@ #30:

While I despise the entertainment industry's copyright tactics, I think that you're being a little too hard on them here, and that an unbiased view would probably be somewhere between yours and Kyle's.

The researchers found that copyright bots are scanning BitTorrent swarms of infringing torrents. Because participating in such a swarm generally
- is unauthorized
- makes copies the entire work, and
- decreases the work's market value,
there is probably no fair-use exception of any kind for anyone actively participating in the swarm. As such, if the swarm is advertised accurately, the participants are probably all infringing.

Now, the tracker is giving out a list of IPs which purports to be a list of everyone actively participating in the swarm. Of course, it contains some errors, between research bots, MediaSentry noisebots, the copyright bots themselves, dynamic IP addresses, and framed laser printers. But after removing known copyright bots, the rate of these errors is probably be very low, less than 1% (I sucked that out of my thumb, but I'd be shocked if it was more than a couple percent).

If I'm right about the accuracy here, MPAA indeed has a good-faith belief (what is required to file a DMCA notice) that the IPs in the swarm are infringing, at least if they have verified that the swarm is distributing what it claims.

That said, universities and other providers should be aware that DMCA notices only convey good-faith belief, and shouldn't discipline their students on the basis of DMCA notices alone. Furthermore, perhaps Big Entertainment should be required to have something stronger than a good-faith belief that some work is infringing before taking it down.

@post: It's an entirely reasonable thing for the US government to want, though I'd expect the CIA to be more involved than the Air Force. Whether it's useful to the citizens of this great nation, well, probably not...

Getting access to just about any computer wouldn't be that hard, either. A recent paper suggested that they could put it in every new CPU for about 12,000 gates, which is trivial if they strongarm or bribe Intel. And that's to say nothing of basic software bugs.

@#5: Hackers will only adapt if they detect the attacks. Presumably the government would either use the attacks slowly and discreetly to gather intelligence, or unleash them suddenly at the beginning of a war.

@#8: So how 'bout them Debian SSH keys? I hear there are about two hundred thousand of them...

I personally don't see why people consider performance enhancement to be wrong. Certainly, most performance-enhancing drugs today wreck your body and/or mind, which is a good reason to restrict or ban them. But if a perfectly safe, effective, reasonably-priced performance-enhancing drug with no significant negative side effects came onto the market, why shouldn't we use it? I mean, we condone the use of other mind-altering substances, like alcohol and caffeine, and those have negative side-effects.

Sports fans point out that competition forces everyone to use the drug, just to maintain an even playing field. But if it gives the crowd a better show, and this is offset only by the cost of the pill, it could easily be worth it.

In the academic world, this is even more true, as researchers purportedly make lasting contributions to human knowledge. Why shouldn't they be allowed to make better contributions? Because it would be unfair to people who choose not to do so?

The one remaining problem that I can see is that it would widen the gap between rich and poor in an area where that gap is already too wide. This is a serious issue, but I think that it could still be worthwhile.

@#17: I'm not going to argue that speed should be an accepted way to get ahead academically, but have you heard of Paul Erdos?

@#9: I'm pretty sure that the magnetic field of a permanent magnet does not store a particularly large amount of energy. So you can't really power anything with permanent magnets.

That's not to say this guy has a perpetual motion machine. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and bamboozling a physics professor is not extraordinary proof.

When I was in high school, we had graphing calculators, but our math/chem/phys/econ/etc teachers cleared them before every test to prevent cheating. (This was back in the days of purely ram-based graphing calculators, like the TI-83, 86, etc.)

Now I was a math geek, so for me, the real purpose of a graphing calculator was to play tetris, galaga, mario etc after finishing the exam in 10-20 minutes. But I couldn't do that if my calculator was cleared, and it was often handy to have one for quick arithmetic.

So I wrote up a TI-86 assembly hack which prevents the memory from being cleared by meddling with the menu callbacks. When you try to clear the memory, it dims the screen and writes "Mem cleared. Defaults set." just like an unmodified calculator, but it doesn't actually clear it.

The local tetris league loved it, because we could use our calculators on quizzes and still face off afterwards over the link cable. The program could easily be used to cheat, but I don't know if anyone actually ever used it for that.