http://www.ed.gov/pubs/RegPrivSchl/nebraska.html:
Private, denominational, and parochial schools, K-5, must devote at least one hour per
week for stories of American history and American heroes, singing patriotic songs and
memorization of the Star Spangled Banner and America and the development of reverence for
the flag and proper conduct in its presentation. In 2 grades from grades 5-8, private,
denominational, and parochial schools must devote at least 3 periods per week for American
history from approved textbooks, taught to make the course interesting and attractive, and
to develop a love of country. In at least 2 grades of every high school, 3 periods per
week must be devoted to civics, including the constitutions of the United States and
Nebraska, the benefits and advantages of our form of government, the dangers and fallacies
of Nazism, communism, and similar ideologies, and the duties of citizenship. Appropriate
patriotic exercises must be held for Lincoln's birthday, Washington's birthday, Flag Day,
Memorial Day, and Veteran's Day. Nebraska requires that all of these history courses
stress contributions of all ethnic groups in the growth of America, art music, education,
medicine, literature, science, politics, government and war service. Neb. Rev. Stat. §
79-724
[...]
Private, parochial and denominational school teachers must give special emphasis in their
instruction to common honesty, morality, courtesy, obedience to law, respect for the
national flag, the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of Nebraska,
respect for parents and the home, the dignity and necessity of honest labor, and other
lessons which promote an upright and desirable citizenry. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 79-725.
(Although you might not have realized it, many states impose requirements much like
these on public schools. Fairly few apply them to private schools as well.)
Confusingly, if you hear a radio engineer talking about DRM, it might be
Digital Radio Mondiale, a standard
for digital AM radio.
Schneier's
Crypto-Gram is
getting flagged as spam by
Razor. The reason is that some
spam-detecting software will try to automatically detect spam and
then automatically report it. So somebody's SpamAssassin mistakenly
concludes that a copy of Crypto-Gram is spam and reports it to Razor,
and this happens a few times over; now everyone who uses Razor
will automatically be advised that Razor considers Crypto-Gram to be spam!
This is also happening to the EFFector. I'm really concerned that opt-in
announcement mailing lists are not surviving the widespread and somewhat
careless use of spam filtering tools. As soon as just a few people
mistakenly think that a legitimate announcement is spam, thousands of
other people are going to have their software's behavior reflect that
incorrect judgment.
Anyway, after cryptographers eat their Heavenly Hash ice cream, they
get those
Bit Commitment
Blues.
Graydon and some other
people are having a discussion on Advogato
about formal methods.
Graydon writes:
a proof, on the other hand, is another formal object in a much larger "space" (a
linguistic space in which machine state spaces, and some parts of your preferred maths
or logics are basic terms). the sort of proof you are interested in is one which
relates your program's text residing in memory at one point, to a (good or bad) region
of machine state space which is implied by the program, via a logic whose rules you
like.
any test can be translated into a proof in a silly logic easily: the proof is simply
the trace of your processor executing your program's code on your test's input, and the
logic is one in which each machine transition that happened is an axiom. but that proof
is boring.
an interesting proof is one which is much smaller, when written down, than the sum of
all the tests which you would need to write to fill the machine state space bounded by
the proof. in this sense, I really believe Chaitin is onto something when he talks
about proofs as nothing more than a form of "higher order data compression", and the
value of a given formal system as the amount of compression it commonly admits over
interesting data.
so, getting back to mbp's comment, certainly you can produce a very large set of
(formal) bugs which nobody's compressed inside a proof yet, for any program you care to
mention. but I do not think this means that all, or even a sizeable majority of those
bugs will admit "no further compression" if the author puts their mind to it.
raph's suggestion that we design programs "the way we'd want to prove things about
them" is, seen in this light, a suggestion that we design programs "in a way which
admits a lot of compression".
Recently, I linked to a document about software-defined radio and
security.
John Gilmore's criticism of the same made it to the IP list.
Having a whole generation of young people grow up full of knowledge
about engineering, computers, and networking is a wonderful advance in
the state of humanity. The authors of the paper apparently see it as
a drawback, since they depend on their customers being ignorant.
Marc Perkel has some nice
Share-in
pictures (see also
the second
and
the third
set of these). I show up in some of them, and they seem to capture the atmosphere
pretty nicely.
Lots of people have written self-reproducing programs -- programs which
print themselves out when run -- in various languages. (These programs
are often called quines.) I wrote a quine in Python before I knew how
to program in Python, and I also wrote a quine in Scheme which works
in LISP and turns out to be identical to a pretty well-known LISP quine.
Most quines are based on the approach which is used in Ken Thompson's
Reflections on Trusting
Trust. That is, they define a blueprint which contains a blank
space and then print out the blueprint, substituting the blueprint
itself for the blank space.
The C version looks kind of like this:
int main(){char *Q="int main(){char *Q=%c%s%c;printf(Q,34,Q,34);}";printf(Q,34,Q,34);}
(That might not be Thompson's version exactly; I wrote it by porting a
Python quine based on Thompson's original C quine back into C. Here
the "blank space" is the printf escape sequence "%c%s%c" and the
"blueprint" is the string Q.)
The approach of the Scheme quine is slightly different, but seems
closely analogous: it's kind of
print-followed-by-itself-in-quotes "print-followed-by-itself-in-quotes"
although the "print-followed-by-itself-in-quotes" is actually written
out explicitly as
(lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x))).
One English equivalent might be
Say twice "Say twice".
Hofstadter discusses some English parallels (a variety of
self-reproducing and "self-documenting" sentences) in Metamagical
Themas.
My challenge is this: Can you write a quine in the computer language
of your choice which does not use the approaches described
above?
As promised, this is a sed script to try to collapse
Unix paths by eliminating "." and ".." and "//". (For
example, we can turn "/foo/../bar" into "/foo/bar".)
See if you can improve it at all. I hadn't known about
the sed command "t" (or, indeed, pretty much any sed
command other than "s"), and it certainly helped save
me from a few traps.
:start;
# /../ --> /
s:^/\.\./:/:; t start;
# /.. -> /
s:^/\.\.$:/:;
# roughly foo/bar/../baz --> foo/baz plus other cases
s:[^/]\+/\.\./\?::; t start;
# roughly foo/bar/./baz --> foo/bar/baz plus other cases
s:/\.$:/:; s:/\./:/:; t start;
# // --> /
s://\+:/:g; t start
If this stands up to careful testing, we might put it into
gar to prevent problems where some programs compiled under
gar expect to be installed in "//bin" and the like. (If
you have a nightly
build of LNX-BBC, you can see this problem by doing
"strings /bin/* /usr/bin/* | grep //".)
A great restaurant in the Mission is Minako Organic Japanese
at 2154 Mission. They have a lot of vegetarian Japanese food,
and it's really, really good. Praveen had a birthday party
there which turned out to be an immense feast (not to be
confused with an
immense
Fthà).
Why does the private sector consider "cyber-" kind of quaint and
overused and retro but the government still continue to use it
all over the place? They are referring to the Internet
as "cyberspace", and they are using coinages like "cybercrime"
which used to be the stuff of mainly somewhat sensationalistic
journalism. Has anybody else noticed this?
There are lots and lots of them, but happy birthday at least to
Biella, Praveen, and Wolfgang.
At the Share-in, I talked with Fred for a while and tried to
understand the intricacies of U.S. copyright law in its
application to musical works.
Below is my current understanding, but any errors in it are mine
and not Fred's! I'm pretty sure I've made some mistakes in this.
The complexity begins with the fact that there are two separate
copyrights associated with much recorded music -- a copyright in
the composition and a copyright in the recording.
For any given copyright, there are several different rights which
copyright law grants to the holder of that particular copyright.
(Frequently, the holder of the copyright in a composition will
not be the same as the holder of the copyright in a recording of
that composition.) The rights reserved by law to copyright
holders include a right of reproduction (copying) and a right of
public performance (playing or performing in public), among others.
So, to start off:
-
There is a public performance right in a composition; this is licensed
for most copyrighted songs by ASCAP or BMI. This is not a compulsory
license -- a copyright holder can say "no" -- but ASCAP and BMI signed a
consent decree which regulates the license, so it is a license
whose terms are regulated by the government. Some people think the
consent decree approximates what a compulsory license would look like
if there were a compulsory license for public performance of
compositions. A song author does not have to be represented by ASCAP
or BMI, but they do represent copyright holders of the majority of
songs. So if you want to sing a copyrighted song before a crowd,
or on a street corner, you are supposed to have a license from ASCAP
or BMI or otherwise have appropriate permission from the copyright holder.
Singing a song in public will be considered a public performance; that
includes singing it in a restaurant, which is why many restaurant chains
will not sing "Happy Birthday" but will instead sing some other song of
their own composition (or "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow").
-
A public performance is not itself copyrighted because it is not fixed
in a tangible medium; if you make a recording of a performance, that
particular recording is subject to copyright. (A side issue is who
holds the copyright in that particular recording, but I won't go there
right now.)
-
There is a reproduction right in a composition; this is licensed by
Harry Fox Agency. This is what you use if you want to record a
"cover" of a song written by someone else. There is a compulsory license
which you can use if you want to cover a song and make your own recording
(and then you can sell or give away as many fixed copies as you like,
paying the statutory royalty or the Harry Fox Agency royalty on each --
but you will still not be able to play that recording in public without
a performance license).
-
There is also a copyright interest in duplication of the
composition itself (without actually performing or recording it --
e.g. by photocopying lyrics and scores). I don't think there's
a compulsory license for that, but there may be a method to collect
royalties and permit this with low overhead in many cases.
-
There is no public performance right in a sound recording; if
you have a sound recording of a work which is not subject to copyright,
you may play it in public without any permission or royalty!
(The copyright holder for the composition will have a claim against
you if you haven't paid the appropriate performing rights organization
like ASCAP or BMI for the license for public performance of the
composition. But it seems that if the composition is not copyrighted,
as with most classical music, then there is no license necessary for
public performance at all.)
-
There is a reproduction right in a sound recording and there is no
compulsory license for this. So if you buy a CD, you are not allowed
in general to copy it (although of course there are reasons to copy the
CD which could be fair uses). But if you play it in public, or
broadcast it, the record label does not have a claim against you.
-
There is a special "digital public performance" right in a sound
recording if you make a broadcast of the recording using a digital
streaming technology. This right is only recently created and is
an exception to the general rule that there is no public performance
right in a sound recording. There is a compulsory license for it;
the terms of this license are the subject of the controversial
CARP proceeding. The royalties for major labels are collected
by SoundExchange.
-
Traditional radio stations never had to pay record labels for
their broadcasts, but they did have to pay composers (via ASCAP
and BMI). The record labels were entirely uncompensated, and,
in fact, frequently bribed the stations to play a particular
work ("payola"). (Many people involved did feel that the radio
stations were performing a service for the labels by playing
music, and labels continue to spend tremendous amounts of money
to try to induce radio stations to play their recordings on
the air.)
-
Internet radio stations enjoyed the same terms as terrestrial
radio stations until 1995 when the digital performance right
was created; now they are treated differently, perhaps because
of the convenience and wide geographic reach, perhaps because
of the ability of listeners to exercise greater control over
what they hear, and perhaps because of the ability of listeners
to make reasonably high-quality recordings of particular works
in an automated way which identifies, segregates, and labels
the recordings. Or maybe the distinction is purely political.
-
Internet radio stations considered the arguments of the RIAA
(that it was unfair to use music without paying them for it)
strange because terrestrial radio stations have never had
to pay the record labels for the corresponding activity.
There might have been a sense of "you've been giving payola
to terrestrial DJs to broadcast your songs as often as
possible, and never charging them a penny for any of their
broadcasts, and now you call us thieves because we broadcast
your songs too?".
[Main]
Contact: Seth David Schoen
