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Math

Do Subatomic Particles Have Free Will? 608

An anonymous reader sends in a Science News article that begins: "Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest amount of free will, then atoms themselves must also behave unpredictably." Standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, of course, embrace unpredictability. But many physicists aren't comfortable with that, and are working to develop deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics. Conway and Kochen's proof argues that these efforts will be fruitless — unless one is willing to give up human free will, in a very strong sense. The article quotes Conway: "We can really prove that there's no algorithm, no way that the particle can give an answer that is unique and can be specified ahead of time. I'm still amazed that we can actually manage to prove that."
Wireless Networking

Submission + - wireless freedom is gone in San Francisco

WARNING WARNING WARNING writes: an Francisco has come to an agreement with Internet Service Provider (ISP) Earthlink that will see the city by the bay turned into a giant, free hotspot. Interestingly, the values of Earthlink are directly opposed to the values of San Francisco. As it turns out, Earthlink is owned and operated by Scientologists, and Scientology calls for genocide against what the cult's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, calls "anti-social" personalities. http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?Article ID=8126 http://www.xenu.net/
The Courts

Submission + - A shadow lies upon all BSD distributions

Alan Trick writes: "Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected.

The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good new is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed.

At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."
The Media

Submission + - ArsTechnica Admits Greenpeace is a Fraud

DECS writes: RDM ranked the Greenpeace Toxic Apple campaign among the top ten Apple myths of 2006 for the group's intentionally tainting headlines with misleading tales about Apple to get donations and free publicity for itself.

Considering that Greenpeace will no doubt be panhandling at MacWorld, here's a four step plan for recovering from a Greenpeace brainwashing, following the experience of ArsTechnica's Mary E Tyler
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Sealand put up for sale

antic writes: The Principality of Sealand is up for sale. The 550 square metre steel platform boasts "uninterrupted sea views", complete privacy and has been mentioned on Slashdot in the past for its offers of hosting outside the jurisdiction of (some) traditional laws.

ABC News has more

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