Re:Sounds interesting but...
on
Orbitsville
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· Score: 1
Well, it certainly sounds interesting enough, and if I ever get the opportunity I'll give it a go, but in general I'm not a huge fan of older science fiction. Personally I find that a lot of it, although based on intruiging ideas, just puts me off because of a lack of any kind of realism - the original series of Star Trek springs to made as a well known example.
The original Star Trek is an example of "older science fiction"? Oog. First of all, science fiction is older than 1966; secondly, Star Trek isn't exactly representative of science fiction....
---Bruce Fields
Re:Grave of the Fireflies / Hotaru no haka
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 2
You should perhaps be warned that "Grave of the Fireflies" is extremely depressing. But it's also really good.
For another break from the robots, try "My Neighbor Totoro" ("tonari no totoro", I think). Don't be put off by the fact that it's a kid's movie (and that it's very cute, and that it's spawned a major stuffed-animal industry)--it's much more subtle and interesting than anything put out by Disney. Also, if you're interested in Japan, there's lots of wonderful cultural details--the shots of the countryside, the food the characters eat and the houses they live in, etc.
I don't know anyone (of any age) who's seen Totoro and not liked it.
In general, anything by the same director (Hayao Miyazaki) is worth watching--see "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds" if you're looking for science-fiction, or "Kiki's delivery service", if you can stand more cute kids.
I ordinarily work with 20 desktops (2 by 2 by 5), with at least 8 (usually more) terminal windows open, several Netscape windows open, not to mention another 8 or so emacs windows, and usually miscellaneous other stuff. I've done all this with Enlightenment and GNOME on a system much less powerful than yours--a 300MHz pentium laptop with 64MB RAM. Window and desktop switching is usually instantaneous. Only in one situation has it ever taken anything near as long as your "ten seconds"---when I've been running Netscape for a long time without keeping an eye on memory usage, I find there's some kind of bug in Netscape that can take over most of the RAM and force Linux to spend most of its time swapping. This happens rarely, is easily avoidable (I keep an eye on a memory usage applet in my panel...), easily cured (switch to a text-only virtual terminal and kill all Netscape processes) and has nothing to do with GNOME as far as I can tell.
The moral I take from this story is to mostly ignore statements (mine included) about software speed from individuals speaking purely from their own experience on one machine; performance can vary so much depending on the peculiarities of your hardware and software configuration that generalization from one or two experiences is pretty useless. The only reason to pay attention is if someone has broader experience and a persuasive explanation of the behavior they've witnessed.
6) Lack of harm does not make copyright infringement legal.
I don't think this is completely true; see item 4, below.
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include - (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
So the amount of harm done by the act of copying may indeed be a factor in determining whether the copying is "fair use". --Bruce Fields
it's more like sponsorship than ads, which on one hand is a cool way to finance development, but where is this gonna end?
Um, could someone explain the difference between the two?
Also, let's do a thought experiment: let's say every company and individual that made a significant contribution to the kernel code inserted a "sponsored by" message into the boot sequence. How useful would those boot messages continue to be? This just isn't the place for advertisements (oh, excuse me, announcements of sponsorship).
Just curious--anyone know how they're dealing with the LZW patent? Last I heard, it looked like the gimp itself was on shaky ground by handling gif's. I suppose it wouldn't be that difficult for them to get a license for use on their own site, though. Ho hum.---Bruce F.
How do we explain the problem to the public?
on
More on LinDVD
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· Score: 4
This is an interesting situation; most of us seem to agree that the availability of proprietary DVD-playing software for Linux doesn't really cut it.
Now how do I explain this to my aunt?
Before we could just say that reverse-engineering CSS was necessary to enable us to create a Linux-compatible DVD player. With this no longer the case, we can now say "we need a free/open source DVD player"; but then we need to explain what "free" and/or "open source" mean, and it gets harder; a wrong choice of words could lead someone to believe (mistakenly) that, for example, we're just cheapskates who want everything for nothing.
So here's a challenge: who can come up with a single sentence, say no more than 20 words, which explains why a propietary DVD player for Linux is not sufficient?
Re:CNN has a report on this.
on
Protesting DMCA
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· Score: 2
Mark Litvack, the MPAA's legal director for worldwide antipiracy.....added that there are authorized Linux-based DVD players on the market.
I suppose "Linux-based DVD player" doesn't necessarily have to refer to a program that runs under Linux; could there be hardware DVD players that use Linux as part of the embedded software??? Bizarre.
Napster, Gnutella, DivX, anything new that comes along: they are all used primarily for entertainment, plain and simple. We ain't talking about political news or relious freedoms or anything serious. We're talking about people stealing South Park and Britney Spears for their own fucking pleasure, just to save a buck or two. It's that plain, as much as you all hate to admit it!
http, gnutella, ftp, whatever.... They're all just different ways of shoveling bits around cyberspace. There are lots of bits out there, and lots of uses to which they can be put; I use all of these bit-shovels all the time, and, personally, I have no interest in downloading South Park, Brittney Spears, or anything else I could get legally in a much more convenient format from a local store.
It looks to me like the Gnutella protocol provides particularly interesting ways of moving bits around, and I see no reason why its applications should be no less varied than those of, say, http.
Maybe all you do with your fancy new computer is download Britney Spears all day, but I'm disappointed if that's the only use you can imagine for any of this.
--Bruce Fields (currently using his "fancy new computer" to post to Slashdot, so he shouldn't be so critical)
They weren't trying to "trick" anyone. You can go to Radioshack and buy a cellphone for a penny....
Yeah, I know, and that's another "trick" of the same genre. We're so used to things being sold this way, we're inured to it, so it's easy to forget the whole point of this exercise: they're trying to play silly games to make their products appear cheaper than they really are, and to make it more complicated for you to figure out how much their product is really going to cost you in the long run.
Don't you find it's a pain in the butt trying to figure out all these stupid cellphone deals? Wouldn't it be simpler if they'd just sell the phones at a reasonable price instead of making you do advanced mathematics every time you want to do a little comparison shopping?
All that I'm suggesting is that if you want to sell interoperable products X and Y, you should sell each of them at a reasonable price and not try to play silly games with your customers. If you do, you may find yourself forced to expend unnecessary resources trying to make your customers to play along.
I agree that the customers don't have a "right" to a free lunch. But neither do the I-opener people. It's not as if Evil Hacker types are cheating them out of their money; people were just buying their product and, GASP, doing something creative with it.
Their plan was to get a "free lunch" by fooling people into believing their product is cheaper than it really is: pay us only $99 now, and you'll pay the rest when you subscribe to our overpriced ISP. They've gotten caught at this stupid trick, and are reacting by tying their customer's hands, instead of just charging an honest price. Why am I supposed to feel sorry for them?
Is it too much to ask that they just charge an honest price and let us do what we want with what we buy? Lots of people would be willing to pay for a reasonably priced X terminal, and if their intended audience isn't going to buy the things without being tricked into it, well, too bad.
Katz in this entire piece has fatally confounded two distinct concepts, Ideas and Expressions.... If you own every expression ever produced by another person, then every person owns every expression ever produced by you.....every Slashdot post you've ever made, no longer belongs to you, and none of the copyright protections apply to it, including some nice ones like "the right to be credited with authorship".
So, you're accusing Mr. Katz of confusing two things (ideas and expressions). But here you're falling into exactly the same sort of trap--you're confusing
the right to make copies of a work with
the right to be named the "author" of a work.
Copyright law, in the US and elsewhere, has something to say about both rights, but it's not true that the two rights are necessarily inseperable. It's perfectly reasonable to imagine a world where you were allowed to copy other people's work as much as you'd like, as long as you attribute it to its correct author.
So you can't say that taking away author's right to prevent copying of their work is necessary to preserve their right to be credit as the author of their work.
---Bruce Fields
(And please feel free to verbatim copies of this post as you like, as long as you do not remove my name or this message....:-))
I'd like to add my own nerdy little nitpick. However, I'm afraid that the unwitting reader may get the impression, from the preponderance here of such nitpicks, that Mission to Mars is a movie that's perfectly enjoyable if you're just willing to suspend disbelief, kick back, and not think too much. So, let me reiterate: the characters are uncovincing; the plot is boring; the movie takes itself much too seriously; despite strenuous efforts your hearstrings will not be tugged; etc. There are, as Jon Katz remarks, a few space scenes with a certain 2001-like elegance. Space-movie buffs will want to see Mission to Mars on the big screen just for that. Anybody else should probably skip it.
Anyway, on with my own little nitpick.
Why is it that the computer displays in movies are always so obviously designed not for the characters who are supposedly using the displays, but for the audience of the movie? Why is it that every single time biologists in movies discuss genetics, they always conveniently happen to be sitting in front of a big color display with a rotating 3D model of a DNA strand? I am in fact sitting right now in a room with two other computer-using geneticists, and both are busily analyzing data. Let's look around. Well, from a few feet away, to be quite honest, they might as well be word-processing. If I look a little closer ('scuse me Gillermo) I can tell there's way too many T's, C's, G's, and A's on the screen, and ok, Sara over there's got a few neat looking graphs up. No animated 3D, though.
Anyway, my favorite moment of graphic display insanity, beside the obligatory double-helix, occurs during the supposedly-tragic moment when a character loses her husband in space. (Of course the movie tries so darned hard to point out how TRAGIC this is that it leaves you numb. But I digress.) Wife makes a foolhardy attempt to jet out to Husband. Her fuel is running low. To make this completely clear to us, she has a little graphic display on her wrist that shows her fuel running down from 70 percent to 60 percent to 55 percent.... OK, I'm willing to accept that there might be such a display, and I'm willing to let the filmmakers exaggerate it a bit so we can see it; I'm even willing to forgive them for the fact that her fuel use appears to be proportional to her change in position instead of her change in velocity. But why, oh why, when the fuel gauge hits 52 percent, must "POINT OF NO RETURN" appear on her wrist-display in big, flashing letters? It wasn't just me, either---the whole theater cracked up.
My point is that that are people that want to use all this great software and ditch the "tiresome" politics of it all, they're called users. You know, those multitudes of people who are currently running Windows98 and who don't hate Microsoft (we can't all be perfect).
OK, now give us a list: how many of your typical user friends have wanted to use free software but have been scared away by RMS? Of the Linux users I know, some agree with RMS, some don't. The ones who agree (myself among them) might refer to RMS's arguments when explaining why they use free software. The ones who don't have other reasons, but I've never heard them say that RMS was an obstacle in the way of their becoming Linux users.
We have to understand that there are going to be people who don't care whether the source code is available or not.
But might it help to have people like RMS trying to persuade them that they should care whether or not the source code is available? If you're trying to sell someone on a particular piece of free software, why not mention, among the other advantages it may have, that it is free? It isn't too hard to explain why this would be an advantage, especially today. How many people do you know who
have experienced the disadvantages of being "locked in" to a proprietary product or format?
have spent lots of money on a piece of software only to find out at the end that it couldn't quite do what they needed it to do, or that they would have to buy more software to make it do what they needed it to do?
have been frustrated by silly copy-protection schemes?
You could argue, perhaps, that open source development methods, or some such magic, insure that open source software will in the long run always be technically superior. Therefore we can just sit back, wait for Open Source to conquer the world, and explain to everyone why this is a Good Thing afterwards. Perhaps this is true, but I'm not so optimistic. Don't forget the advantages enjoyed by purveyors of proprietary software; for example:
It's easier for them to apply for and to litigate patents.
The UCITA may allow them to deny responsibility for defects in their software.
They can use copyright and trade secret law to prevent third parties from writing software that interoperates with their software. The DMCA may make this easier than ever.
Free/open source software will be at a great disadvantage as long as it is impossible to release free/open source software that plays DVD's, that uses standard encryption algorithms, that makes GIF's, that handles popular streaming audio formats, or that drives ecommerce sites. If, in the end, we are able to legally distribute free software that does all these things, then it will be partly because people like RMS have made ordinary computer users aware of political issues.
MuPAD looks OK, but the original post asked for non-proprietary software; as far as I can tell from the website, MuPAD is free-as-in-beer for educational and research use, but is no less proprietary than mathematica or maple.
I'm required to take two calculus classes to get my degree here... which is OK by me with one exception.. we're led to beleive that the calcultor and Maple mysteriously find these anti-derivates to functions which "have no antiderivative" when you use our hand methods of finding them. Of course anybody knows that ANY function has an anti-derivative.. but to find it takes too many calculations to do by hand.
Woah, be careful! Yes, it's true that "any function has an anti-derivative" (well, at least any function that isn't too weird). But it's *not* true that any function has an antiderivative that can be expressed in a sensible way in terms of elementary functions. Your teachers aren't withholding some kind of secret-antiderivative-finding method from you! You really do need to resort to computational methods to find most antiderivatives.
Why can't we have a class on calculus for CS majors alone? Teach us how to "correctly" find the answers to these things... with code... not goofy rules that apply to a small number of practical applications.
That's all antiderivative rules (or integration techniques) are. They're "goofy rules that apply to a small number of practical applications". The silver bullet that you're asking for doesn't exist. There are, of course, lots of algorithms that estimate values antiderivatives numerically--maybe that's what you're looking for. Those too have their limitations, and if you really want to learn about them that's a course in itself. But most calculus courses cover at least a few of those (Simpson's rule, etc.), and understanding the fundamentals of what derivatives and antiderivatives are and how they work is really more important for a first introduction to calculus.
But I'd like to second the recommendation for "Concrete Mathematics"; it's a wonderful book, and worth your time, even if you're not required to read it. And it's fun to read too--lots of jokes and interesting tidbits--just take it slowly and don't expect to be able to read the whole thing at once. The math it covers is particularly useful stuff that tends to fall between the cracks in most introductory mathematics courses, so it would complement your calculus courses well.
Probably you've already thought about this, but have you tried proposing any alternative ways of dealing with the perceived pornography problem? I notice, for example, that the Ann Arbor district library, although it doesn't use "censorware", does have an acceptable use policy which deals with the issue of "disturbing information and images".
I also stumbled across a survey of library policies which has pointers to individual policies of libraries in each state, and also has some statistics (e.g., they say that at that time only 2% of libraries were using filtering software).
Maybe it would be possible to talk someone from the Ann Arbor library, or from some other library in your area, to come and give a presentation about how they arrived at the policies for their library, and how those policies have worked. I bet a lot of people would find it very reassuring to see a local librarian come and say "we didn't use censorware, but we did do this and this and this, and we've had no complaints so far...".
American University law professor James Boyle has a nice article addressing this point ("Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired Censors"), in which he argues that proponents of the idea that the web is uncensorable underestimate the ability of the government to regulate the net, and to enroll private agents (e.g. ISPs) to enforce policy.
I argue that the conceptual structure and jurisprudential assumptions of digital libertarianism lead its practitioners to ignore the ways in which the state can often use privatized enforcement and state-backed technologies to evade some of the supposed practical (and constitutional) restraints on the exercise of legal power over the Net.
Warning: Be prepared for somewhat dense prose, if you're not used to reading this kind of article. It's well worth the effort, though; he certainly changed the way I thought about net censorship. I also recommend the rest of his site to anyone interested intellectual property issues. (If only he'd get rid of that one <blink> tag, arggghh.)
Slashdot Mirror
The original Star Trek is an example of "older science fiction"? Oog. First of all, science fiction is older than 1966; secondly, Star Trek isn't exactly representative of science fiction....
---Bruce Fields
You should perhaps be warned that "Grave of the Fireflies" is extremely depressing. But it's also really good.
For another break from the robots, try "My Neighbor Totoro" ("tonari no totoro", I think). Don't be put off by the fact that it's a kid's movie (and that it's very cute, and that it's spawned a major stuffed-animal industry)--it's much more subtle and interesting than anything put out by Disney. Also, if you're interested in Japan, there's lots of wonderful cultural details--the shots of the countryside, the food the characters eat and the houses they live in, etc.
I don't know anyone (of any age) who's seen Totoro and not liked it.
In general, anything by the same director (Hayao Miyazaki) is worth watching--see "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds" if you're looking for science-fiction, or "Kiki's delivery service", if you can stand more cute kids.
--Bruce Fields
I ordinarily work with 20 desktops (2 by 2 by 5), with at least 8 (usually more) terminal windows open, several Netscape windows open, not to mention another 8 or so emacs windows, and usually miscellaneous other stuff. I've done all this with Enlightenment and GNOME on a system much less powerful than yours--a 300MHz pentium laptop with 64MB RAM. Window and desktop switching is usually instantaneous. Only in one situation has it ever taken anything near as long as your "ten seconds"---when I've been running Netscape for a long time without keeping an eye on memory usage, I find there's some kind of bug in Netscape that can take over most of the RAM and force Linux to spend most of its time swapping. This happens rarely, is easily avoidable (I keep an eye on a memory usage applet in my panel...), easily cured (switch to a text-only virtual terminal and kill all Netscape processes) and has nothing to do with GNOME as far as I can tell.
The moral I take from this story is to mostly ignore statements (mine included) about software speed from individuals speaking purely from their own experience on one machine; performance can vary so much depending on the peculiarities of your hardware and software configuration that generalization from one or two experiences is pretty useless. The only reason to pay attention is if someone has broader experience and a persuasive explanation of the behavior they've witnessed.
--Bruce Fields
Um, could someone explain the difference between the two?
Also, let's do a thought experiment: let's say every company and individual that made a significant contribution to the kernel code inserted a "sponsored by" message into the boot sequence. How useful would those boot messages continue to be? This just isn't the place for advertisements (oh, excuse me, announcements of sponsorship).
Just curious--anyone know how they're dealing with the LZW patent? Last I heard, it looked like the gimp itself was on shaky ground by handling gif's. I suppose it wouldn't be that difficult for them to get a license for use on their own site, though. Ho hum.---Bruce F.
This is an interesting situation; most of us seem to agree that the availability of proprietary DVD-playing software for Linux doesn't really cut it.
Now how do I explain this to my aunt?
Before we could just say that reverse-engineering CSS was necessary to enable us to create a Linux-compatible DVD player. With this no longer the case, we can now say "we need a free/open source DVD player"; but then we need to explain what "free" and/or "open source" mean, and it gets harder; a wrong choice of words could lead someone to believe (mistakenly) that, for example, we're just cheapskates who want everything for nothing.
So here's a challenge: who can come up with a single sentence, say no more than 20 words, which explains why a propietary DVD player for Linux is not sufficient?
I suppose "Linux-based DVD player" doesn't necessarily have to refer to a program that runs under Linux; could there be hardware DVD players that use Linux as part of the embedded software??? Bizarre.
--Bruce Fields
http, gnutella, ftp, whatever.... They're all just different ways of shoveling bits around cyberspace. There are lots of bits out there, and lots of uses to which they can be put; I use all of these bit-shovels all the time, and, personally, I have no interest in downloading South Park, Brittney Spears, or anything else I could get legally in a much more convenient format from a local store.
It looks to me like the Gnutella protocol provides particularly interesting ways of moving bits around, and I see no reason why its applications should be no less varied than those of, say, http.
Maybe all you do with your fancy new computer is download Britney Spears all day, but I'm disappointed if that's the only use you can imagine for any of this.
--Bruce Fields (currently using his "fancy new computer" to post to Slashdot, so he shouldn't be so critical)
Note that that's "free as in free beer"--before downloading, you're required to agree to a license that prevents redistribution.
Nothing against this product, I'm sure it's great, I just think it's important to clear this up for those that care about these nuances....
---b.
Yeah, I know, and that's another "trick" of the same genre. We're so used to things being sold this way, we're inured to it, so it's easy to forget the whole point of this exercise: they're trying to play silly games to make their products appear cheaper than they really are, and to make it more complicated for you to figure out how much their product is really going to cost you in the long run.
Don't you find it's a pain in the butt trying to figure out all these stupid cellphone deals? Wouldn't it be simpler if they'd just sell the phones at a reasonable price instead of making you do advanced mathematics every time you want to do a little comparison shopping?
All that I'm suggesting is that if you want to sell interoperable products X and Y, you should sell each of them at a reasonable price and not try to play silly games with your customers. If you do, you may find yourself forced to expend unnecessary resources trying to make your customers to play along.
---Bruce Fields
Their plan was to get a "free lunch" by fooling people into believing their product is cheaper than it really is: pay us only $99 now, and you'll pay the rest when you subscribe to our overpriced ISP. They've gotten caught at this stupid trick, and are reacting by tying their customer's hands, instead of just charging an honest price. Why am I supposed to feel sorry for them?
Is it too much to ask that they just charge an honest price and let us do what we want with what we buy? Lots of people would be willing to pay for a reasonably priced X terminal, and if their intended audience isn't going to buy the things without being tricked into it, well, too bad.
---Bruce Fields
So, you're accusing Mr. Katz of confusing two things (ideas and expressions). But here you're falling into exactly the same sort of trap--you're confusing
Copyright law, in the US and elsewhere, has something to say about both rights, but it's not true that the two rights are necessarily inseperable. It's perfectly reasonable to imagine a world where you were allowed to copy other people's work as much as you'd like, as long as you attribute it to its correct author.
So you can't say that taking away author's right to prevent copying of their work is necessary to preserve their right to be credit as the author of their work.
---Bruce Fields
(And please feel free to verbatim copies of this post as you like, as long as you do not remove my name or this message....:-))
I'd like to add my own nerdy little nitpick. However, I'm afraid that the unwitting reader may get the impression, from the preponderance here of such nitpicks, that Mission to Mars is a movie that's perfectly enjoyable if you're just willing to suspend disbelief, kick back, and not think too much. So, let me reiterate: the characters are uncovincing; the plot is boring; the movie takes itself much too seriously; despite strenuous efforts your hearstrings will not be tugged; etc. There are, as Jon Katz remarks, a few space scenes with a certain 2001-like elegance. Space-movie buffs will want to see Mission to Mars on the big screen just for that. Anybody else should probably skip it.
Anyway, on with my own little nitpick.
Why is it that the computer displays in movies are always so obviously designed not for the characters who are supposedly using the displays, but for the audience of the movie? Why is it that every single time biologists in movies discuss genetics, they always conveniently happen to be sitting in front of a big color display with a rotating 3D model of a DNA strand? I am in fact sitting right now in a room with two other computer-using geneticists, and both are busily analyzing data. Let's look around. Well, from a few feet away, to be quite honest, they might as well be word-processing. If I look a little closer ('scuse me Gillermo) I can tell there's way too many T's, C's, G's, and A's on the screen, and ok, Sara over there's got a few neat looking graphs up. No animated 3D, though.
Anyway, my favorite moment of graphic display insanity, beside the obligatory double-helix, occurs during the supposedly-tragic moment when a character loses her husband in space. (Of course the movie tries so darned hard to point out how TRAGIC this is that it leaves you numb. But I digress.) Wife makes a foolhardy attempt to jet out to Husband. Her fuel is running low. To make this completely clear to us, she has a little graphic display on her wrist that shows her fuel running down from 70 percent to 60 percent to 55 percent.... OK, I'm willing to accept that there might be such a display, and I'm willing to let the filmmakers exaggerate it a bit so we can see it; I'm even willing to forgive them for the fact that her fuel use appears to be proportional to her change in position instead of her change in velocity. But why, oh why, when the fuel gauge hits 52 percent, must "POINT OF NO RETURN" appear on her wrist-display in big, flashing letters? It wasn't just me, either---the whole theater cracked up.
Oof.
--Bruce Fields
OK, now give us a list: how many of your typical user friends have wanted to use free software but have been scared away by RMS? Of the Linux users I know, some agree with RMS, some don't. The ones who agree (myself among them) might refer to RMS's arguments when explaining why they use free software. The ones who don't have other reasons, but I've never heard them say that RMS was an obstacle in the way of their becoming Linux users.
But might it help to have people like RMS trying to persuade them that they should care whether or not the source code is available? If you're trying to sell someone on a particular piece of free software, why not mention, among the other advantages it may have, that it is free? It isn't too hard to explain why this would be an advantage, especially today. How many people do you know who
You could argue, perhaps, that open source development methods, or some such magic, insure that open source software will in the long run always be technically superior. Therefore we can just sit back, wait for Open Source to conquer the world, and explain to everyone why this is a Good Thing afterwards. Perhaps this is true, but I'm not so optimistic. Don't forget the advantages enjoyed by purveyors of proprietary software; for example:
Free/open source software will be at a great disadvantage as long as it is impossible to release free/open source software that plays DVD's, that uses standard encryption algorithms, that makes GIF's, that handles popular streaming audio formats, or that drives ecommerce sites. If, in the end, we are able to legally distribute free software that does all these things, then it will be partly because people like RMS have made ordinary computer users aware of political issues.
---Bruce FieldsMuPAD looks OK, but the original post asked for non-proprietary software; as far as I can tell from the website, MuPAD is free-as-in-beer for educational and research use, but is no less proprietary than mathematica or maple.
Woah, be careful! Yes, it's true that "any function has an anti-derivative" (well, at least any function that isn't too weird). But it's *not* true that any function has an antiderivative that can be expressed in a sensible way in terms of elementary functions. Your teachers aren't withholding some kind of secret-antiderivative-finding method from you! You really do need to resort to computational methods to find most antiderivatives.
That's all antiderivative rules (or integration techniques) are. They're "goofy rules that apply to a small number of practical applications". The silver bullet that you're asking for doesn't exist. There are, of course, lots of algorithms that estimate values antiderivatives numerically--maybe that's what you're looking for. Those too have their limitations, and if you really want to learn about them that's a course in itself. But most calculus courses cover at least a few of those (Simpson's rule, etc.), and understanding the fundamentals of what derivatives and antiderivatives are and how they work is really more important for a first introduction to calculus.
But I'd like to second the recommendation for "Concrete Mathematics"; it's a wonderful book, and worth your time, even if you're not required to read it. And it's fun to read too--lots of jokes and interesting tidbits--just take it slowly and don't expect to be able to read the whole thing at once. The math it covers is particularly useful stuff that tends to fall between the cracks in most introductory mathematics courses, so it would complement your calculus courses well.
Probably you've already thought about this, but have you tried proposing any alternative ways of dealing with the perceived pornography problem? I notice, for example, that the Ann Arbor district library, although it doesn't use "censorware", does have an acceptable use policy which deals with the issue of "disturbing information and images".
I also stumbled across a survey of library policies which has pointers to individual policies of libraries in each state, and also has some statistics (e.g., they say that at that time only 2% of libraries were using filtering software).
Maybe it would be possible to talk someone from the Ann Arbor library, or from some other library in your area, to come and give a presentation about how they arrived at the policies for their library, and how those policies have worked. I bet a lot of people would find it very reassuring to see a local librarian come and say "we didn't use censorware, but we did do this and this and this, and we've had no complaints so far...".
American University law professor James Boyle has a nice article addressing this point ("Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired Censors"), in which he argues that proponents of the idea that the web is uncensorable underestimate the ability of the government to regulate the net, and to enroll private agents (e.g. ISPs) to enforce policy.
Warning: Be prepared for somewhat dense prose, if you're not used to reading this kind of article. It's well worth the effort, though; he certainly changed the way I thought about net censorship. I also recommend the rest of his site to anyone interested intellectual property issues. (If only he'd get rid of that one <blink> tag, arggghh.)