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Ricky Lee's (large) thesis Creating a Practical Legal Framework for the Commercial Exploitation of Mineral Resources in Outer Space

Oh great, just what we need to help open a new frontier; massive piles of regulation.

Ricky Lee's (large) thesis Creating a Practical Legal Framework for the Commercial Exploitation of Mineral Resources in Outer Space

It would be drawing a long bow to insist that all students read sci-fi, but there is an alternative. At Murdoch University, in Perth (WA, Australia) all first-year students are required to take a foundation unit in first-year to get their study skills up to scratch. One of these (by far the most popular) is called "Life and the Universe" and explores a range of science-related themes with a pretty good selection of sci-fi texts.

By comparison with the rest of my undergrad degree (BSc Biotechnology) it was pretty fluffy, but it served its purpose well, and the reading list was broad and fun.

It was a very long time ago when I did this, but the course is still running. Now, obviously I'm not saying everybody should migrate to Western Australia (I, myself have migrated away) but a course of this nature provides both a taste of sci-fi from a range of authors and also a useful underpinning for later studies.

Look, this is silly. Take the example of what happened to Napster: in the end of their court battle, the court found that they didn't qualify for the "safe harbor" provisions of DMCA [which is exactly what would happen if Flickr decided to ignore DMCA notices]. Since they didn't qualify, the court ordered them to "monitor the activities of its network and to block access to infringing material when notified of that material's location" [which seems to be in part what you want Flickr to refuse to do]. They couldn't (or wouldn't) do that, so they had to completely shut down.

So, you can make all the analogies you want, but in the end, if Flickr (or anyone else) doesn't want to comply with DMCA notices to remove (allegedly) infringing material, eventually they will have to be completely shut down. Of course, it's not automatically "take down the picture or completely shut down" -- that would be silly. But the point stands -- without being protected by the "safe harbor" provisions and willingness to "remove infringing material when notified of the material's location", it's impossible to continue to work, as was shown in the Napster case.

I was struck by the remark in the OP regarding attitude from an Australian university. I was under the impression that most of them have no problem with cross-platform support these days. Certainly my alma mater has done so for many years, although I did have one cretinous lecturer who insisted on embedding much of his course content in Shockwave apps. But the IT department was perfectly happy to support any system that handled TCP/IP.

It's little better in Australia, where "serious" federal-funded universities have courses in Chiropractic. The UK is worse.

Maybe the problem is that we don't have a good terms to differentiate between appropriate reuse of one's own writing, and unnaceptable reuse.

It always used to make me chuckle to find textbook references cited as "personal observation" in journal articles written by one of my university's professors. Most scientists can't get away with that. But if you are as much of a bigwig in your field as he was, I guess it's not as arrogant as it might seem.

I didn't say the EU banned EULAs, I said it banned that specific clause.

No contract trumps the law, unless you enter an 'agreement' to allow it beforehand. Which you did by accepting the EULA.

No. See:

Standardized terms found in pre-printed documents, however, rest upon an entirely different dynamic. One party writes standardized terms for a vast and anonymous market. The parties neither negotiate nor agree to most pre-printed terms. There is no pre-contract time period during which the parties engage in give and take to reach compromises. Except for a few terms, such as price, product description and method of payment, standardized terms do not embody a fusion of the parties' wills or represent a "meeting of their minds."

http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v10n2/burke102_text.html#Chapter%20Four%20-%20The%20Great%20Schism:%20Reality%20and%20Law_T

As an example, I am sure no (non-consumable) product, like a computer or a TV, can have less than two years of warranty when sold in a country that's part of the EU, regardless of its EULA.

CLU drew on the lessons learned with both Alphard and Vers. Alphard was from CMU and written by Wulf and Shaw, Wulf also writing the famous BLISS. Vers was made by Jay Early, whose parser was hugely important in all the compilers of the time. THe language itself (and its V-graphs) was heavily influenced by the Mem-theory of Anatol Holt (who was on the Alogl Committee and was a principle in designing the astonishing GP and GPX systems for the UNIVAC - first languages to explicitly feature ADTs per se. That became ACT, the adaptable programming system for the Army's Fieldata portable computers (portable in a completely different sense to the modern usage. He also hated Unicode, but that was a rival programming system back then. So reading the reports at the time can be misleading - "don't use Unicode on Portable Computers!"). Holt's ideas permeate computing, the notion of making any system of data representation as abstract as possible goes back to him.

CLU was written using MDL (pronounced muddle) which was a protoreplacement for LISP which featured ADTs. MDL was cowritten by Sussmann of LISP fame as a basis for PLANNER which became Scheme, and perhaps more geekly interesting is that is was also used for writing ZIL (and if you don't know about ZIL, you shouldn't be reading Slashdot)

CLU evolved into Argus, but the ideas were also used in the Theta programming system for the Thor OO database, and was also in PolyJ which was (as it suggests) a Polymorphic Java

Another fascinating development of the CLU ideas the SPIL system that Liskov co-wrote at the USAF-sponsored MITRE corp, which was in turn used for writing the VENUS operating system

Liskov has pioneered the notion of abstraction per se in language design for 40 years, and this generics-based approached is now taken for granted. She fully deserved the award for her insights as well as for her determination in fighting the reductionism represented by previous recipients (eg Dijkstra) although opposed by others (eg Iverson)

I have extracts for reports for all language of these on the HOPL website HOPL.murdoch.edu.au (too many URLs to paste in individually). Find CLU http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=637&name=CLU and follow the genealogy links. And if you haven't yet seen my 4000-strong programming-language family tree it is worth printing out for wallpaper if you have an A1 plotter.

I work on z/OS in COBOL, et. al. Most of the posts in this thread labeled "informative" are anything but.

There is a difference between a system design and an implementation of that design in a particular programming language. If the design is bad, the implementation is bad regardless of programming language.

Like most programming languages, COBOL is suited to some tasks and not to others.

I think it's a pretty safe bet that the intersection of the set of problems for which COBOL is a good fit and the set of problems for which Perl is a good fit is empty.

Someone in this thread bemoaned the fact that COBOL doesn't include a library of things like linked lists. Of course it doesn't, they aren't needed for the sort of problem you solve with COBOL.

COBOL does have built-in support for check-protect printing, fixed-point arithmetic with rounding on request, and binary table searches.

This isn't to say you can't do idiotic things with pointers in COBOL, just that most COBOL programmers have the good sense to solve a business problem in an efficient and maintainable fashion without resorting to such foolishness.

As far as the plaintive cry of "no one teaches COBOL any more," apparently no one can use google any more.

In all jurisdictions, police officers who commit criminal acts can be tried under the criminal law.[170] The fact that they are not prosecuted more frequently is arguably another cost of exclusion and sends the message to both the police officer and the community that criminal conduct by police officers should be tolerated. As long as the exclusion of evidence is seen as a suitable substitute for personal accountability, police officers will continue to avoid responsibility for their actions, resulting in two crimes rather than one going unpunished.

I just found a very interesting paper published in the Murdoch University Journal of Law: Suppressing the Truth: Judicial Exclusion of Illegally Obtained Evidence in the United States, Canada, England and Australia. Some highlights:

The United States of America is the birthplace of the 'Exclusionary Rule', an absolute rule of evidence which, with a few exceptions, forbids illegally obtained evidence from being admitted in a criminal trial. However the rule is not an independent entity existing for its own sake.[2] It exists solely as a means of enforcing the people's right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[3] While other means of enforcing the right have been suggested from time to time, the United States Supreme Court has decided (amidst strong dissent) that the exclusion of unconstitutionally seized evidence in subsequent criminal trials is the only effective means of enforcement.

The drastic consequences of the Exclusionary Rule are obvious. The fact that excluded evidence would be likely to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt of the defendant's guilt is not relevant to the issue of exclusion. As a result, harsh criticism has been leveled at the rule for as long as it has been in existence. In 1923, Dean Wigmore referred to the rule as 'misguided sentimentality'[29] saying ...it appears indifferent to the result of making justice inefficient, ... coddles the criminal classes of the population... and regards the zealous officer of the law as a greater danger to the community than the unpunished murderer or embezzler or panderer.[30]

Until recently, the Canadian approach to dealing with illegally or unfairly obtained evidence was firmly 'inclusionary'. The leading case was R v Wray[35] where the Court held that a trial judge had no discretion to exclude evidence of substantial probative value because it was illegally or unfairly obtained. Any discretion to exclude admissible evidence was 'limited to evidence gravely prejudicial to the accused, the admission of which is tenuous and whose probative force in relation to the main issue before the court is trifling.' [36] Consequently, illegally or unfairly obtained evidence could only be excluded when its prejudicial effect outweighed its probative value or where it was either irrelevant or unreliable.[37] However, the position changed significantly following the adoption by Canada of its Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982.[38] This is because the Charter did not follow the narrow view expressed by the majority in R v Wray, but instead adopted the wide view of judicial discretion favoured by the minority.

One of the more vocal critics of the post-Charter move towards a more exclusionary rule of illegally obtained evidence can be found on the bench of the Canadian Supreme Court itself. In the 13 years since Collins, Justice L'Heureux-Dub, has been in frequent dissent in many of the decisions involving the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence, particularly in cases involving reliable real evidence necessary to establish the guilt of persons accused of serious crimes. [59] She also differs from her colleagues on the bench by her insistence that what may 'bring the administration of justice into disrepute' must be viewed from a community rather than a judicial perspective.[60] She charges the Supreme Court with 'fashioning what has proved, in at least a wide spectrum of cases, to be an extremely aggressive exclusionary remedy' in direct opposition to the original intent of the framers of the Charter who were attempting to fashion 'a cautious exclusionary rule where evidence would be refused only in relatively extreme cases'.[61]

Historically, the English position on

Well as some one from New Zealand living in Oz ( and I quite like it, don't get me wrong ), who's law is also derived from the England, I can say Australian law concerning the internet has always been a bit backwards. It's not so much the unions, it is the government. I can say that's better than it was, but there have always been astounding decisions regarding the internet.

http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v11n3/beyer1 13_text.html someone suing and winning against a publisher in another country (over defamation), but as it was viewed in Australia it was valid.

and even http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/copyright-ruling-pu ts-linking-on-notice/2006/12/19/1166290520771.html linking to copyrighted information is on notice.

The people and OMG the girls are amazing! the government,internet & prices are not not so much.

Well, it is an irony, indeed. But at least, comparing C to Cobol, C is younger and
then _more modern_ than Cobol :)
Take a look at this this

12 years younger is less than nothing (lol)!

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/06/05 4240&from=rss Australia's own DMCA.
http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v11n3/beyer1 13_text.html People suing and winning against a publisher in another country, over what was said about him, as it was viewed in Australia it was valid.
and how about http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/copyright-ruling-pu ts-linking-on-notice/2006/12/19/1166290520771.html and today we get no linking to copyright material.

Don't get me wrong, Australia is doing very well, but it is backward compared to new New Zealand when it come to the internet.

Some background on the treaties. Interesting thing is that the US has signed, but the Senate has not yet ratified. After the debacle over the Geneva Conventions and the recent history of backing out, I can't imagine it will ever be signed into law.

A few years ago I was working at my university's IT helpdesk while I finished my degree. Here is one of many incidents. There's a userfriendly.org cartoon based on this though I don't have the URL handy.

This is, approximately, my 15th attempt to post this past the fucking lameness filters. WHAT ARE THE JUNK CHARACTERS GIVE ME A CLUE.

From: Julia [mailto:@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, 5 January 2002 10:34 PM
To: helpdesk@student.murdoch.edu.au
Subject: Re: Only 20 days remain until your email account will be
deactivated.

Dear Help Desk

Regarding your above mentioned email, I am very concerned that you will
deactivate my personal hotmail email account. The email address I am using
is my personal hotmail account which I do not want deactivated by Murdoch
University.

Please do not cancel this email address. I would appreciate a reply email
to let me know that my personal hotmail account is safe and that you will
not be deactivating it.

Thank you.

Julia Taylor.
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: Click Here

***

From: Student IT Helpdesk
To: 'Julia '
Subject: RE: Only 20 days remain until your email account will be deactiva ted.
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2002 11:51:08 +0800

Hi Julia,

Unfortunately, Murdoch University's long-term plan to take over the world
has not yet reached the hotmail acquisition stage. As such, the email you
received is referring to your Murdoch University student email account (eg:
j.@student.murdoch.edu.au ).
You have set your preferred email address in MyInfo as your hotmail account
- as such, all email received by your student account is being forwarded on
to your hotmail account. That is why you received the deactivation notice
there.

Hope this clears things up,
Regards,
Richard @ Student IT Helpdesk.

---
Student IT Helpdesk
Murdoch University
Email: helpdesk@student.murdoch.edu.au
URL: http://wwwstudent.murdoch.edu.au/
Contact: (+61 8) 9360 2000
Hours of operation: 8.00am - 5.00pm Mon-Fri (+08:00 GMT)
---

***

From: Julia [mailto:@hotmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 9 January 2002 1:13 AM
To: Student IT Helpdesk
Subject: Email Account

Hi Richard
Wonderful news! Thanks very much.
Julia.

Originally in Fortran

This is a huge suck-job, which is actually doing something meaningful. If it were a RIAA product, it would be being advertized everywhere, as the "THE GREATEST ORGIASTIC SWINGING EXPERIENCE OF ALL TIME," and would be turn out to be just another hand-job, and ... bring your own hand.

Back to topic, a little Googling failed to turn up more detailed data, even at the research institution sponsoring the study, the University of Western Australia Murdoch University, see here. I did come across the images of something else of interest on Rottnest Island, the quokka, which is not only more dignified and intelligent than the typical RIAA-oid, but a lot cuter, too.

Hi. Sorry to help him burst your fantasy bubble there pal, but you are so ignorant and you picked such bad examples that, well, I couldn't resist:

Tell me, is there a serious cultural movement to ban birth control in Japan? (I'm going to laugh at you if you say there is.)

If by "birth control" you mean "the pill" (and not, say, abortion) then you might be surprised to learn that it was not available in Japan until 1999.

Any gay people crucified on fences over there? No?

Homosexuals in Japan may not adopt or marry. While a fantastically unrealistic concept of homosexuality is tolerated in Japan, sometimes even esteemed, real homosexuality is almost always kept very discreet and is considered shameful by most. The disparity in "acceptance" of homosexuality between the rural and urban areas is even more stark than your colorfolly-worded description of the same issue in the US.

Any other ignorant fantasies about Japan you'd like shattered?

(I enjoyed that more than I should have, sure, but slapping morons is so fun.)

See for yourself tonight: http://www.mcc.murdoch.edu.au/pubtalk/2005/j_malco lm.html

Surpulus AN/UYK-7 case, preferably with ferrite core memory modules and control panel, for admittedly perverse case-modding project.
No real interest in programming the thing in CMS-2, just want it for a conversation piece.

Incomplete, and thus inaccurate. Nanotechnology is likely to make petrochemical synthesis from alternative raw materials possible, and alternate materials may partially replace plastics. (Pla However, the key difficulty in replacing oil is that it is a pre-existing compact form chemical energy storage. Nanotechnology might concievably produce a replacement energy storage technology-- although the high energy profit ratio and reasonable energy density of gasoline make this somewhat questionable. However, if you are using nanotechnology to synthesize a form of energy storage, you still need the energy as an input in one form or another. Nanotechnology is primarily materials science; it does not provide new energy sources.

A space elevator is highly unlikely to be developed before it is rendered unnecessary by other nanotech-based technology.

Um? A space elevator allows for access to space via a Conservative system. Unless losses to entropy are far higher than projections for fullerene conductors indicate, there is NO more long-term economical way for bulk materials space transport; the costs are prinicpally capital set-up costs, of which the bulk are projected for the initial semi-orbital space deployment... of just the sort that a beanstalk can ameliorate.

Furthermore, large scale space solar is the ONLY kind of energy source capable of sustaining humanity to a Singularity scenario, barring a suprise in a GUT breakthough well beyond what is expected at this point from string theory models. Nanotech is primarily an improvement in materials science, not physics. It has the potential to improve energy storage and transportation, but very limited possibilites for improving energy production.

Besides which, I said Transhumans will go off-planet - not every monkey-ass primate who can wipe his nose. If the latter die by the billions, it's NOT a disaster.

Unfortunately, until said Transhumans are living in a self-contained biosphere, they are probably reliant for production of their food supply on said monkey-ass primates. Even then, the transhumans will need a self-sustaining technological infrastructure. Haven't you read Marooned in Realtime? Merely because something is stupid does not mean it is safe to remove from your local economy nor ecology. Additionally, diminished biodiversity within a species-- even (trans)humans-- is generally a bad thing; too much risk of single point of failure from epidemics and the like.

http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage2.prx?exp=2 07

I've worked with the AS400 and I know plenty of Cobol people (hell, my dad is one). However, I don't know a soul that's ever used it [RPG], let alone currently doing development/maintainence.

Anyone here actually use RPG (or it's descendants)? Any war stories?

Additionally -- it could be my eyes -- I didn't see RPG on the non-pdf 'family tree'.

Googling for "FOCAL" turned up this interesting page on the taxonomy of computer languages

[1]
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8/section-11.h tml
http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=40 6&language=FOCAL

[2] my school had use of a HP 9830 for half a term a year, and I was the one usually found in front of it after school.

Googling for "FOCAL" turned up this interesting page on the taxonomy of computer languages

[1]
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/dec-faq/pdp8/section-11.h tml
http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=40 6&language=FOCAL

[2] my school had use of a HP 9830 for half a term a year, and I was the one usually found in front of it after school.

Agreed. APL is practically unheard of now but it spawned many other languages and no language since has had that densisty of expression [which is of course a good news/bad news achievement].

So I rtfa. The "feedback" link in the article has a pretty good list of the omissions. The list was shown to /. after the 40 choices were winnowed out by a much smaller [and apparently less well educated or younger] audiance than /.
/. readers have noted that the gods who gave us the first languages like cobol and fortran and lisp are not on the list. [Where, for instance, is Aiken whose APL spawned two dozen derivitive languages?] If you leave the selection up to a group of readers who can stomach wall-to-wall adds and exhortations like "... In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final "cut" to you,..." you are going to get pretty a uninformed range of choices. I'd rather start an ASK SLASHDOT for an open ended POLL with the names /. readers have already supplied than be shown the leftovers from some narrower and less informed group.

Jeebus, this is basic stuff that's been done in CAI for decades. The firmest prior art is probably IBM CourseWriter which dates back to 1968, maybe even farther. I worked porting some CourseWriter programs back in the early 70s, they did exactly what the MS patent describes. In fact, that was the whole POINT of CourseWriter, to branch to extended instructional material depending on user input.
IBM even had a little "voice unit" for synthesized speech output from the old Coursewriter machines, but I forget the model number of the CPUs, I think they were 1401s. I have a nameplate from one of the old voice units somewhere, I found it lying on the floor when the old machines were decommissioned and the new DECs were installed.

The HOPL is an "Interactive historical roster of computer languages". It has more languages, but also contain non-programming languages (like query-languages).

The editor of the site has made two color-coded posters: Version 1 and Version 2.

Other lists are here, here and here.

Ulrik

The HOPL is an "Interactive historical roster of computer languages". It has more languages, but also contain non-programming languages (like query-languages).

The editor of the site has made two color-coded posters: Version 1 and Version 2.

Other lists are here, here and here.

Ulrik

The HOPL is an "Interactive historical roster of computer languages". It has more languages, but also contain non-programming languages (like query-languages).

The editor of the site has made two color-coded posters: Version 1 and Version 2.

Other lists are here, here and here.

Ulrik

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

trying to destroy the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission

Being the force behind Australia's equivalent of the Patriot Act

Refusing to defend a homosexual judge, despite being bound by his position as Attorney General to act as an advocate and protector for the judiciary

Refusing to accept UN reports on racism in Australia

Lobbying for increased intellectual property rights

Lobbying for laws allowing Australia's spy agency, ASIO, to read domestic emails

Supporting the increase in the rate of phone tapping

And generally trampling on human rights and civil liberties wherever possible.

This is definately not good news.

You might be interested in a couple of articles that appeared in Murdoch University's December 1998 Electronic Journal of Law:

Justice or Money? How to Save the Law from Contempt

Common v. Continental: A Reaction to Mr. Evan Whitton's 1998 Murdoch Law School Address

The former is an indictment of English common law (and its descendants). The latter is an introduction to the legal systems of continental Europe.

bacchusrx.

You might be interested in a couple of articles that appeared in Murdoch University's December 1998 Electronic Journal of Law:

Justice or Money? How to Save the Law from Contempt

Common v. Continental: A Reaction to Mr. Evan Whitton's 1998 Murdoch Law School Address

The former is an indictment of English common law (and its descendants). The latter is an introduction to the legal systems of continental Europe.

bacchusrx.

If you are not afraid of spoilers, here is a very good summation of the whole original series.

There was a great deal of fan consternation about the "anticlimax" nature of the series, so when Gainax got enough of a budget together, they did not one, but (again, beware spoilers) two movies to further explore the concepts originally put across in the series. (I don't know why I wound up with three Australian sites for this info...I'm not Australian.)

In any event, "Death and Rebirth" and "End of Evangelion" were a wrapup of the narrative in the series. However, no matter how neatly Evangelion creator Anno Hideaki had wrapped things up, the true meaning of the Evangelion universe continues to be a huge topic of debate. Sort of like how the true meaning of The Matrix movies are becoming a huge topic of debate...there, I brought this back on-topic.

Anyway, it has been announced that a live-action Evangelion movie (the series and the two movies were all animated) has gone into pre-production. Gainax, ADV Films and Peter Jackson's Weta Digital effects studio are all part of this effort. For a movie which will, by necessity, have to have quite an epic sweep, the resources of these three partners which have been revealed so far seem far too limited to execute the plans. Perhaps one of the Seven Families of the Movie Industry is a part of this plan. Perhaps more than one. But the big financing has yet to be revealed. So take this all with a grain of salt.

It was this possible live-action movie to which I was referring to. If they are true to the original series and the two animated movies, they will piss off a lot of religious people in all "three great monotheisms." Just like Matrix Reloaded seems to have done in Egypt.

Why aren't these billionaires exploring the depths of the oceans as James "King of the World" Cameron does?

Surely there's interesting stuff down there, like nucular radiation-enlarged squids, slime monsters and maybe a Godzilla-like creature or two.

Are any of them funding research into solar cells, wind technology, tidal power or geothermal or is it all a great big ego boost?

• Ugly but Informative
• Great Description page
• a Vendor who sells OTEC and other enegry harvesting alternatives. Has some nice diagrams.
• Pedestrian newspaper article.

The ocean is a lot closer and cheaper to get to.

Not by much. The closest anyone has gotten to ocean mining is DeBeers and their diamond trawler off Namibia which scrapes the bottom of the ocean floor.

Ocean based mining is still a hideously expensive way to mine, but there's one big problem standing in the way of mining the Ocean floor: Law of the Seas

More Details:

• Deep Sea-Bed Mining Under Customary International Law

• See:
• Legal Dictionary, and
• Finding a Fiduciary Duty

I read an interesting perspective on wave power from Dr. Peter M. Duesing regarding the exploitation of wave and tidal power here that basically says that its prospects of being a major contributor to large scale production are slight. On a small scale there are several cases that support localised usage.

Regarding Ocean POwer Delivery, there is a pdf regarding their funding package available here.

If their site goes down or if you don't want to click, here is the text clipped from the pdf:

Press release

Wave energy company Ocean Power Delivery secures £6m funding package

Edinburgh-based wave energy company Ocean Power Delivery Ltd (OPD) today announced that is has secured £6m (EUR 9.8m) funding from an international consortium of venture capital companies led by Norsk Hydro Technology Ventures (NTV), the venture capital arm of Norway's largest industrial company and including 3i, Europe's leading venture capital company and Zurich-based Sustainable Asset Management (SAM). Each organisation provided an equal level of funding to produce the largest investment of its kind in a wave power company.

The investment success builds on OPD's steady rise to prominence in the field and clears the way for the company to become the leading force in the sector.

"This investment is the culmination of OPD's intensive four-year programme to develop the Pelamis concept, the funds secured today will allow us to demonstrate and commercialise the system," says Richard Yemm, Managing Director of OPD. "Wave energy represents a major commercial opportunity and we have positioned ourselves well to take advantage of this."

The Pelamis is a long, thin, semi-submerged articulated structure composed of four cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints, the complete system is oriented head-on to incoming waves. The wave-induced motion of the joints is resisted by hydraulic rams, these pump fluid through hydraulic motors to drive electrical generators. A 750kW machine with a similar output to a modern wind turbine will be 150metres long and 3.5metres in diameter. An array of 40 Pelamis machines would provide enough power to supply the energy needs of 20,000 homes.

OPD aims to have a working prototype producing electricity to the grid within the next two years.

Many previous wave energy concepts have failed as they lack the inherent survivability of the Pelamis. The system uses the unique combination of a streamlined, low-profile form and proven technology from the offshore oil and gas sector to provide the required load-shedding and reliability to withstand the rigours of the marine environment.

OPD has recently demonstrated the system at intermediate scale in the Firth of Forth as part of a UK DTI supported programme to address all key aspects of technical risk. Further DTI support in conjunction with today's investment will allow all elements of the full-scale system to be thoroughly tested this summer before being installed in the first full-scale demonstrator next year.

In 1999 the company won a contract to install a pair of Pelamis machines off Islay within the Scottish Renewables Obligation and recently beat off stiff international competition to secure an agreement with BC Hydro, the Canadian West Coast utility, to carry out a full feasibility study for a 2MW scheme for installation off Vancouver Island during 2003.

Graeme Sword, 3i director commented: "OPD has developed a leading renewable energy technology which positions the business to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities in the rapidly developing renewable energy market. The combination of this unique technology and strong management makes OPD an ideal fit for 3i in the development of our support for alternative energy technologies."

"NTV's role is to seek exciting investments with venture capital financial returns, in arapidly evolving new energy economy." says Jørgen Rostrup, NTV's Managing Director. "We screened several wave energy machines around the world before finding Pelamis, and are delighted to work with OPD and our co-investors in commercialising this concept."

"SAM is proud to be part of this exciting project in what we have identified as a highly promising new opportunity in the renewable energy space. Dr Richard Yemm has managed to gather an impressive group of talented people who have produced a design that stands out for successfully marrying robustness with efficiency," says Gianni Operto, principal of SAM Private Equity.

ends 20 March 2002

For further information please contact:

Ocean Power Delivery Ltd

Richard Yemm or Max Carcas

Tel: +44 131 554 8444

Email: enquiries@oceanpd.com

Web: www.oceanpd.com

When will those Dune windtraps become reality??

Seriously, power generation via wave is old news.

Check out this site for some backgrounds.

-adnans

I bet most of that went into top-of-the-line solar cells.

The good thing about races like this is that effort is put into designing the very best cells possible, and a side effect is (eventually, we hope) better solar cells available to the community market.

A major advance was made (the so called 'green cells' in Australia for the Australian solar challenge a few years ago).

A good resource on PV cells (notice my Australian bias!) is http://acre.murdoch.edu.au/refiles/pv/text.html.

Yes, I'd say that our draconian drug policies are way out of proportion to the actual crime. ...oh wait, you think they should be harsher??? Let's see, you'd rather lock a pot smoker or drug abuser away for longer than the guy that just raped your sister? And, you'd rather lock him up in a place where he gets no help for his addiction -- and likely his addiction will become worse, so that when he finally is released, he's worse off than ever before and more likely to turn to drugs and crime? Makes sense to me.

By the way, Singapore has pretty rampant drug use, contrary to the popular propaganda you might hear. This report explains how prevalent drug use actually is.

Don't forget that to get such a handle on drug use requires a much more authoritarian governement than you're used to living in. We've made the bill of rights a bunch of toilet paper in the war on drugs, but to achieve Singaporean "control", you might as well toss it out the window.

The main problem with punishing consentual crimes, is that to be effective, crime must be punished quickly, consistently, and proportional to the crime. Everyone speeds, why? Because usually people don't feel they are doing anything truly wrong -- though it's against the law, and they will get away with it most of the time. Even when they get caught, many times the officer will let them off with a warning or a simple verbal repremand. The punsihment is usually proportional, but if people were going to jail for years for speeding, you'd have a lot of civil disobedience and uproar going on.

at the end user level it is a natural monopoly. Few houses or even factories have more than one incoming power cable, so whoever owns that or the equipment upstream has to be regulated in some way

If a natural monopoly is understood as a condition in which a single efficient seller (or in this case, distributor) can serve the entire relevant market at a lower average cost than can multiple sellers, it would appear that we have a testable proposition. Yet as economist Walter Primeaux has discovered, electricity rates were lower in municipalities that had vigorous competition and multiple distribution grids at the advent of monopoly regulation than in municipalities with little or no competition and a single distribution grid. In fact consumers in several dozen municipalities today, such as Lubbock, Texas and Clyde, Ohio, have a choice of electricity providers, each with their own separate transmission and distribution facilities; yet, these customers purchase power at rates below the regional average. This simply should not happen under any reading of the natural monopoly model.

Moreover, if this economic diagnosis of the electricity industry were correct, one should expect to find evidence of natural monopoly-that is, evidence that a single competitor achieved economies of scale sufficient to drive out competitors and capture the market-in the hazy mists of history prior to utility regulation. But investigations by Bradley and other experts have yielded no such examples of natural monopoly.

Or this:

Although it is popular for analysts to speak of the electricity industry as a natural monopoly, even a brief review of the development of the industry will lead to the opposite conclusion. Industry historian Robert L. Bradley, Jr., president of the Houston-based Institute for Energy Research, has noted, "The opening era of the electric industry was characterized by competing franchises and `regulation by competition.'" In other words, rivalry, not regulation, protected consumers. In fact, as economist Burton N. Behling noted in 1938, "There is scarcely a city in the country that has not experienced competition in one or more of the utility industries." Behling noted that six electrical companies were organized in 1887 to serve New York City and five companies vied for customer loyalty in Chicago in 1907. Smaller cities also saw competitors rise up to serve their citizens. Duluth, Minnesota, was served by five electrical companies in 1895, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, was served by four firms in 1906.

The result of this free market experience, which lasted from 1882 to 1907, was, in Bradley's words, "very positive for consumers.... [T]he quantity [of electricity] supplied was rapidly increasing from technological advances and expanding affordability, and prices were falling from declining costs and open competition." This era also saw a staggering increase in generation capacity and overall production capability. As Bradley aptly noted, "This expansion rate, which would not be subsequently equaled, hardly suggests the 'monopolistic' practice of restricting output to maintain or increase prices."

This evidence strongly suggests that the electric industry was never a natural monopoly.

Or even this:

The natural monopoly case has been the classic argument for public ownership. As indicated in the previous topic the understanding of the nature of natural monopoly has been enhanced, and at the same time changes in technology have eliminated the natural monopoly situation especially in electricity generation.

Don't be fooled by the politicians, the electric companies, or their lackeys. Competition is the solution; they are terrified.

There's one in France which predates the Bay of Fundy by some 18 years, and produce 240Mw versus ~20Mw from the Fundy plant.

• Captain Cook's account of his discovery aroused much interest in England but Britain did not try to colonise Australia until its American colonies achieved independence. On 13 May 1787, the first fleet of 11 ships sailed from England under the command of Capt. Arthur Phillip. They reached Botany Bay on 18 January 1788 with 1530 people, 736 of them convicts.

• 1718-1783 About 50,000 British criminals were transported to colonies in America.
  1775-1783 AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE - hostilities with Britain brought transportation to a halt.
  1783-1787 British prisons and hulks began to over-flow.
  

Internet Overview

• Internet Timeline

Technical History

• Charles Spurgeon's Ethernet Web Site (several Ethernet historical documents here).
• I have a printed copy of an ALOHANET analysis, but can't seem to find one online.

Concept History

• As We May Think
• Project Xanadu ("Computer Lib/Dream Machines")
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar