now within 1/4th to 1/5th of all of the time delays it is accustomed to hearing and thus thinks that every noise source is coming from a cone within less than 20-30 degrees directly in front of or behind you. Nothing sounds like it is on your right or your left. (note that this is in answer to the parent post, not just the current topic).
Actually, the press release directly addresses the issue of Digital Rights Management. To quote:
"It is possible for the Blu-ray Disc to record digital high definition broadcasting while maintaining high quality and other data simultaneously with video data if they are received together. In addition, the adoption of a unique ID written on a Blu-ray Disc realizes high quality copyright protection functions."
While most of the posts here have talked about color management and about the difficulty of creating perceptually equal color difference metrics, and while I do agree that this is a difficult topic with no definitive answer at present, no one has mentioned actual work on this topic. MacAdam explored this topic by having targets change "color" in different directions in CIE-1931-xyz coordinates and measuring the standard deviation when subjects were able to make a match in color appearance to the surround / background color. He measured this at 15-25 points in CIE-1931-xyz colorspace over a few papers that he published in the 1940's. The targets were 2 to 10 degrees in size and measured at a luminance of 48 lux. These color tolerances for color matching were called the MacAdam Ellipses and can be found at www-cvrl.ucsd.edu, a web site which is migrating to England soon. Newer studies work on the JND, the Just Noticeable Difference. Please note that if you look at a MacAdam ellipse diagram that the ellipses are drawn at approximately 10 (ten) times the size of the actual discrimination ellipses in CIE-1931-XYZ color space.
You can try to work these ellipses into your formulae, and people like Parra in France and Parry Moon in Camridge (MA) had tried to distort these color ellipses back into circles in trying to find a transform of these color spaces into a perceptually uniform color space. But the key thing is that the monitors will differ, the monitors' settings will differ, (the phosphors don't really differ that much between CRTs, but the primaries for CRTs are very different from that of LCDs and that of projectors using LCDs or DLP/DMDs), and most importantly the viewers' photopigments will also differ. Along with the well known ~10% of males that are dichromats, a large number of the population are anomalous trichromats. The actual numbers are still being tallied, and it is still in a very conjectural stage whether most people have multiple copies of the L-opsin gene or multiple copies of the M-opsin gene. The Nathans are on one side of this and the Neitzes are on the other side of this. Which is which, I keep forgetting.
But a quick summary is:
the majority of human subjects are most sensitive to changes in the red (+L-M) or green direction (-L+M), with changes of 0.3% being perceptible for targets of 2-10 degrees in size, mediumly sensitive to changes in intensity (+L+M[+ maybe S]) {there are HUGE arguments and PhD theses brewing over this} for brighter and -L-M[ - maybe S] for darker), and least sensitive to changes that affect the S-cones (+S, kind of a violet change, -S, kind of a greeny-chartreuse change). This, along with the MacAdam Discrimination Ellipse, are for a target color being compared to the immediately adjacent surround color. This does not hold true for nonadjacent and distant targets being compared or for targets subtending visual angles much larger than 5 degrees or much less than 1-2 degrees. There are some funky changes that occur when you get to targets of less than 1/2 degrees in size and when you start to talk about colors that you don't look at foveally or centrally.
That may answer your question. And it may even lead you towards a workable plan on equi-perceptual space. (work with CIE xyz and integrate MacAdams' discrimination data). But realize that MacAdams' work, like much of visual psychophysics is based on less than 5 (count 'em five) subjects. Most visual psychophysics papers today usually have the authors and their post-doc slaves as the only subjects. But actually coming up with that will take data collection on the scale of a PhD thesis, and working within the CIE color space, even from 1931, is probably close enough for most work, even if some of your side-by-side colors are twice as far in color space than they need to be at minimum.
While most of the posts here have talked about color management and about the difficulty of creating perceptually equal color difference metrics, and while I do agree that this is a difficult topic with no definitive answer at present, no one has mentioned actual work on this topic. MacAdam explored this topic by having targets change "color" in different directions in CIE-1931-xyz coordinates and measuring the standard deviation when subjects were able to make a match in color appearance to the surround / background color. He measured this at 15-25 points in CIE-1931-xyz colorspace over a few papers that he published in the 1940's. The targets were 2 to 10 degrees in size and measured at a luminance of 48 lux. These color tolerances for color matching were called the MacAdam Ellipses and can be found at www-cvrl.ucsd.edu, a web site which is migrating to England soon. Newer studies work on the JND, the Just Noticeable Difference. Please note that if you look at a MacAdam ellipse diagram that the ellipses are drawn at approximately 10 (ten) times the size of the actual discrimination ellipses in CIE-1931-XYZ color space.
You can try to work these ellipses into your formulae, and people like Parra in France and Parry Moon in Camridge (MA) had tried to distort these color ellipses back into circles in trying to find a
transform of these color spaces into a perceptually uniform color space. But the key thing is that the monitors will differ, the monitors' settings will differ, (the phosphors don't really differ that much between CRTs, but the primaries for CRTs are very different from that of LCDs and that of projectors using LCDs or DLP/DMDs), and most importantly the viewers' photopigments will also differ. Along with the well known ~10% of males that are dichromats, a large number of the population are anomalous trichromats. The actual numbers are still being tallied, and it is still in a very conjectural stage whether most people have multiple copies of the L-opsin gene or multiple copies of the M-opsin gene. The Nathans are on one side of this and the Neitzes are on the other side of this. Which is which, I keep forgetting.
But a quick summary is:
the majority of human subjects are most sensitive to changes in the red (+L-M) or green direction (-L+M), with changes of 0.3% being perceptible for targets of 2-10 degrees in size, mediumly sensitive to changes in intensity (+L+M[+ maybe S]) {there are HUGE arguments and PhD theses brewing over this} for brighter and -L-M[ - maybe S] for darker), and least sensitive to changes that affect the S-cones (+S, kind of a violet change, -S, kind of a greeny-chartreuse change). This, along with the MacAdam Discrimination Ellipse, are for a target color being compared to the immediately adjacent surround color. This does not hold true for nonadjacent and distant targets being compared or for targets subtending visual angles much larger than 5 degrees or much less than 1-2 degrees. There are some funky changes that occur when you get to targets of less than 1/2 degrees in size and when you start to talk about colors that you don't look at foveally or centrally.
That may answer your question. And it may even lead you towards a workable plan on equi-perceptual space. (work with CIE xyz and integrate MacAdams' discrimination data). But realize that MacAdams' work, like much of visual psychophysics is based on less than 5 (count 'em five) subjects. Most visual psychophysics papers today usually have the authors and their post-doc slaves as the only subjects. But actually coming up with that will take data collection on the scale of a PhD thesis, and working within the CIE color space, even from 1931, is probably close enough for most work, even if some of your side-by-side colors are twice as far in color space than they need to be at minimum.
Actually, there was a system in the 1980s that did implement a 10-dimensional binary hypercube topology for communication and implemented it well. Daniel Hillis' Thinking Machine was a highly parallel 1024 node machine which implemented inter-node communication via a 10-bit binary hypercube address system.
Despite what one of the other posters has said about "binary hypercubes" being nonsensical, they are simply a way of describing the nodes of a hypercube with a binary address. Each node in a 1024 node network has a ten bit address. Each one has to connect only to ten other nodes: the ten nodes which are specified by flipping only ONE bit on that nodes address. This provides multiple redundant paths by which a message can be routed in the case of the failure or congestion of a node.
And by intermittently polling the other nodes to which it connects, it can keep a routing table which optimizes the paths to be used. The major difference is that in Hillis' Thinking Machines the number of nodes was capped, in fact it was a fixed number of nodes. Now implementing a dynamic network in a hypercude or hypertoroid topology brings on a new set of problems such as dynamically re-allocating the hypercude node addresses as users fall off and climb back on to the network. This can be more of a bear than people realize.
I agree with you regarding wasting company or government resources, bandwidth, and money. Monitoring is appropriate if it is explained that it is going to occur. This has to be explicitly articulated. I believe that Kozinski's point was that it was not spelled out at all.
Note that in the article, Judge Kozinski is reported to state in a memorandum that he believes monitoring for content is a violation of anti-wiretap statute. This is independent of whether the judges themselves or the judiciary employees want to avoid monitoring for idealistic and legalistic reasons or simply as an end-run around being caught downloading MP3s, AVIs, inappropriate content for the workplace, or simply stealing the bandwidth provided to them as a matter of course for their use in their employment. Don't forget that the judges are employed by us (the taxpayers) via the government to administer and adjudicate the laws that are created by the legislative and executive branches that we choose to elect.
I didn't elect them to use workplace time and equipment for personal use. Now I agree with Kozinski that if this policy was not well-articulated, then it is wrong for monitoring to be allowed to occur. But I also feel that it is not appropriate to suck bandwidth or waste time on the company dime. Especially when that company dime came from my pocket via taxes.
I also feel that if the company or gov't office allows people to use telephones to make personal calls, they ought to allow some leeway in using internet bandwidth for personal use.
But since it would be inappropriate to use the office telephone system to call Mabel in Australia every day from the AOC office in the U.S.A., it would be just as inappropriate to waste huge amounts of bandwidth for MP3's (unless you are Judge Marilyn Patel, working on the Napster case), porn (unless you are working on a porn-related case), or even voice-over-IP phone calls (unless you are going to work on that case that ATT, MCI, et al, all WANT to file!).
Note that in the article, Judge Kozinski is reported to state in a memorandum that he believes monitoring for content is a violation of anti-wiretap statute. This is independent of whether the judges themselves or the judiciary employees want to avoid monitoring for idealistic and legalistic reasons or simply as an end-run around being caught downloading MP3s, AVIs, inappropriate content for the workplace, or simply stealing the bandwidth provided to them as a matter of course for their use in their employment. Don't forget that the judges are employed by us (the taxpayers) via the government to administer and adjudicate the laws that are created by the legislative and executive branches that we choose to elect.
I didn't elect them to use workplace time and equipment for personal use. Now I agree with Kozinski that if this policy was not well-articulated, then it is wrong for monitoring to be allowed to occur. But I also feel that it is not appropriate to suck bandwidth or waste time on the company dime. Especially when that company dime came from my pocket via taxes.
I also feel that if the company or gov't office allows people to use telephones to make personal calls, they ought to allow some leeway in using internet bandwidth for personal use.
But since it would be inappropriate to use the office telephone system to call Mabel in Australia every day from the AOC office in the U.S.A., it would be just as inappropriate to waste huge amounts of bandwidth for MP3's (unless you are Judge Marilyn Patel, working on the Napster case), porn (unless you are working on a porn-related case), or even voice-over-IP phone calls (unless you are going to work on that case that ATT, MCI, et al, all WANT to file!).
Note that in the article, Judge Kozinski is reported to state in a memorandum that he believes monitoring for content is a violation of anti-wiretap statute. This is independent of whether the judges themselves or the judiciary employees want to avoid monitoring for idealistic and legalistic reasons or simply as an end-run around being caught downloading MP3s, AVIs, inappropriate content for the workplace, or simply stealing the bandwidth provided to them as a matter of course for their use in their employment. Don't forget that the judges are employed by us (the taxpayers) via the government to administer and adjudicate the laws that are created by the legislative and executive branches that we choose to elect.
Kozinski's point is actually a very good thing. He asserts that regardless of why he or the judiciary may oppose this monitoring of employee web usage, he has a valid point because this sort of invasion of privacy is violating the anti-wiretap laws.
This may have an interesting effect on the case before FBI's keystroke-logging of Scarfo's computer to acquire his PGP key.
August 8, 2001
Rebels in Black Robes Recoil at Surveillance of Computers
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 -- A group of federal employees who believed that the monitoring of their office computers was a major violation of their privacy recently staged an insurrection, disabling the software used to check on them and suggesting that the monitoring was illegal and unethical.
This was not just a random bunch of bureaucrats but a group of federal judges who are still engaged in a dispute with the office in Washington that administers the judicial branch and that had installed the software to detect downloading of music, streaming video and pornography.
It is a conflict that reflects the anxiety of workers at all levels at a time when technology allows any employer to examine each keystroke made on an office computer. In this case, the concern over the loss of privacy comes from the very individuals, federal judges, who will shape the rules of the new information era.
The insurrection took root this spring in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco and the largest of the nation's 12 regional circuits, covering 9 Western states and two territories. The Judicial Conference of the United States, the ultimate governing body of the courts, is to meet on Sept. 11 to resolve the matter.
The conflict between the circuit judges and the Administrative Office of the Courts, a small bureaucracy in Washington, deteriorated to a point that a council of the circuit's appeals and district judges ordered their technology staff to disconnect the monitoring program on May 24 for a week until a temporary compromise was reached. Because the Ninth Circuit's was also linked to the Eighth and Tenth Circuits, the shutdown affected about a third of the country and about 10,000 court employees, including more than 700 active and semiretired judges.
Leonidas Ralph Mecham, who runs the Administrative Office of the Courts, and who ordered the monitoring of all federal court workers, said in a March 5 memorandum that the software was to enhance security and reduce computer use that was not related to judicial work and that was clogging the system. A survey by his office, he wrote, "has revealed that as much as 3 to 7 percent of the judiciary browser's traffic consists of streaming media such as radio and video broadcasts, which are unlikely to relate to official business."
Officials in the judicial branch on both sides of the issue provided several internal memorandums written as the dispute continued over the weeks.
After the shutdown, Mr. Mecham complained in a memorandum that disconnecting the software was irresponsible and might have resulted in security breaches, allowing unauthorized outsiders access to the judiciary's internal confidential computer network. "The weeklong shutdown put the entire judiciary's data communication network at risk," he wrote on June 15.
Mr. Mecham warned in that memorandum that on the days before the software was disabled, there were hundreds of attempts at intrusion into the judiciary's network from places like China and Iran.
But Chief Judge Mary Schroeder of the Ninth Circuit responded that the concerns were overblown and that the circuit's technical people carefully monitored computer activity during the week that the software was disabled.
In a June 29 memorandum, she said that there was no evidence that the electronic firewall used to block hacking had been breached and suggested that Mr. Mecham had exaggerated the potential of a security breach because having hundreds of attempted breaches per day was routine and routinely blocked.
The Ninth Circuit disconnected the software, she wrote, because the monitoring policy was not driven by concern over overloading the system but Mr. Mecham's concern over "content detection." Many employees had been disciplined, she noted, because the software turned up evidence of such things as viewing pornography, although they had not been given any clear notice of the court's computer use policy.
Moreover, she wrote, the judiciary may have violated the law.
"We are concerned about the propriety and even the legality of monitoring Internet usage," she wrote. Her memorandum said that the judiciary could be liable to lawsuits and damages because the software might have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which imposes civil and criminal liability on any person who intentionally intercepts "any wire, oral or electronic communication."
She noted that the Ninth Circuit had ruled just this year that the law was violated when an employer accessed an employee Web site. In fact, the issues of what is permissible by employers have produced a patchwork of legal rulings and the matter has never been addressed directly by the Supreme Court.
Judge Alex Kozinski, a member of the Ninth Circuit appeals court, drafted and distributed an 18-page legal memorandum arguing that the monitoring was a violation of anti- wiretap statute. [italics added]
Judge Kozinski, widely known for his libertarian views, said the court employees who were disciplined, an estimated three dozen, could be entitled to monetary damages if they brought a lawsuit.
A spokesman for Mr. Mecham said that the software could not identify specific employees but workstations. When unauthorized use was detected, Mr. Mecham's deputy, Clarence Lee Jr., wrote to the chief judge of the district, urging that the employee who used the workstation be identified and disciplined. One such letter includes an appendix listing the Web sites that employee had visited, some of them pornographic. There is no evidence that any alleged abuse of the system involved judges.
Judge Kozinski said: "Aside from my view that this may be a felony, it is something that we as federal judges have jurisdiction to consider. We have to pass on this very kind of conduct in the private sphere."
Prof. Jeffrey Rosen of the George Washington University Law School, author of a recent book on privacy, "The Unwanted Gaze" (Vintage 2001), said, "It's fascinating that the courts have to grapple with these issues so close to home." The law is evolving, he said, adding: "This drama with the judges reminds us of how thin the privacy protections are. There's a real choice right now whether e-mail and Web browsing should be regarded like the telephone or a postcard."
Judge Edwin L. Nelson, who is chairman of a judges' committee that deals with computer issues, said in an interview that his group met last week and drafted proposals to deal with monitoring. Judge Nelson would not discuss the proposals but they are almost certain to resemble policies used in the rest of the federal government, in which clear notice is given to computer users that they may be monitored.
Jim Flyzik, vice chairman of an interagency group that considers computer privacy issues in the federal government, said that each department had its own policy but that clear and unambiguous notification of monitoring was usually an element.
In the private sector, a survey by the American Management Association this year found that 63 percent of companies monitored employees' computer use.
END OF ARTICLE
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lot of great advice listed above. Sometimes, the hard part of having so much great advice is not knowing how to carry out the recommendations. The really important thing is to Take the Initiative.
Don't wait for people to introduce themselves to you, go up to them.
Don't wonder where people are planning to go this evening and how you can be a part of it: make the suggestion that people come with you to a restaurant for pizza or beer.
Don't worry about what to do on a weekend or weekday night. Make your own plans and invite people along to see a movie.
Try new things and be adventurous: try new types of restaurants with groups, go see movies that are foreign with other people who might be interested. Some of the best memories I have from college are of walking across the Longfellow Bridge to go to the European for pizza with ten freshman and a random smattering of upperclassmen or road trips to Louis' Lunch for hamburgers or Hilltop Steak House.
Don't be afraid of trying a new language for the first time; you don't need to have studied French for years in high school to take French in college. They have intro courses. Take anthropology, psychology, sociology, art history; don't just take the requisites.
If you have the opportunity to take classes at other schools, do it! If you're at a tech school, there may be a local liberal arts college that you can cross-register at for a class or two with no extra fees. If you're at a liberal arts college, try to take a tech course.
Do sports and physical activities: join an intramural sports team, try ice-hockey, go watch the volleyball team, and even if you don't qualify for a varsity team hang out with people and play basketball or racquetball. Learn to Sail! This is probably offered and often does not entail any extra fees.
There will be all sorts of free or close to free events going on at your campus and nearby colleges. Attend symphony performances; go watch a dance troupe; pay a few bucks and watch the plays that are performed on campus or at local playhouses; go attend lectures or seminars that may be aimed at grad students in things that interest you or that might interest you. Encourage someone to come to these things with you. Even if no one you know wants to go, go on your own. You'll meet people at these events who have interests that overlap yours, but will also differ from yours. Then you can extend yourself.
There will be a lot of people with a lot of ulterior motives trying to grab a piece of your mindshare. The beginning of college can be a vulnerable time for people: a lot of religious proselytization goes on (and atheistic and
humanistic and libertarian and republican and democratic and socialist, etc.), there are many easy avenues for acquiring alcohol and drugs and STDs. Don't be too easily convinced of anything.
But DO NOT blindly disagree with everyone who is not just like you! You may not want to be converted, but college is a great time to debate religious and political philosophies with others. Assert your own ideas, but be willing to realize that your view may not be the only view that has to exist.
The benefit of being in a university or college is that, yes, everyone around you is like you in trying to educate themselves, but everyone around you has a lot of great differences that can be of benefit to you. Hang around with the exchange students; hang out with people whose politics and viewpoints are not the same as yours. There's nothing like realizing that people in your dorm are from different countries, too, not just from different states. Take the initiative to meet people, talk to them, argue with them, learn from them, and stay connected with them.
Volunteer if you can, and not just for APO or other services frats or organizations. You're not doing this so that you can put it on your resume. That may have been the thing to do in high school: padding your bio to get you to the next step. Volunteer so you can be a part of the world and see that there is more to the world than just the ivory towers you'll be ensconsed in. Helping out at a pet shelter or a hospital or a crisis center or suicide hotline will let you in on the many options that there are in life.
You get to make your own way and define your own path. It's good to join groups, but don't let yourself be defined just by what others suggest you should do. Take advice with a grain of salt: listen to what your parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and advisors have to say. But even the faculty advisor that may be assigned to you may not know enough about you to give you the right advice about everything. Trust yourself to make decisions about what classes to take and what major you'll be and what nonacademic things to do.
Hmmm....
My AD 1100-W does not say VCD on the front, it just has logos for Photo-CD, JPEG, Dolby, and DVD. So I guess I must have gotten one of the new ones. That's a shame. I may have to return it, because the key reason I got it was to give it to my parents so I could send them CDs with photos of the kids and so that my sister could send CDs with videos on them of her kids. Why should Sony care?
Are they worried that the presence of a large base of VCD compatible players may crimp the size of their market for recordable DVD or mini-disks?
I just bought an AD 1100-W this week.
However, I can't get it to read or display any VCDs or CD-i disks. Do I need to flash it and update it to get it to work with CD-i and VCD and SVCD formats?
The manual that comes with it claims Photo-CD, DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3, and JPEG compatibility. I've gotten it to do all of that except Kodak Photo-CD because I don't have one. But the manual makes no claim about VCD or CD-i. ???
However, I can't get it to read or display any VCDs or CD-i disks. Do I need to flash it and update it to get it to work with CD-i and VCD and SVCD formats?
The manual that comes with it claims Photo-CD, DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3, and JPEG compatibility. I've gotten it to do all of that except Kodak Photo-CD because I don't have one. But the manual makes no claim about VCD or CD-i. ???
That is what Apple ought to add to the next redo of the iPod: a text to speech reader to read your ebooks or news or email for you. And just consider that instead of wasting 1 MB per minute of MP3 audio news reading, you could have less than 32k of plain text for 5 to 10 minutes of news reading. That would be a kicker.
I first did the Powerbook "read me my news" trick in January of 1999, when it was only a month old for me. I learned quickly to put all of the stories I wanted in either one big text file or in multiple cascaded text files so that I wouldn't have to use the touchpad. Just hitting the Apple-A to select all the text and Apple-H to have it "speak the selection".
Hmmm... I remember logging in via ssh from a powerbook G3 onto university with a Ricochet Modem while riding as a passenger in a friend's car. I didn't have a second friend Ricocheting simultaneously, otherwise I could have done something similar. Supposedly, it's still possible to connect from one Ricochet Modem to another directly, and it could be done car-to-car without needing the Ricochet network. Aah, memories...
Could the real reason be that booting up in OS X necessitates password entry and systel level protection of files under BSD whereas booting up in System 9 allows any user to trash ANY part of the hard drive without any permissions checking at all?
Currently, dual boot OS X and 9 systems can be trashed by booting up in 9. Single boot OS X systems can be "rooted" instead by booting up with a CD that boots up on System 9 with the right key sequence at powerup. I don't deny that not having to support older software on newer hardware may play a role, but the security issue may also be a big part for Admins who want to lock down publicly accesible systems.
I still remember using TBUG to write assembly programs for a TRS-80 and having to reboot and reload TBUG from a cassette tape when the program would hang. Anyone remember the animated bunny rabbits?
My school also had an obscure HP minicomputer that had an eight or nine inch black and white CRT and a cassette tape interface.
Those definitely were not the days!
I also remember doing some punchcard jobs at the local university during some summer classes and flirting with the undergrad who was accepting the cards for the batch jobs.
Ahhh youth!
Not only does this happen all the time, but after a short while these myths take on a life stronger than the truth. A very old canard is that people only use about 10% of their brainpower. The root source of this disappears in the 1920's-1930's, but as far as I've been able to find, there is NO BASIS in fact for such a statement. It appears to rest on the fact that there are non-neuronal elements in the brain: glia and cellular matrix and vascular elements. Well, of course! It's like saying that we only use 10% of a building because look at all of the volume unoccupied by humans. The support structure is a necessary part of the whole. Or it's like saying that matter is effectively not there because the particles that make up atoms do not occupy more than 0.01% of the volume that an atom occupies. Lies, lies, and distorted and un-reviewed statistics!
I don't think so.
These type of "brain teasers" were just as common in 1985 during the interviews for internships at XEROX PARC when I was at MIT as a 6.1/6.3 Junior. IBMs interviewers also asked a brain teaser but HP did not, if I remember correctly.
Any other prior art that others can remember from the ancient days???
--- why has Karma become Qualitative instead of Quantitative?
And while the initial protestations may be that this is supposed to be ancillary and optional, it will probably be like the ICD-9 or DSM coding. They were meant to be a way to relate transactions in order to get paid, but they have turned into de facto diagnostic criteria.
Some of the "research" is that writer's belief that the amount of detail in Vermeer's painting is too accurate in rendering the actual shapes of objects. He just doesn't believe that it is possible for an artist to create free-hand images that can be correct. A lot of artists disagree with this conclusion.
As for control experiments, Neurosurgeons got a lot of people up in arms for doing sham surgery as control experiments in fetal cell transplantation for alleviating Parkinson's Disease. The initial reason for doing the control experiments was the same as this: Is the mucking around in the retina itself, rather than the presence of the implant, responsible for the rescue response? The only way to tell would be to muck around and pretend to implant something but not leave anything in there. This can lead to severe complications. Even just doing a sham burr hole for the Neurosurgical controls, or even a partial burr hole which does not penetrate all of the skull, would create the risk of infection.
Post Retinal Bionics would be good for someone with a functional retina and perhaps a ganglionic or pigmented epithelium problem such as Retinitis Pigmentosa. They would not be much good for those with photoreceptor, horizontal, amacrine, bipolar, or ganglionic cell problems, eh? I agree that we are definitely a LONG way away from retinal implants being as functional and as routine as cochlear implants currently are. And the current cochlear implants are not so impressive considering what Mother Nature gives us.
If you assumed a flat probability of death for each age for a large population, say only 1% per year for everybody from newborns to the elderly, you'd expect 1000 deaths per 100000 people. With an average life expectancy of 70 yrs (M) - 77 yrs (F) in health-economy-advantaged nations, you can expect a death rate of 1.4% as a decent guess. Higher death rates may apply. And if you realize that morbidity is higher for neonates and the elderly and lower for the teenaged to middle-aged, then the presence of a death rate of 132 per 100-thousand per year for 20-70-to-more years older is in fact NOTHING at all. It is not even a statistical anomaly. It is not anywhere close to being significant.
I haven't bothered looking at the data for actual death rates and your MMV (morbidity may vary).
But it is always smart to read numerical data in reports carefully and skeptically. The math does not support any conspiracy in this case. Of course, it does not rule it out. But that's what conspiracy theories are all about.
I don't mind if they're losing money on it.
Where do I buy one for that thirty dollars?
1 - the lips and face
2 - the tongue
3 - the larynx
4 - the diaphragm
This approach only has access to part 1 above and will not be able to capture the other elements of sound. Lip reading works only partially. Try watching TV muted without closed captioning to see how many things that sound different will look alike.
The diaphragm is controlled by the vagus nerve (Cranial Nerve X). The diaphragm starts the ball rolling and controls the expulsion of air from your lungs. Sighs and the amplitude of your voice are controlled by controlling the strength of the exhalation.
The larynx is controlled by the laryngeal branch of the cranial nerve X, the vagus. Controlled constriction of the larynx provides a vibrating memrane which controls the resonance and dominant frequency output of the voice. Intonation is controlled by changing the frequency. This can change across a sentence, or in Cantonese and many languages even across the length of a single word or syllable.
The tongue is controlled by the hypoglossal nerve (Cranial Nerve XII). The soft palate is controlled by the glossopharyngeal nerve. These two components along with the lips and the cheeks act to change the size and internal shape of the resonance cavity that is your mouth. This filters the sound produced by the lungs and the larynx. Placing your tongue in different places changes a lot of filter characteristics.
Your lips and cheeks are controlled by the facial nerve and by the upper cervical nerves. They help modulate the resonance cavity. The lips also provide an abrupt or gradual start and stop to sounds.
Saying the letter 'B' or 'P' requires that the lips close first, then the lungs start to exhale and pressure builds up in the mouth, then the lips are opened and the larynx resonates as air is quickly allowed to be expelled. You do all of this automatically all of the time. The only part that is visible externally are the lips and the slight facial nuances associated with this. The rest go out of the brainstem via the cranial nerves and are not accesible. (well, you could get to the laryngeal component of the vagus surgically, but that is invasive.)
This won't work easily and will not sound as fluid without all of the other characterstics of sound and voice production being taken into account.
Yes, there is a limit to how many re-edits an artiste ought to do of their work. But the limit is probably more in what the audience tolerates, not really in what they ought to do. Coding of software continues to fine tune the points. And we can't see the defects that Ridley Scott sees in his creation as major: it just doesn't create the story he wanted to tell. So why shouldn't he be allowed to do a re-write or re-edit and try it again? Even if it is just to get a bunch of fans and fanatics to buy yet another version.
Actually, the ITD (interaural time difference) and the IAD (interaural amplitude difference) are both involved in being able to judge the angle of origination of a sound source. The IAD is the old style of stereo effect: if it's louder on the right, the sound source is on the right, and vice versa. The interaural time difference is based on the fact that since the head is ~6 inches across and the ears are ~6-7 inches apart, with sound traveling close to ~1100 feet per second will arrive at most ~1/2000th of a second apart in the right vs. left ear. Under water, with a different speed of propagation for sound vibrations of close to ~5000 feet per second, this
difference is divided by ~4.something, so the brain which is accustomed to deciding that something is on the right or the left based on the ITD and IAD does not get enough data to be able to tell the difference. All time delays are now within 1/4th to 1/5th of all of the time delays it is accustomed to hearing and thus thinks that every noise source is coming from a cone within less than 20-30 degrees directly in front of or behind you. Nothing sounds like it is on your right or your left. (note that this is in answer to the parent post, not just the current topic).
"It is possible for the Blu-ray Disc to record digital high definition broadcasting while maintaining high quality and other data simultaneously with video data if they are received together. In addition, the adoption of a unique ID written on a Blu-ray Disc realizes high quality copyright protection functions."
You can try to work these ellipses into your formulae, and people like Parra in France and Parry Moon in Camridge (MA) had tried to distort these color ellipses back into circles in trying to find a transform of these color spaces into a perceptually uniform color space. But the key thing is that the monitors will differ, the monitors' settings will differ, (the phosphors don't really differ that much between CRTs, but the primaries for CRTs are very different from that of LCDs and that of projectors using LCDs or DLP/DMDs), and most importantly the viewers' photopigments will also differ. Along with the well known ~10% of males that are dichromats, a large number of the population are anomalous trichromats. The actual numbers are still being tallied, and it is still in a very conjectural stage whether most people have multiple copies of the L-opsin gene or multiple copies of the M-opsin gene. The Nathans are on one side of this and the Neitzes are on the other side of this. Which is which, I keep forgetting.
But a quick summary is:
the majority of human subjects are most sensitive to changes in the red (+L-M) or green direction (-L+M), with changes of 0.3% being perceptible for targets of 2-10 degrees in size, mediumly sensitive to changes in intensity (+L+M[+ maybe S]) {there are HUGE arguments and PhD theses brewing over this} for brighter and -L-M[ - maybe S] for darker), and least sensitive to changes that affect the S-cones (+S, kind of a violet change, -S, kind of a greeny-chartreuse change). This, along with the MacAdam Discrimination Ellipse, are for a target color being compared to the immediately adjacent surround color. This does not hold true for nonadjacent and distant targets being compared or for targets subtending visual angles much larger than 5 degrees or much less than 1-2 degrees. There are some funky changes that occur when you get to targets of less than 1/2 degrees in size and when you start to talk about colors that you don't look at foveally or centrally.
That may answer your question. And it may even lead you towards a workable plan on equi-perceptual space. (work with CIE xyz and integrate MacAdams' discrimination data). But realize that MacAdams' work, like much of visual psychophysics is based on less than 5 (count 'em five) subjects. Most visual psychophysics papers today usually have the authors and their post-doc slaves as the only subjects. But actually coming up with that will take data collection on the scale of a PhD thesis, and working within the CIE color space, even from 1931, is probably close enough for most work, even if some of your side-by-side colors are twice as far in color space than they need to be at minimum.
You can try to work these ellipses into your formulae, and people like Parra in France and Parry Moon in Camridge (MA) had tried to distort these color ellipses back into circles in trying to find a
transform of these color spaces into a perceptually uniform color space. But the key thing is that the monitors will differ, the monitors' settings will differ, (the phosphors don't really differ that much between CRTs, but the primaries for CRTs are very different from that of LCDs and that of projectors using LCDs or DLP/DMDs), and most importantly the viewers' photopigments will also differ. Along with the well known ~10% of males that are dichromats, a large number of the population are anomalous trichromats. The actual numbers are still being tallied, and it is still in a very conjectural stage whether most people have multiple copies of the L-opsin gene or multiple copies of the M-opsin gene. The Nathans are on one side of this and the Neitzes are on the other side of this. Which is which, I keep forgetting.
But a quick summary is:
the majority of human subjects are most sensitive to changes in the red (+L-M) or green direction (-L+M), with changes of 0.3% being perceptible for targets of 2-10 degrees in size, mediumly sensitive to changes in intensity (+L+M[+ maybe S]) {there are HUGE arguments and PhD theses brewing over this} for brighter and -L-M[ - maybe S] for darker), and least sensitive to changes that affect the S-cones (+S, kind of a violet change, -S, kind of a greeny-chartreuse change). This, along with the MacAdam Discrimination Ellipse, are for a target color being compared to the immediately adjacent surround color. This does not hold true for nonadjacent and distant targets being compared or for targets subtending visual angles much larger than 5 degrees or much less than 1-2 degrees. There are some funky changes that occur when you get to targets of less than 1/2 degrees in size and when you start to talk about colors that you don't look at foveally or centrally.
That may answer your question. And it may even lead you towards a workable plan on equi-perceptual space. (work with CIE xyz and integrate MacAdams' discrimination data). But realize that MacAdams' work, like much of visual psychophysics is based on less than 5 (count 'em five) subjects. Most visual psychophysics papers today usually have the authors and their post-doc slaves as the only subjects. But actually coming up with that will take data collection on the scale of a PhD thesis, and working within the CIE color space, even from 1931, is probably close enough for most work, even if some of your side-by-side colors are twice as far in color space than they need to be at minimum.
Despite what one of the other posters has said about "binary hypercubes" being nonsensical, they are simply a way of describing the nodes of a hypercube with a binary address. Each node in a 1024 node network has a ten bit address. Each one has to connect only to ten other nodes: the ten nodes which are specified by flipping only ONE bit on that nodes address. This provides multiple redundant paths by which a message can be routed in the case of the failure or congestion of a node.
And by intermittently polling the other nodes to which it connects, it can keep a routing table which optimizes the paths to be used. The major difference is that in Hillis' Thinking Machines the number of nodes was capped, in fact it was a fixed number of nodes. Now implementing a dynamic network in a hypercude or hypertoroid topology brings on a new set of problems such as dynamically re-allocating the hypercude node addresses as users fall off and climb back on to the network. This can be more of a bear than people realize.
Note that in the article, Judge Kozinski is reported to state in a memorandum that he believes monitoring for content is a violation of anti-wiretap statute. This is independent of whether the judges themselves or the judiciary employees want to avoid monitoring for idealistic and legalistic reasons or simply as an end-run around being caught downloading MP3s, AVIs, inappropriate content for the workplace, or simply stealing the bandwidth provided to them as a matter of course for their use in their employment. Don't forget that the judges are employed by us (the taxpayers) via the government to administer and adjudicate the laws that are created by the legislative and executive branches that we choose to elect.
I didn't elect them to use workplace time and equipment for personal use. Now I agree with Kozinski that if this policy was not well-articulated, then it is wrong for monitoring to be allowed to occur. But I also feel that it is not appropriate to suck bandwidth or waste time on the company dime. Especially when that company dime came from my pocket via taxes.
I also feel that if the company or gov't office allows people to use telephones to make personal calls, they ought to allow some leeway in using internet bandwidth for personal use.
But since it would be inappropriate to use the office telephone system to call Mabel in Australia every day from the AOC office in the U.S.A., it would be just as inappropriate to waste huge amounts of bandwidth for MP3's (unless you are Judge Marilyn Patel, working on the Napster case), porn (unless you are working on a porn-related case), or even voice-over-IP phone calls (unless you are going to work on that case that ATT, MCI, et al, all WANT to file!).
Note that in the article, Judge Kozinski is reported to state in a memorandum that he believes monitoring for content is a violation of anti-wiretap statute. This is independent of whether the judges themselves or the judiciary employees want to avoid monitoring for idealistic and legalistic reasons or simply as an end-run around being caught downloading MP3s, AVIs, inappropriate content for the workplace, or simply stealing the bandwidth provided to them as a matter of course for their use in their employment. Don't forget that the judges are employed by us (the taxpayers) via the government to administer and adjudicate the laws that are created by the legislative and executive branches that we choose to elect.
I didn't elect them to use workplace time and equipment for personal use. Now I agree with Kozinski that if this policy was not well-articulated, then it is wrong for monitoring to be allowed to occur. But I also feel that it is not appropriate to suck bandwidth or waste time on the company dime. Especially when that company dime came from my pocket via taxes.
I also feel that if the company or gov't office allows people to use telephones to make personal calls, they ought to allow some leeway in using internet bandwidth for personal use.
But since it would be inappropriate to use the office telephone system to call Mabel in Australia every day from the AOC office in the U.S.A., it would be just as inappropriate to waste huge amounts of bandwidth for MP3's (unless you are Judge Marilyn Patel, working on the Napster case), porn (unless you are working on a porn-related case), or even voice-over-IP phone calls (unless you are going to work on that case that ATT, MCI, et al, all WANT to file!).
Note that in the article, Judge Kozinski is reported to state in a memorandum that he believes monitoring for content is a violation of anti-wiretap statute. This is independent of whether the judges themselves or the judiciary employees want to avoid monitoring for idealistic and legalistic reasons or simply as an end-run around being caught downloading MP3s, AVIs, inappropriate content for the workplace, or simply stealing the bandwidth provided to them as a matter of course for their use in their employment. Don't forget that the judges are employed by us (the taxpayers) via the government to administer and adjudicate the laws that are created by the legislative and executive branches that we choose to elect.
Kozinski's point is actually a very good thing. He asserts that regardless of why he or the judiciary may oppose this monitoring of employee web usage, he has a valid point because this sort of invasion of privacy is violating the anti-wiretap laws.
This may have an interesting effect on the case before FBI's keystroke-logging of Scarfo's computer to acquire his PGP key.
August 8, 2001
Rebels in Black Robes Recoil at Surveillance of Computers
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 -- A group of federal employees who believed that the monitoring of their office computers was a major violation of their privacy recently staged an insurrection, disabling the software used to check on them and suggesting that the monitoring was illegal and unethical.
This was not just a random bunch of bureaucrats but a group of federal judges who are still engaged in a dispute with the office in Washington that administers the judicial branch and that had installed the software to detect downloading of music, streaming video and pornography.
It is a conflict that reflects the anxiety of workers at all levels at a time when technology allows any employer to examine each keystroke made on an office computer. In this case, the concern over the loss of privacy comes from the very individuals, federal judges, who will shape the rules of the new information era.
The insurrection took root this spring in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco and the largest of the nation's 12 regional circuits, covering 9 Western states and two territories. The Judicial Conference of the United States, the ultimate governing body of the courts, is to meet on Sept. 11 to resolve the matter.
The conflict between the circuit judges and the Administrative Office of the Courts, a small bureaucracy in Washington, deteriorated to a point that a council of the circuit's appeals and district judges ordered their technology staff to disconnect the monitoring program on May 24 for a week until a temporary compromise was reached. Because the Ninth Circuit's was also linked to the Eighth and Tenth Circuits, the shutdown affected about a third of the country and about 10,000 court employees, including more than 700 active and semiretired judges.
Leonidas Ralph Mecham, who runs the Administrative Office of the Courts, and who ordered the monitoring of all federal court workers, said in a March 5 memorandum that the software was to enhance security and reduce computer use that was not related to judicial work and that was clogging the system. A survey by his office, he wrote, "has revealed that as much as 3 to 7 percent of the judiciary browser's traffic consists of streaming media such as radio and video broadcasts, which are unlikely to relate to official business."
Officials in the judicial branch on both sides of the issue provided several internal memorandums written as the dispute continued over the weeks.
After the shutdown, Mr. Mecham complained in a memorandum that disconnecting the software was irresponsible and might have resulted in security breaches, allowing unauthorized outsiders access to the judiciary's internal confidential computer network. "The weeklong shutdown put the entire judiciary's data communication network at risk," he wrote on June 15.
Mr. Mecham warned in that memorandum that on the days before the software was disabled, there were hundreds of attempts at intrusion into the judiciary's network from places like China and Iran.
But Chief Judge Mary Schroeder of the Ninth Circuit responded that the concerns were overblown and that the circuit's technical people carefully monitored computer activity during the week that the software was disabled.
In a June 29 memorandum, she said that there was no evidence that the electronic firewall used to block hacking had been breached and suggested that Mr. Mecham had exaggerated the potential of a security breach because having hundreds of attempted breaches per day was routine and routinely blocked.
The Ninth Circuit disconnected the software, she wrote, because the monitoring policy was not driven by concern over overloading the system but Mr. Mecham's concern over "content detection." Many employees had been disciplined, she noted, because the software turned up evidence of such things as viewing pornography, although they had not been given any clear notice of the court's computer use policy.
Moreover, she wrote, the judiciary may have violated the law.
"We are concerned about the propriety and even the legality of monitoring Internet usage," she wrote. Her memorandum said that the judiciary could be liable to lawsuits and damages because the software might have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which imposes civil and criminal liability on any person who intentionally intercepts "any wire, oral or electronic communication."
She noted that the Ninth Circuit had ruled just this year that the law was violated when an employer accessed an employee Web site. In fact, the issues of what is permissible by employers have produced a patchwork of legal rulings and the matter has never been addressed directly by the Supreme Court.
Judge Alex Kozinski, a member of the Ninth Circuit appeals court, drafted and distributed an 18-page legal memorandum arguing that the monitoring was a violation of anti- wiretap statute. [italics added]
Judge Kozinski, widely known for his libertarian views, said the court employees who were disciplined, an estimated three dozen, could be entitled to monetary damages if they brought a lawsuit.
A spokesman for Mr. Mecham said that the software could not identify specific employees but workstations. When unauthorized use was detected, Mr. Mecham's deputy, Clarence Lee Jr., wrote to the chief judge of the district, urging that the employee who used the workstation be identified and disciplined. One such letter includes an appendix listing the Web sites that employee had visited, some of them pornographic. There is no evidence that any alleged abuse of the system involved judges.
Judge Kozinski said: "Aside from my view that this may be a felony, it is something that we as federal judges have jurisdiction to consider. We have to pass on this very kind of conduct in the private sphere."
Prof. Jeffrey Rosen of the George Washington University Law School, author of a recent book on privacy, "The Unwanted Gaze" (Vintage 2001), said, "It's fascinating that the courts have to grapple with these issues so close to home." The law is evolving, he said, adding: "This drama with the judges reminds us of how thin the privacy protections are. There's a real choice right now whether e-mail and Web browsing should be regarded like the telephone or a postcard."
Judge Edwin L. Nelson, who is chairman of a judges' committee that deals with computer issues, said in an interview that his group met last week and drafted proposals to deal with monitoring. Judge Nelson would not discuss the proposals but they are almost certain to resemble policies used in the rest of the federal government, in which clear notice is given to computer users that they may be monitored.
Jim Flyzik, vice chairman of an interagency group that considers computer privacy issues in the federal government, said that each department had its own policy but that clear and unambiguous notification of monitoring was usually an element.
In the private sector, a survey by the American Management Association this year found that 63 percent of companies monitored employees' computer use. END OF ARTICLE