First of all, you should have in mind that Linux is just a kernel, and what you are probably more interested in are all the userland programs that comprise your typical Linux distribution. I think it is best to start with a general Unix introductory text, because the fundamental principles have not changed in 25 years, and it is much better to understand the core Unix system utilities and how they plug together to accomplish complex tasks, rather than waste time with all the modern Windows-like interfaces that are fashionable in Linux distributions today.
There is one "classic" Unix introduction book that I can strongly recommend, and that you can probably buy used for a dollar: Exploring the Unix System by Stephen Kochan and Patrick Wood. Make sure to get the paperback edition that is about 400 pages. Also, apparently the authors are going to release an updated version of that book -- check http://www.kochan-wood.com for updates.
Once you learn the fundamentals of Unix systems, then you would be ready to learn the modern tools available in Linux distributions. Remember that is much more important to learn the principles and philosophy that Unix was built upon, rather than attempting to memorize arcane details.
By carefully examining how Republicans parse their statements about Bush's warrantless, openly felonious, and treasonous[1] domestic surveillance program, and combining that with network engineering knowledge available through open sources, alert reader philosophicus has advanced our understanding of the NSA surveillance system Bush set up.
Long story short: (1) Internet surveillance is Bush's goal, not voice calls; (2) the Republican "wiretap" talking point is a diversion, to voice, away from from Internet surveillance; (3) Bush's domestic surveillance system would pose no engineering challenges whatever to NSA. No rocket science--or tinfoil hats--required.
Well believe it or not slavery was only one of the rights that the south was fighting for.
This is simply not true. Most Northerners were not abolitionists. Most northerners did not care about slavery in the South, so long as it stayed in the South and didn't wander into their back yards. Northerners were keenly interested in limiting the spread of slavery into the federal territories, which in 1860 was most of the country west of the Mississippi. This was more for economic than moral reasons. Slavery and capitalism simply can't function in the same place. Slavery sucks the life out of capitalism.
It's true that by 1860 abolitionist sentiment was growing in the North, thanks partly to the popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but Northerners generally were not so enflamed about how awful slavery was in the South that they wanted to go to war over it.
At the same time, the plantation class in the South came to believe that they had to expand slavery into the territories in order to protect the institution itself. They were keenly interested in being sure new states entering the Union would be slave states. Otherwise, at some point in the future there might be a big enough majority of "free" states to amend the Constitution and ban slavery.
Also, cotton depletes nutrients in the soil, and if the same fields are used for growing cotton year after year, eventually there will be a reduced yield. Apparently crop rotation didn't occur to anyone back then. So, the plantation class wanted to move slavery into new territories (and not just U.S. territories) in order to keep production up with demand.
Most of the wealth of the antebellum South was concentrated in the hands of the plantation owners. Most southern whites were dirt poor, illiterate farmers, but the plantation class lived in lordly splendor. And the antebellum South was, in effect, a plutocracy controlled by the plantation class.
The southern plantation class believed slavery to be necessary to maintaining their wealth. The U.S. South was the chief supplier of high-quality cotton to Europe at the time. Plantation owners believed that their futures depended on the expansion of slavery into the territories, which Lincoln opposed and pledged to stop. Hence, as soon as Lincoln was elected the Southern states began to secede.
The secession conventions of Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas wrote "declaration of causes" documents that explained their reasons for secession. The reasons were slavery, slavery, slavery, and also slavery. What caused secession is what caused the war. You can find links to these here. This is what Mississippi had to say:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
Have you seen the new tuple library being added to C++?
He said: multiple return values. You said: have you seen the tuples library? Two distinct and very different things. Multiple return values means that a function can return several distinct first-class values that have nothing to do with each other. Otherwise, the function could just return a list. Hey, look, multiple return values!
The distinction helps you when you want to return distinct unrelated objects that don't really belong in the same data structure, such as an error code and a value, for example. There are a million other ways in which you can do that, but this is one of the more elegant approaches.
Multiple return values are especially useful in compiler intermediate representations, because they allow you to model certain control constructs (exceptions and continuations) explicitly. That turns out to be surprisingly useful to compiler writers.
I stand corrected...I (mistakenly) thought Brian Kernighan also received a Turing Award. Of course, in the "well-known CS people at Princeton list" there's also Sedgewick, whose algorithms textbook is one of the most popular introductory textbooks on the topic.
Let's not also forget that Turing himself got his Ph.D. in Princeton, and some of the most brilliant mathematicians and computers scientists of the century worked there at one point or another.
Try again, you still need a warrant. Might I suggest reading the PATRIOT act at some point?
Actually, they do not need a warrant if you are not a citizen, even if you are a perfectly legal resident. The Patriot Act essentially eliminated the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th amendment. Of course the Republican criminals want even more power by allowing the government to strip any American citizen of their citizenship, and to eliminate search and seizure protection (4th amendment). Wake up and fight for your rights, people.
If its merely a license key issue, I'm sure these "developers" could get around that. Judging by the number of keygen programs for other software packages that come out the same day a program is released, this is a non-issue.
This is the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. Do you realize that you're advocating breaking the law? That a company would actually have its developers crack software on company time? This is preposterous. No, in a commercial environment nobody is going to fucking waste their time with goddamn stupid keygen programs, because this is simply unlawful. This is not cracking your stupid Windows games on the computer your parents bought you; this is business.
I must say that this is a fine example of what Stallman has been talking about all these years. Software companies are irresponsible towards their customers, and the only way to force them to obey the rules, short of government intervention, is to provide a choice for said customers to go to another vendor with the source code they own, or hire their own programmers.
Copyright law per se just permits authors a time-limited monopoly of control over their work. This does not require putting remunerative or overly restrictive conditions on access to the works. That is more along the lines of copyright-law-as-traditionally-employed.
Good point. Well, I'm not a lawyer, I just play one on Slashdot;-)
Pleading about what is and isn't fair just doesn't cut it. If you want to argue business w/the shills at Forbes, then stick to what matters:
Well, I suppose I'm operating under the assumption that fairness should be what governs the relations between men in a healthy society. The reason why I wrote this particular sentence was because the author of the article was bemoaning how much the "onerous" GPL is oppressing the helpless corporations. I was trying to show that not only the GPL is not oppressive, but that it is in fact rather fair to all parties involved.
On the Nature and Purpose of the General Public License
Sir,
I find the tone of your article on the General Public License (GPL) to
be offensive and disrespectful to the Free Software community. In the
particular example of Cisco, what we have is a simple contract dispute
based on United States copyright law. Comparing the actions taken
by the Free Software Foundation to protect the community, to actions
of organized crime, or the GPL to communism (!?) is childish, and it
is inexplicable to me how a self-respecting journalist could publish
anything like that. I encourage you to read the GPL Frequently Asked
Questions, located at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html in order to gain some understanding of how the GPL works.
To address your particular points: the primary reason behind the GPL
is providing freedom to developers and users. You are very much in
control of your machine. It is yours. The software, that's yours. The
data you generate, that's yours too. The documentation, that's also
yours. However, if you do decide to release that software to the
public, or a subset thereof, you'd like to have a guarantee that
nobody can then take this software, make some small modifications to
it, and start offering it under restricted terms, in effect preventing
the public from benefiting from your software the way you intended.
This is a very powerful idea, and it works because it benefits both
users and developers. Many corporations today choose to incorporate
Free Software in their products, because Free Software is reliable,
flexible, and most importantly, it comes without onerous commercial
licensing terms, and the freedom to modify it and use it internally
without any limitations. Observe that at this point, the GPL already
provides more freedoms than traditional copyright law. Now, if a
corporation decides to distribute (sell) the modified software,
section 3 of the GPL requires them to provide the exact same freedoms
that they enjoyed while creating the modified version of the
software. I hope you will agree with me that this is perfectly fair.
If the corporation wishes to release some strictly proprietary
software alongside the GPL software, there are ways to arrange that,
and that's one way the intellectual property of the company can be
protected.
Above all, nobody is forcing these corporations to use Free
Software. If they do not want to use Linux, they don't have to. If
they want to enjoy the quality work of hundreds of volunteers, then
they have to obey the rules. It's as simple as that.
When I were a lad, our firewall were a shoebox in t' middle o' t' information superhighway.
Shoebox! You were lucky. All we had was a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
Sure, nobody really cares if a Mexican uses a fake green card to get a job, but somebody sees an Arab with a fake passport, they are going to rot in jail for a very, very long time.
I do not know how easy it is to fake U.S. passports. What I do know is that there is a thriving market of various fake European passports, which is sufficient for the purposes of assuming false non-Arabic identity. Groups like al-Qaeda are backed by millions of dollars of Saudi money, so they don't care how much it costs to make/buy a fake passport. In addition, many Arabs have light complexion, so I don't see how you can immediately tell "an Arab with a fake passport." Oh, and I define "redneck" as any racist white person with bigoted attitude, which description you fit perfectly.
The government needs to flag people whose name is Mohammad bin Mohammad, people who have spent modest to extended amounts of time in the Middle East, people who act suspiciously and so on. And all the Slashdot liberals can take your liberal bullshit and shove it, I fucking *WANT* some racial profiling.
Oh, so the terrorists will simply obtain fake documents with white Christian names, and travel through Europe to get to the Middle East, and the government will end up harassing innocent people and letting the terrorists through (like they do now). You sir, are an ignorant, racist redneck. People like you are the reason why we ended up with Asscroft's police state.
(Ahem, "National SOCIALIST Party" ring a bell with you?)
Actually, Hitler named his party "National-Socialist Party of the German Workers" (NSDAP), because at the time socialist ideas were very popular in Germany, and he needed to attract mainstream voters, similarly to a certain "conservative" party in present-day United States.
However, Hitler had an immense hatred for all socialists and communists, and at the same time he courted the German peasant and worker he also distributed secret pamphlets (which no ordinary Nazi party member was allowed to see) to prominent industrialists and businessmen that assured them that corporate control of the state is the true goal of the NSDAP. Like another poster said, putting "socialist" in your name doesn't necessarily make you one.
'even genocidal litigation can't stop file sharers' Or to put it in the immortal words of the great Teacher and Leader of the American People comrade George Bush, BRING IT ON!
In other words, I can prove that if my software is 100% bug-free, it's bug-free. Woohoo. This doesn't address the case where my program doesn't fully conform to the Z specification, does it?
In formal verification, the idea is that you would have a way to prove the equivalence between your Z model (or whatever modeling language you use) and your implementation. Of course, it's a lot more difficult to prove equivalence between a formal model and a C implementation, than if you are using a modern high-level language like Standard ML.
ACL2 is a theorem proving and modeling environment, based on Common Lisp, which is used for verification of hardware and software. I believe AMD used it to prove the correctness of the floating-point division algorithm in one of their processors.
When Christian students cannot have a Bible Study at school during free time don't see our local ACLU joinging in to help protect these student's freedoms.
WHAT? Privacy is one of the essential rights that the founding fathers believed in. The fourth amendment to the United States Constitution is what protects the right to privacy:
IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the
place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Please make sure you read and understand the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If you don't know what your rights are, how are we going to oppose government officials like Big Brother John Ashcroft and the rest of the Republican criminals?
Recently, the vice provost of undergraduate studies in my university has initiated a series of activities aimed at getting active student input on improving the educational experience on our campus. One of my pet peeves with the studentry of my school is that they're rather apathetic and uninformed of political and social issues in the world surrounding us. Given that tomorrow these people would be engineers and scientists, and above all, citizens, I think it is vitally important that they are well aware of current social and legal issues in our technological society.
My two questions are: 1) how would you go about encouraging college students to become more interested in issues like the DMCA 2) do you feel that most engineering and science students in Princeton University have a good understanding of the legal and ethical issues in IT?
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, you should have in mind that Linux is just a kernel, and what you are probably more interested in are all the userland programs that comprise your typical Linux distribution. I think it is best to start with a general Unix introductory text, because the fundamental principles have not changed in 25 years, and it is much better to understand the core Unix system utilities and how they plug together to accomplish complex tasks, rather than waste time with all the modern Windows-like interfaces that are fashionable in Linux distributions today.
There is one "classic" Unix introduction book that I can strongly recommend, and that you can probably buy used for a dollar: Exploring the Unix System by Stephen Kochan and Patrick Wood. Make sure to get the paperback edition that is about 400 pages. Also, apparently the authors are going to release an updated version of that book -- check http://www.kochan-wood.com for updates.
Once you learn the fundamentals of Unix systems, then you would be ready to learn the modern tools available in Linux distributions. Remember that is much more important to learn the principles and philosophy that Unix was built upon, rather than attempting to memorize arcane details.
July 22, or 22/7 would be Europe's pi day.
Well believe it or not slavery was only one of the rights that the south was fighting for.
This is simply not true. Most Northerners were not abolitionists. Most northerners did not care about slavery in the South, so long as it stayed in the South and didn't wander into their back yards. Northerners were keenly interested in limiting the spread of slavery into the federal territories, which in 1860 was most of the country west of the Mississippi. This was more for economic than moral reasons. Slavery and capitalism simply can't function in the same place. Slavery sucks the life out of capitalism.
It's true that by 1860 abolitionist sentiment was growing in the North, thanks partly to the popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin, but Northerners generally were not so enflamed about how awful slavery was in the South that they wanted to go to war over it.
At the same time, the plantation class in the South came to believe that they had to expand slavery into the territories in order to protect the institution itself. They were keenly interested in being sure new states entering the Union would be slave states. Otherwise, at some point in the future there might be a big enough majority of "free" states to amend the Constitution and ban slavery.
Also, cotton depletes nutrients in the soil, and if the same fields are used for growing cotton year after year, eventually there will be a reduced yield. Apparently crop rotation didn't occur to anyone back then. So, the plantation class wanted to move slavery into new territories (and not just U.S. territories) in order to keep production up with demand.
Most of the wealth of the antebellum South was concentrated in the hands of the plantation owners. Most southern whites were dirt poor, illiterate farmers, but the plantation class lived in lordly splendor. And the antebellum South was, in effect, a plutocracy controlled by the plantation class.
The southern plantation class believed slavery to be necessary to maintaining their wealth. The U.S. South was the chief supplier of high-quality cotton to Europe at the time. Plantation owners believed that their futures depended on the expansion of slavery into the territories, which Lincoln opposed and pledged to stop. Hence, as soon as Lincoln was elected the Southern states began to secede.
The secession conventions of Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas wrote "declaration of causes" documents that explained their reasons for secession. The reasons were slavery, slavery, slavery, and also slavery. What caused secession is what caused the war. You can find links to these here. This is what Mississippi had to say:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
And that's why there was a Civil War..
Have you seen the new tuple library being added to C++?
He said: multiple return values. You said: have you seen the tuples library? Two distinct and very different things. Multiple return values means that a function can return several distinct first-class values that have nothing to do with each other. Otherwise, the function could just return a list. Hey, look, multiple return values!
The distinction helps you when you want to return distinct unrelated objects that don't really belong in the same data structure, such as an error code and a value, for example. There are a million other ways in which you can do that, but this is one of the more elegant approaches.
Multiple return values are especially useful in compiler intermediate representations, because they allow you to model certain control constructs (exceptions and continuations) explicitly. That turns out to be surprisingly useful to compiler writers.
It is good law there, until either overruled by the Supremes, or made the Law of the Land by the Supremes.
I didn't know Diana Ross was that influential with the U.S. court system...
The PDP-1 actually used a modified IBM keyboard, so I'm guessing their key layout is similar to that of the IBM Executive or Selectric.
Got a photo of the keyboard handy? I haven't been able to google up anything better than small bad scans of old adverts.
Score 0, Troll? Have the Repugnicans taken a hold of Slashdot moderation? Oh, the ignominy...
I stand corrected...I (mistakenly) thought Brian Kernighan also received a Turing Award. Of course, in the "well-known CS people at Princeton list" there's also Sedgewick, whose algorithms textbook is one of the most popular introductory textbooks on the topic.
Let's not also forget that Turing himself got his Ph.D. in Princeton, and some of the most brilliant mathematicians and computers scientists of the century worked there at one point or another.
Try again, you still need a warrant. Might I suggest reading the PATRIOT act at some point?
Actually, they do not need a warrant if you are not a citizen, even if you are a perfectly legal resident. The Patriot Act essentially eliminated the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th amendment. Of course the Republican criminals want even more power by allowing the government to strip any American citizen of their citizenship, and to eliminate search and seizure protection (4th amendment). Wake up and fight for your rights, people.
If its merely a license key issue, I'm sure these "developers" could get around that. Judging by the number of keygen programs for other software packages that come out the same day a program is released, this is a non-issue.
This is the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. Do you realize that you're advocating breaking the law? That a company would actually have its developers crack software on company time? This is preposterous. No, in a commercial environment nobody is going to fucking waste their time with goddamn stupid keygen programs, because this is simply unlawful. This is not cracking your stupid Windows games on the computer your parents bought you; this is business.
I must say that this is a fine example of what Stallman has been talking about all these years. Software companies are irresponsible towards their customers, and the only way to force them to obey the rules, short of government intervention, is to provide a choice for said customers to go to another vendor with the source code they own, or hire their own programmers.
Copyright law per se just permits authors a time-limited monopoly of control over their work. This does not require putting remunerative or overly restrictive conditions on access to the works. That is more along the lines of copyright-law-as-traditionally-employed.
;-)
Good point. Well, I'm not a lawyer, I just play one on Slashdot
Pleading about what is and isn't fair just doesn't cut it. If you want to argue business w/the shills at Forbes, then stick to what matters:
Well, I suppose I'm operating under the assumption that fairness should be what governs the relations between men in a healthy society. The reason why I wrote this particular sentence was because the author of the article was bemoaning how much the "onerous" GPL is oppressing the helpless corporations. I was trying to show that not only the GPL is not oppressive, but that it is in fact rather fair to all parties involved.
Here's my email to Forbes:
On the Nature and Purpose of the General Public License
Sir,
I find the tone of your article on the General Public License (GPL) to be offensive and disrespectful to the Free Software community. In the particular example of Cisco, what we have is a simple contract dispute based on United States copyright law. Comparing the actions taken by the Free Software Foundation to protect the community, to actions of organized crime, or the GPL to communism (!?) is childish, and it is inexplicable to me how a self-respecting journalist could publish anything like that. I encourage you to read the GPL Frequently Asked Questions, located at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html in order to gain some understanding of how the GPL works.
To address your particular points: the primary reason behind the GPL is providing freedom to developers and users. You are very much in control of your machine. It is yours. The software, that's yours. The data you generate, that's yours too. The documentation, that's also yours. However, if you do decide to release that software to the public, or a subset thereof, you'd like to have a guarantee that nobody can then take this software, make some small modifications to it, and start offering it under restricted terms, in effect preventing the public from benefiting from your software the way you intended.
This is a very powerful idea, and it works because it benefits both users and developers. Many corporations today choose to incorporate Free Software in their products, because Free Software is reliable, flexible, and most importantly, it comes without onerous commercial licensing terms, and the freedom to modify it and use it internally without any limitations. Observe that at this point, the GPL already provides more freedoms than traditional copyright law. Now, if a corporation decides to distribute (sell) the modified software, section 3 of the GPL requires them to provide the exact same freedoms that they enjoyed while creating the modified version of the software. I hope you will agree with me that this is perfectly fair.
If the corporation wishes to release some strictly proprietary software alongside the GPL software, there are ways to arrange that, and that's one way the intellectual property of the company can be protected.
Above all, nobody is forcing these corporations to use Free Software. If they do not want to use Linux, they don't have to. If they want to enjoy the quality work of hundreds of volunteers, then they have to obey the rules. It's as simple as that.
Sincerely yours,
Ivan Raikov
When I were a lad, our firewall were a shoebox in t' middle o' t' information superhighway.
Shoebox! You were lucky. All we had was a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
Sure, nobody really cares if a Mexican uses a fake green card to get a job, but somebody sees an Arab with a fake passport, they are going to rot in jail for a very, very long time.
I do not know how easy it is to fake U.S. passports. What I do know is that there is a thriving market of various fake European passports, which is sufficient for the purposes of assuming false non-Arabic identity. Groups like al-Qaeda are backed by millions of dollars of Saudi money, so they don't care how much it costs to make/buy a fake passport. In addition, many Arabs have light complexion, so I don't see how you can immediately tell "an Arab with a fake passport." Oh, and I define "redneck" as any racist white person with bigoted attitude, which description you fit perfectly.
The government needs to flag people whose name is Mohammad bin Mohammad, people who have spent modest to extended amounts of time in the Middle East, people who act suspiciously and so on. And all the Slashdot liberals can take your liberal bullshit and shove it, I fucking *WANT* some racial profiling.
Oh, so the terrorists will simply obtain fake documents with white Christian names, and travel through Europe to get to the Middle East, and the government will end up harassing innocent people and letting the terrorists through (like they do now). You sir, are an ignorant, racist redneck. People like you are the reason why we ended up with Asscroft's police state.
(Ahem, "National SOCIALIST Party" ring a bell with you?)
Actually, Hitler named his party "National-Socialist Party of the German Workers" (NSDAP), because at the time socialist ideas were very popular in Germany, and he needed to attract mainstream voters, similarly to a certain "conservative" party in present-day United States.
However, Hitler had an immense hatred for all socialists and communists, and at the same time he courted the German peasant and worker he also distributed secret pamphlets (which no ordinary Nazi party member was allowed to see) to prominent industrialists and businessmen that assured them that corporate control of the state is the true goal of the NSDAP. Like another poster said, putting "socialist" in your name doesn't necessarily make you one.
'even genocidal litigation can't stop file sharers' Or to put it in the immortal words of the great Teacher and Leader of the American People comrade George Bush, BRING IT ON!
In other words, I can prove that if my software is 100% bug-free, it's bug-free. Woohoo. This doesn't address the case where my program doesn't fully conform to the Z specification, does it?
In formal verification, the idea is that you would have a way to prove the equivalence between your Z model (or whatever modeling language you use) and your implementation. Of course, it's a lot more difficult to prove equivalence between a formal model and a C implementation, than if you are using a modern high-level language like Standard ML.
ACL2 is a theorem proving and modeling environment, based on Common Lisp, which is used for verification of hardware and software. I believe AMD used it to prove the correctness of the floating-point division algorithm in one of their processors.
Here's to hoping that the ship is about to sink...
When Christian students cannot have a Bible Study at school during free time don't see our local ACLU joinging in to help protect these student's freedoms.
Do you know what you are talking about? ACLU Supports Right of Iowa Students to Distribute Christian Literature at School
While privacy is not a constitutional right [...]
WHAT? Privacy is one of the essential rights that the founding fathers believed in. The fourth amendment to the United States Constitution is what protects the right to privacy:
IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Please make sure you read and understand the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. If you don't know what your rights are, how are we going to oppose government officials like Big Brother John Ashcroft and the rest of the Republican criminals?
Dear Dr. Felten,
Recently, the vice provost of undergraduate studies in my university has initiated a series of activities aimed at getting active student input on improving the educational experience on our campus. One of my pet peeves with the studentry of my school is that they're rather apathetic and uninformed of political and social issues in the world surrounding us. Given that tomorrow these people would be engineers and scientists, and above all, citizens, I think it is vitally important that they are well aware of current social and legal issues in our technological society.
My two questions are: 1) how would you go about encouraging college students to become more interested in issues like the DMCA 2) do you feel that most engineering and science students in Princeton University have a good understanding of the legal and ethical issues in IT?