The RIAA filed a motion to dismiss Felten's lawsuit.
I'm also told that the motion for rehearing en banc of Eldred v. Reno (now Eldred v. Ashcroft) was denied.
John Doerr apologized for his famous "largest legal creation of wealth" comment!
I had a productive day at the EFF.
Happy Yellow Pig Day. (It's Tuesday.)
In honor of Yellow Pig Day, here is a proof Nathaniel Smith sent me yesterday:
The proof that c (the cardinality of the reals) is equal to the cardinality of the power set of the naturals (or integers, or whatever) is actually pretty fun. Knowing you, I'd have guessed you'd heard it already, but your diary leaves some doubt, so I feel compelled to describe it. Also, it's so pretty that I can never resist telling people about it at the slightest excuse. Of course, being a cardinality argument, it's mind-bendingly simple and hence takes less space than this whole disclaimer...The basic idea is to use the binary representation of reals (say between 0 and 1), padding finite expansions with an infinite number of zeros, and take these as bit-strings. (So 0.4 decimal is "010000...".) These, then have a simple bijection to subsets of the natural numbers -- if the nth digit is a 1, put n in the corresponding subset. (So 0.4 decimal maps to {2}). These is obviously bijective, so, there you go.
Of course, I cheated -- the mapping to bitstrings isn't quite bijective. It's ye olde 9's problem -- just like 1 = 0.9999..., the binary representation of a real number is not necessarily unique. This is possible to get around (there are only countable numbers with this problem (those with terminating binary representations), so it's easy but irritating to fiddle room for them), but boring -- the fun part is the bitstring to subset trick.
The continuum hypothesis tattoo that I saw at DEF CON did contain an error. Alas!
Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov (note: not "Dimitry" or "Skylarov") gave a presentation at DEF CON on Sunday. I almost attended that presentation, but I went off at the last minute to take care of some other things. On my DEF CON program, it's circled as one of the things I was interested in attending.
The following day, as he was about to board a plane to return to Russia, Sklyarov was arrested in Las Vegas. He's charged with criminal violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for the program which was the subject of his DEF CON talk. This program defeats the copy protection on Adobe e-books; it appears that Adobe got the FBI involved.
Apparently Sklyarov has been transferred to prison in San Jose; I'm trying to get information on attending his court hearings.
I've created the free-sklyarov mailing list. Free Dmitry Sklyarov!
The EFF press release links to my free-sklyarov list.
[BitTorrent developer Bram] Cohen is just one of thousands of hackers, would-be hackers, consultants and federal agents who gather at Defcon each year for a rollicking good time and the chance to share alcohol, ideas, and -- for the luckier ones -- casual sex in one of the suites of the Alexis Park Hotel.("Defcon Keeps Hackers Hooked", July 16, 2001)
That's an interesting description of the event.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
