[Verba] Last Meeting Summary :-(

[Stuart D. Gathman]

	Copyright Law

Somehow we started out with a discussion of Copyright law and fair use.
No, it is not OK to give copies of CDs to your friends without 
permission.  Yes, it is OK to make copies for your own use, including 
copying to different formats for Car, Ipod, etc.  Internet friendly 
publishers often due give permission for limited copies.  I showed

http://magnatune.com 

as an example.  MP3s from that site be copied according to a
Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) license:

http://magnatune.com/info/openmusic

Mrs. Brown - I happened to have a copy of Magdalena with me:

http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/joglaresa-magdalena/

These are Medieval hymns in Latin (a few in old French).  Good
practice for Latin students.  You (and students) can play and download the MP3s
free of charge, but the "non-commercial" clause on the CC license I think
means you need to buy a license for the school to play the songs
for the students as part of school:

https://magnatune.com/artists/license/?artist=Joglaresa&album=Magdalena&genre=World

We then discussed the DMCA and the case of "DVD Jon":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Johansen

who didn't actually spend time in Jail as I alleged (although someone
else did for similar charges).

	Permutations

No one else had come up with a permutations program, so we reviewed
mine.  (Attached).

	Intelligent Design

Somehow, permutations led to a discussion of the difference between
complexity and "specified" complexity, and then to the philosophical 
basis of materialism.

	Summer School

   Reading

I loaned "Adventures in Group Theory" to Jillian, and Rebecca
currently has "The Equation that Couldn't be Solved".  My new copy
of "G÷del, Escher, Bach" arrived a few minutes after I left for Ad Fontes :-(
I am reserving it for Computer Club members.  My old copy I already
loaned out it turns out.

GEB is directly related to computing - and should take precendence
over the group theory books for learning programming.  Group theory
is a "problem domain" (as well as being interesting and several
Club members being Rubik's Cube fanactics).

   Hands On

A big road block for the club was learning to handle shell prompts / command
prompts and basic system administration like creating directories / folders
(and finding them again).  My (probably ambition) recommendation is for
students to spend their entire summer going dumpster diving for junk PCs,
refurbishing them, and installing free/open software on them (e.g. Linux).
They will become confidently familiar with BIOS settings, hardware diagnosis
and repair, boot sectors, partitions, file systems, firewalls, etc.  :-)

I'll probably have to settle for something less ambitious, if anything - like
maybe an old system lying around the house, or installing an extra disk
drive for dual booting between Windows and Linux.

On that note, Taylor has obtained an external 10G firewire disk drive
for his Mac Mini.  His project is to install PPC Linux on it.  Way
to go Taylor!  (Here's hoping you don't accidentally wipe your OSX disk.)

-- 
	      Stuart D. Gathman <stuart at bmsi.com>
Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
"Confutatis maledictis, flamis acribus addictis" - background song for
a Microsoft sponsored "Where do you want to go from here?" commercial.
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def permute(s):
  if not s:
    yield s
    return
  if type(s) is str:
    for i,first in enumerate(s):
      for cc in permute(s[:i]+s[i+1:]):
	yield first + cc
  else:
    for i,first in enumerate(s):
      first = [first]
      for cc in permute(s[:i]+s[i+1:]):
	yield first + cc

for x in permute('abc'):
  print x
for x in permute([1,2,3]):
  print x