Older blog entries for schoen (starting at number 142)

mwh, cool, and thanks! I didn't think of using logarithms at all (I was trying to put together an inductive proof using the binomial theorem).

Once you've taken the logarithm of both sides, the proof that the logarithm of the average is larger than the average of the logarithms seems pretty easy.

I think there is an interesting analogy there to a famous picture from nuclear physics, the curve of binding energy per nucleon in an atomic nucleus -- the graph that shows that fusion of nuclei below iron or fission of nuclei above iron can yield energy, and that iron nuclei are the most stable. ("Everything wants to be iron.") If you look at the region of that curve which shows where fusion occurs, you see that the average (arithmetic mean) energy is greater when you move to the right, in the increasing direction, toward iron. The curve is everywhere concave downward, so that in its increasing region, between hydrogen and iron, the average energy of the sum of nucleons (into a single nucleus) is always greater than the sum of the average energies of nucleons (in separate nuclei).

Where the curve is decreasing (but still concave downward), between iron and infinity, the average energy of the sum of nucleons is always less than the sum of their average energies in separate nuclei.

So, with the arithmetic and geometric mean inequality, after you've taken the logarithm of both sides, the problem is quite similar to explaining how the curve of binding energy shows which nuclear reactions will release energy as a result of changes in mass deficit.

Sorry if that wasn't completely clear; it's very difficult for me to talk about the curve of binding energy without having one handy to point at.

In other news

I had a great dinner with a bookseller couple in Berkeley.

On Friday, my friend Anirvan took me to see a pair of documentaries at a movie theater in Berkeley. Called "Showdown in Seattle" and "Breaking the Bank", they concerned two major U.S. demonstrations of the past year (the WTO protest in Seattle and the World Bank protest in Washington, DC). The two of these were probably the most distressing thing I've seen in years, and definitely "Showdown in Seattle" was the most violent movie I've seen in a long time.

I could probably write about these two documentaries for pages, and I probably will, but maybe in a letter rather than on Advogato.

After that, and once I could breathe again (I discovered that watching pictures of people getting teargassed does interesting things to my autonomic nervous system), we went to a post-election party at Sumana's place, and it was very geeky and a lot of fun. I got to cite Martin Gardner on voting paradoxes, and we played Hangman, and various other things.

Hi, Anirvan, Sumana, Michelle, Nathaniel. Did I miss anybody?

I stayed over in Berkeley and got up extremely early to make a 3.5-hour trip from Berkeley to Santa Rosa by way of San Francisco. I'm still yawning and falling asleep intermittently.

I was in Santa Rosa because I was invited to attend a technology planning meeting for Sonoma Academy, a new independent high school which will open next year. (Non-U.S. readers: an independent school is a private, i.e. non-tax-supported, competitive-admission, tuition-based school which isn't affiliated with a larger organization like a religious denomination.)

The meeting was pretty cool. We covered a lot of ground, and I met some nice people. It's amazing to be in a situation where people are talking about computer technology and they aren't even considering using free software -- in fact, they haven't even heard of free software! Most of the people at the meeting assumed that the school would be using Microsoft Windows for all its computing.

All the other computer people I've met in recent memory were free software deveopers, or free software advocates, or the like. I have pretty much entirely stopped interacting with technologists outside the free software world. (The notable exception was Dave Winer; lilo and jpick and I met him at the Moscone Center, and that was interesting.) So it's kind of a shock to have this reality check, like, not only do these people not assume that they will use Linux or another free PC Unix, but they assume instead that they will use Windows 2000 or another proprietary Microsoft operating system.

I guess it's like spending a couple of years in a somewhat insular religious community and then venturing outside momentarily.

If I have any further influence in the concrete decision-making for Sonoma Academy's IT policy, I'll try to get them to consider Linux for all their new servers and maybe for some lab machines, too. But I think I made some useful general points completely outside of the free software issue, on the subject of the role of information technology in high school education. So even if they go with Windows everywhere, I hope my general points will have had an effect.

Sonoma County is pretty beautiful, like much of California, but I was either asleep on a bus or engrossed in conversation about LBL each time I was passing through, so I didn't actually get to see much of it.

I think I had better become a teacher or something.

It's gotten cold recently, in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Santa Rosa alike. I guess I'll have to start wearing socks and a jacket or something.

Tired, headache, too much writing about CIDR, too little sleep. I hadn't realized to what extent netmasks were already a pervasive concept before CIDR; but there weren't netmasks in border routers (or at least not dynamic routing protocols), and there wasn't prefix notation, right?

I taught a Python class again and I dragged in digital roots for some reason -- I couldn't resist. "Hey, what's 37533094858041282253294 % 9? Hey, no paper, now!"

There are some nice memory tricks if you can do various running-total mod n calculations in your head. I saw Arthur Benjamin do one of those once when he performed at UC Berkeley; it was awesome.

Can anybody tell me a good way to get to Santa Rosa from San Francisco on Saturday?

deekayen, one time I told a Christian friend that I thought I'd experienced koinonia at a CABAL meeting, but she didn't really believe me.

In other news

It looks like the sugar substitute "Sweet'n'Low" is named after a line in a poem by Tennyson.

Sure enough, it is.

I've had distressingly little math around here recently. Hmmm... so I wondered why the arithmetic mean of two numbers must be larger than their geometric mean.

I proved it for two numbers; now I'm trying to prove it for n numbers.

apgarcia, one of several difficulties in the Wager is the account of the nature of belief that it presumes.

Can we really believe that belief is a matter of choice and that this choice can be taken upon factors unrelated to the content of the belief or to evidence for it?

Pascal suggests that we have to choose whether to believe in God, but his account of the nature of that choice is really suspect. He presents it as sort of a question of whether we want to live in one city or another city, knowing that the consequences might be extremely serious (perhaps more serious than the consequences of any other choice).

I don't see belief as formed that way!

In other news

Hooray, no force of law for administrative classification in the U.S. (no "official secrets act"). I'm actually totally amazed that Clinton vetoed that bill; I thought there was almost no chance of that.

Lots of turmoil and reports of old turmoil that I didn't know about in the anti-censorware community, currently centered around the Censorware Project and spilling over into other things. It's very sad.

Somehow I always think that only the bad guys have these things happen to them.

I spent a lot of Saturday with a friend wandering around, including an excursion to Green Apple Books in the Inner Richmond (6th and Clement; take the 1 bus to 6th and California from downtown). That was cool. Now I have Martin Gardner's most recent book (Did Adam & Eve Have Navels?).

I might go to my friend's place for Thanksgiving, which is fast approaching. I haven't been one for big family holidays in recent memory, but it should be cool to see how someone else's family does it.

stephane's party was pretty neat and seemed to have the TikiNature. I had a good time, and got home late. A lot of people with Advogato accounts were present, with large Eazel and Linuxcare contingents. I was going to post some quotations from the party here, but I've forgotten all of them!

OK, "we could get out some Cat 5 and start knitting" seems to have been one.

Stephane's cat Pixel is very cute.

So, happy birthday, Stephane, and happy Guy Fawkes Day, everybody.

ajv, I know about that chicken-and-egg problem; I gave a talk on IPv6 where I described it, and, in the year and a half since then, it doesn't seem to have gotten any better. Lots of people take IPv6 seriously, but few of them seem to be ISPs.

One incentive problem is that there are very few IPv6-only services, and, as a matter of policy and practice, people providing services over IPv6 normally don't want to make them IPv6-only. Consequently the people who want IPv6 are all kind of networking geeks; the transition mechanisms like 6over4 and 6to4 and all the rest have really reduced some of the urgency that people might feel!

I mean, it's now easier and less painful, but there isn't any big reason for people to worry about being "left behind"! That may be one reason they don't feel themselves in a hurry.

A world-wide multiprotocol network at the network layer is something that hasn't existed for some years; it's an interesting thing but also a sort of painful thing. In the best case, if your efforts are successful, that is the best we can look forward to for a while!

GJF, I don't think Richard Stallman would appreciate being called a "well known open source evangelist".

In other news

There's more Daniel Burton campaign coverage in the Daily Cal.

It's funny with what equanimity the reporter covered the story -- it seems she was probably given an assignment to track down all the candidates on the ballot for the office, interview them, and give them all equal space to tell their respective stories in their own words. Accordingly, Daniel gets just as much respect (and space) as Aroner, but there's no news analysis discussing the difference between them.

It seems that Linus Torvalds has written a book, an autobiography, called Just For Fun, forthcoming from HarperCollins.

It also seems that Wells Fargo Bank statements are bearing a notice that

EFFECTIVE 12/01/00, THE FOLLOWING HAS BEEN ADDED TO THE DEPOSIT AGREEMENT: YOUR WELLS FARGO ATM/ATM & CHECK CARD OR INSTANT CASH/CASH & CHECK CARD MUST NOT BE USED FOR ANY UNLAWFUL PURPOSE (FOR EXAMPLE, FUNDING ANY ACCOUNT THAT IS SET UP TO FACILITATE ON-LINE GAMBLING). YOU AGREE YOU WILL NOT USE YOUR CARD OR ACCOUNT FOR ANY TRANSACTION THAT IS ILLEGAL UNDER APPLICABLE LAW.

I wonder why Wells Fargo did that, but it doesn't seem that kelly is around much to comment. It reminds me of some license issues that have come up and that I've been involved in. Of course, bank deposit policies are not exactly open source licenses.

I went to the BayFF meeting at the Moscone center. The meeting was a little scattered. There were three panelists (Scientology critic, reporter, law professor) talking about free speech and intellectual property on-line. I think I might have spotted the Church of Scientology representative. That issue is a bit less good-natured than "Spot the Fed" at DefCon.

I saw dmarti, Tabinda, crackmonkey, and shaleh there (the latter was accepting an award on behalf of Debian).

dmarti has had an excellent idea called antipackages (which perhaps shaleh will be implementing in Debian): a package with only conflicts, no dependencies, no provides... just conflicts!

Why would you want such a useless thing?

Well: task-no-cleartext-login-daemons, task-no-x11, task-no-gnome, task-no-kde, task-no-lzw, task-no-mp3, (once upon a time) task-no-unlicensed-rsa, task-no-strcpy (or task-no-non-bounds-checking-string-functions; this is problematic because there are safe ways to use these functions and maybe some very important software uses them safely), task-no-games (Don says that's useful for U.S. government procurements). In principle you could have task-no-nonfree (or task-no-semifree and task-no-proprietary), but that's already handled in a different way by Debian (by only shipping free software).

The cool thing is that you can upgrade antipackages to new versions, just like any other packages. It's just that their conflicts will be updated; nothing else will change.

This is a very convenient way to set a policy that a particular category of software should not be installed somewhere. And that policy won't be accidentally overridden by a dependency; instead, the system administrator will be specifically warned about the conflict, and will have to make a choice.

I also have a task-no-outstanding-security-flaws idea, as a way to remove automatically anything with a reported security flaw until its maintainer can fix it (and release a new version, which task-no-outstanding-security-flaws no longer conflicts with). I'm not sure this is an ideal solution, but it's an interesting application of package management.

I've got a rice cooker now. That is (at first impression) a terribly useful appliance. Mmmmm, carbohydrates!

My stepsister is engaged to be married. I hope I can make it to her wedding.

The MathWorld lawsuit makes me sad. Just in case anyone wanted to claim that copyright was about "protecting authors", we have further evidence that it's all about money (and of course a lot of the time that money is, well, given to authors).

(Protecting authors in the sense of getting people to abide by their wishes isn't the be-all and end-all either: there are various cases of successors in interest trying to withdraw or suppress old controversial works which are still under copyright. Or even authors themselves trying to do that. I would welcome news of more examples of this.)

The even worse thing is that I have actually bought a copy of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics -- and it's great, of course -- but now my habit of linking to MathWorld is ruined.

But they cannot help their neighbors,
That's not good, hackers, that's not good.

I wrote a long answer to a question about the calculation of pi. That was fun.

Quick Python hacks I wrote as part of my answer include a Monte Carlo calculation and a Riemann sum calculation. Yes, I know these are horribly inefficient ways to calculate pi, but they illustrate important theoretical concepts (two particular techniques in numerical methods for approximating definite integrals).

The Bailey/Borwein/Plouffe algorithm is totally mind-blowing. There are so many people I wish were alive to see that. Arbitrary digits of pi in any base calculated directly, without any intermediate digits!

Today is my first Python class at Linuxcare. This should be fun. Also, teaching a class is really the best possible way to learn about something; I submit that even Guido van Rossum himself has probably learned more Python by teaching other people than by writing the Python interpreter.

Gee, Al Gore is still capable of quoting the Clipper Chip announcement!

I'm no longer a Kaiser Permanente client, and I'm pretty pleased about that.

I've got on-line queries working in my CueCat book scanning stuff. So you can scan a book and have the LOC database queried immediately. In principle, I could easily do asynchronous (background) queries; in that case, there should be lockfile support so that scanning a particular book twice doesn't result in two simultaneous queries writing into the same file.

The main thing that's missing is the ability to start a new session if the LOC query session expires in the middle. Right now, I can't even detect that condition -- it was pretty much impossible for batch queries, but for real-time queries it could easily happen if you just leave the program running for a while and then come back and try to scan something else.

My friend in Teach for America in Mississippi writes

how can I expect these children to be able to analyze the effect of enzyme concentration on the rate of the reation it catalyzes if they don't even know how to calculate an average?

The phone line thing didn't work out that well. Say you're building an apartment complex in the South of Market in San Francisco in the late 1990s. On one side of you is Pac Bell; on another side of you is Best Internet; on another side is Pac Bell again. In a two-bedroom apartment, do you

(a) have two pairs of Cat 3 copper, encased in concrete, with no conduit (and a policy against exterior wiring), or

(b) have eight or ten pairs of Cat 5 in a conduit with easy access to pull more copper or fiber?

Guess which one my apartment complex chose?

So I got a pager instead of a phone line.

stephane, woohoo!

Waldo, congratulations.

paci and davidw, good luck.

In other news

I wish I were qualified to handle liquid nitrogen.

I looked at the SFPD Crime Summary For October 6 - October 12, 2000. It seems that the dramatic emergency response outside my window that weekend was due to an AGGRAVATED ASSAULT WITH A KNIFE.

I've got voicemail working at work, and now PacBell is coming on Wednesday to set up my phone. This is better telephone luck than I've had in a while.

Jim Warren noted ages ago that identities of those who request public records are themselves public records (as a general rule); this is interesting, and maybe it should serve as a precaution to people contemplating making CPRA or FOIA or similar requests.

I'm eating some Double Rainbow Soy Cream recently. "40% Less Fat than Ice Cream" doesn't help much if you eat twice as much of it!

I wonder if I could get Herrell's to introduce a non-dairy ice cream. I should remember to ask about that. Hey, if you're reading this, and you read a later entry indicating that I'm in Northampton, would you mind dropping me an e-mail message to remind me to ask about non-dairy ice cream?

I've announced a Python class at Linuxcare (Thursday noon). I've already got five or six people planning to attend.

heu

Skip to the end of my diary entry, if you'd like (about 1800 words). (This is the longest diary entry I've written this month, I think.)

Latin

lilo, things in Latin normally requiescunt in pace (in peace) rather than in pacem (into peace). You can also wish that your old car requiescat in partes -- rest in pieces. :-)

"Pacem" is used in prayers for peace ("dona nobis pacem", not necessarily far from the Kaddish Shalem) and the intensely controversial quotation "Si vis pacem, para bellum" (if you want peace, prepare for war). Some peace activists during my lifetime have suggested "Si vis pacem, para pacem" (if you want peace, prepare for peace) instead.

"Throwing up our hands"

stefan, here is the beginning of what I wrote about "throwing up our hands", with some changes. It's too long, but I know I glossed over some important things anyway.

Phil Agre wrote one of his essays about his limitless frustration with libertarians, pointing out that lots of libertarians obsessively avoid the idea of "designing" or "consciously choosing" anything. I should try to find that essay; it was very good, although I didn't think it quite reached my own objections.

If we talk about social problems as engineering problems (a powerful metaphor, an influential metaphor, obviously far from the only metaphor through which the left understands social problems), then clearly it's appealing to bring to bear some engineering-like methods (conscious choice!) to try to resolve or mitigate these problems.

Libertarian writers like Hayek and von Mises who were aggressively attacking totalitarian arrangements like Stalinist central planning pointed out (among other things) that social engineering has unintended consequences. So it doesn't always work, or often may not work as intended.

Then such writers sometimes added theoretical reasons to suggest that social engineering almost never works and typically achieves the exact opposite of what it sets out to do. I don't understand those theoretical reasons, and I think that part of the case was enormously overstated (although of course I have more political agreement with these writers than economic agreement).

I mean, some very naive central planning enthusiasts might have suggested in Stalin's day that all social programs can be solved directly and completely by engineering methods. Obviously those people were not engineers. :-) But it seems that a Hayek-style attack is most effective against somebody who believes that public policy is perfectly effective and never has harmful unintended consequences. Real engineers don't normally think of real engineering that way, or else they should be reading comp.risks.

Against "engineering problem" metaphor, there are a number of different attacks. In normal engineering problems, there is some actor (an engineer or engineering staff) knowledgeable, capable, and authorized to act to remedy the problem. If social problems are thought of in these terms, Hayek, say, hammers away at the "knowledgeable and capable" part, whereas I would be much more stressed out about the "authorized" part. Normal engineers almost always get to choose the means they think best to solve a problem, because the subject matter of their engineering doesn't implicate other moral concerns.

(As a side note, I should point out that this is wrong, a lot of the time, but engineers have yet to realize that, so we can pretend it's right.)

Social engineers (in the metaphor) are engineering with (not merely for) groups of people -- so that even given that they are "knowledgeable and capable", there are huge concerns about the morality of the means they choose.

(But progressives and libertarians already disagree about whether certain means are allowed -- so maybe phrasing the problem this way doesn't help, or maybe what I've said is already obvious.)

For example, libertarians, as individualists, normally consider individual choice sacrosanct, so that overruling it is wrong, even if overruling it is an appropriate engineering solution to a genuine social problem. (I don't have much patience for the claim that there is no such thing as a genuine social problem: just because society is an abstraction doesn't mean that it isn't a useful abstraction for understanding problems. That doesn't mean I'm willing to use that abstraction for other purposes.)

In other words, would-be social engineers are enormously constrained, because they probably lack legitimate authority to employ most of the means which would seem appropriate to them (and which, ineed, might be broadly effective).

If you think of the Prisoner's Dilemma, libertarians will insist that people who end up at the lower right should be allowed to stay there instead of forcing them to the upper left (although that's not the whole story) -- so how do you get everybody to the upper left corner without forcing them? I grant that things could be much better (in the utilitarian sense) and it's possible to get closer to that through conscious choice.

And libertarianism permits (please, not "produces") mutual defection in many situations where progressivism might forbid it.

Somebody wrote a recent book about two strands of thought in the liberal tradition dating back to the Enlightenment (and portions of which are older). One of these is rational ordering of things, and the other is individual sovereignty or autonomy. People have started to notice (obviously this author is far from the first to do so) that both of these are a part of the liberal tradition and yet that they're often in dramatic contrast.

Sometimes (frequently, it seems) the rational order fails to just appear (and what to blame for that is itself a subject of endless political debate -- greed, culture, human nature, advertising, a lack of education, the essential bankruptcy of the liberal tradition, states' policies or propaganda, foreign or domestic subversion, or "time and chance" per Ecclesiastes).

The liberal tradition's answer to this is probably that you need to produce the rational order through education and not indoctrination or coercion. I think lilo might feel less attacked by graydon if the former reflected on the latter's reluctance to suggest that cell phones should be banned: just, I think, that maybe we don't all absolutely need them. [After a few days, graydon emphasized that he didn't have a political agenda in mind, but rather a suggestion.]

As someone who's just recently given up on cell phones for a while, I could endorse that. :-)

But obviously people have different lifestyles and some people might have more use for certain items or (thinking of Phil Agre again) institutions than others. I'm sure that in most of these areas (from what graydon wrote) graydon would be happy to see people simply being more reasonable and reflective, less gratuitous and frenzied.

[Speaking of sub-issues, how about the difference between "there is such a thing as technological progress, and it is important and frequently beneficial to humanity" and "people all need to consume a lot and have a fast-paced lifestyle"? I think it would be nice to separate these two, and maybe others.]

So the outstanding issue about the "education alone" idea is in part that some people say it doesn't work (it's not enough) and some people say it will take a long time and some people say it's simply not being practiced at all.

Where education doesn't work, libertarian liberals would suggest that you simply give up (and perhaps try to mitigate the problems indirectly, or to escape from them), because you are not allowed to use other means to effect social change, lest you should compromise individual autonomy.

Progressive liberals would suggest that you consider some other means as well, provided that you have appropriate motives and/or appropriate safeguards.

I'm enthusiastic about education for lots of reasons -- in this context because it's the largest common ground between libertarians and progressives. [...]

In other news

I got a green FSF shirt in the mail, completing my collection (beige, maroon, black, green) -- and then I lost it.

Oops, davidm goes by davidm here and not dmandala.

The MIT Museum Shop seems to have stopped carrying slide rules. Shame!

The transition back to PST is very convenient. I trust all the other U.S. time zones made it OK, too. :-)

I read The Forge of God by Greg Bear. That's the first science fiction novel I've read in several months; I was disappointed in the ending (things rapidly get more and more "far out" and extreme, and it's not a happy ending by any stretch).

It's funny how science fiction writers manage to get together what would be called an adventuring party in role-playing games, and how normally most of them are brilliant scientists and their spouses; then there are some politicians or military leaders, some soldiers, and at least one smart kid. So The Forge of God did that.

The book also had some scenes taking place at an "American Geophysical Society meeting in San Francisco", which brought back some memories for me (although it's actually the American Geophysical Union).

plundis, take care and good luck.

Bay Area book collecting

Some really good news is that Black Oak Books of Berkeley has bought out Columbus Books at 540 Broadway in the City, and is opening up a third store (the second one is at 630 Irving, near Golden Gate Park).

Now, Black Oak is an excellent used book store (though some people think their prices are high, they have really nice inventory). Columbus Books is a just-OK used book store with a very large space and an impressive number of subject areas, but very uneven quality. So under Black Oak management, I think they will become consistently great.

But the really cool thing is that Columbus Books is just one block from the famous and also excellent new book store City Lights Books, so North Beach is going to become a fantastic area for book shopping, with an excellent independent new book store only a block away from an excellent independent used book store.

There's also Carroll's Books, about two blocks from City Lights; they're small, but I like them. (Used only.)

Something I'd like to do is go book-hunting with some friends again, by announcing in advance an all-day book hunt on a Saturday. I had a really pleasant itinerary like that with Sumana (hi, Sumana) one day earlier this year, and it would be a nice thing to repeat.

The backbone of that trip would probably be Stacy's (new), Alexander (new) City Lights (new), Black Oak III (used), Carroll's (used), Books Inc. (new), Green Apple (used), Green Apple (new), some bookstores down along near Van Ness (used), A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books (new). There are other possibilities. Lots of other possibilities.

For Berkeley: ASUC or CTE (textbooks), Cody's (new), Moe's (used), Shakespeare (used), Cartesian Books (used), then on Solano the surviving Half-Price Books (used) and Pegasus (used). The challenge is to fit in conveniently The Other Change of Hobbit (sci-fi), Pegasus on Shattuck, and Pendragon (among others) on College. College in particular is in the opposite direction from Solano.

So I should announce that I'm doing this on some fine clear Saturday and see who wants to come along.

Lots of changes at Linuxcare, again.

rachel, I also heard it doesn't rain in California, so I also feel betrayed: this isn't supposed to happen, I'm in California!

I wish jimd and dmandala luck in their new jobs. Friday was the last day for each of them at Linuxcare. I wish some other people luck in their new jobs, too -- those caught me more by surprise.

I missed Daniel Burton, Libertarian Not For State Assembly on KQED-FM Thursday evening. It's a pity; I wanted to see how the Republican and Democrat would react to competition from an anarchist. I hope they didn't laugh; as Penrose says, "whatever they should have done, they should not have laughed".

Where can I get bumperstickers made? I think, in retrospect, I want some "Daniel Burton, Libertarian Not For California State Assembly" bumperstickers (not that I have a car). Or even better: "Daniel Burton, Libertarian Against California State Assembly".

I was actually at a Linuxcare dinner (during which I got to talk to mbp on the phone, though I couldn't hear him that well) which turned out to be at a restaurant right around the corner from a Starbucks where a friend works. So that was a nice co-incidence, and I dropped by and rode a bus back to Market Street with her.

I wrote a message about why there are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and 360 degrees in a circle -- another friend asked. I love that stuff; I think the history of calendars is the coolest thing ever (almost).

I also bought a copy of The Inner Game of Tennis, a controversial book of sports-training psychology, solely because Doug Engelbart praised it extensively in a documentary Brian Harvey showed in CS 61A at Berkeley.

Useless Telco! I still don't have my phone line, because they "weren't informed that [my] roommate already has a telephone line in that apartment" (as they said to crackmonkey when he answered the line in question).

lilo, I still work at Linuxcare. But you can't call me because I don't have any working phone!

Did anybody notice that censorware opponents got one of only two exemptions to the DMCA anticircumvention rules granted by the Librarian of Congress? They may use (but not traffic in) circumvention devices to find out what censorware blocks.

"I hate the DMCA, it makes this song illegal..."

Waldo, I see you noticed that. I disagree with you that it's a good thing from the DMCA. Why? Because the Library of Congress did not, and can not, declare that something like CPHack is legal: all they said is that the DMCA's anticircumvention provisions are not a particular legal theory under which people can be sued for creating programs like that.

There's still trade secret law, unfair competition, breaches of contract (heh!) and even traditional copyright law. Remember that the DMCA wasn't even mentioned in the Cyber Patrol case as providing a cause of action.

We now know that, until 2003, the DMCA won't provide a cause of action in any censorware case like that -- but that doesn't mean that there aren't other causes of action out there.

I had a general comment about the lilo/graydon exchange, and it was directed to stefan, on the subject of "throwing up our hands" and strands of thought in the liberal tradition.

But I think I'm a bit late with that because lilo and graydon are continuing to go back and forth on this. So I'll hold on.

Two really good friends came to visit Friday, so that I got to talk to them for a long time and even walk out to the lovely San Francisco Art Institute with them. SFAI might be a little more lovely when it's not in session, though. :-)

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