Yep, I agree. The RIAA is just trying to make people feel bad about opposing their broken business model. They're not really proposing to raise CD prices. It's all just a ploy to maintain the illusion that the RIAA is useful and relevant.
It's clear you've never designed a spacecraft, or anything human-rated.
When you design something for reliability, you don't go get Intel's hot-off-the-press 64-bit screaming-meemie microprocessor. You use something instead that has 10 years of extensive field experience, debug cycles, and hardening under its belt. The space shuttle was designed with proven technology, not with "obsolete" technology. And contrary to popular assertion, its equipment is routinely upgraded and improved. Not with brand spanking new equipment, of course, but with newer equipment. You always use equipment that has been extensively validated, and that takes time.
Then all you'd have to do is figure out how to keep teenagers from wanting to talk to each other. Myspace thrives because there is a demand for it. You don't make demand go away by squelching supply.
Stupid parents are never going to educate their children. But the answer to that is to hold stupid parents responsible for their stupidity, not to select someone else arbitrarily to take the blame.
Myspace provides communication. Communication is not inherently predatory. Bars provide alcohol. Alcohol is inherently intoxicating to humans. The proprietor of a bar knows that alcohol exceeding some amount will necessarily produce intoxication. Myspace operators cannot know that communication in any amount will necessarily result in sexual predation. There is a fundamental qualitative difference between what these two kinds of service provide.
Let's say your bar has 20,000,000 patrons and is largely self-service. To what extent should you be held liable to verify the inebriation of each one of them? There is a fundamental quantitative difference between each service's clientele.
Primary responsibility for the safety of some minor rests on those closest to the minor, not with some distant corporation. If the parents failed to instruct their minor children about the dangers of communicating with strange adults and failed to pay sufficient attention to their children's activities, then I cannot see why they have been injured by the actions of Myspace. In the wake of the Columbine High School shooting, the parents of the perpetrators were taken to task for not having paid appropriate attention to what their children were doing. Now the shoe is on the other foot: other parents who have failed in exactly the same way now claim to be the victims themselves.
No, the point of copyright as it touches this matter is to enjoin people from profiting inappropriately from the intellectual work of others, or diluting the profits to an original creator. That means that when someone creates a work that substantially includes the work of someone else, the success of that derived work is due in some measure to the appeal of the original work, and the original creator deserves to share the success. The original creator receives consideration for his contribution, and the derivative creator receives consideration for the portion that is unique and original to him. Under copyright, all the involved creators profit -- not just the last one in the chain.
Limits on derivation under copyright also recognize that a creator of a work has an intellectual stake in it and wants some measure of control over how it is published and perceived. Just because someone publishes an original graphical creation doesn't mean he has consented to someone else's depiction of Calvin peeing on it. Copyright recognizes a limited right of a creator to control how his work is framed and presented by others.
If I spend six months in the studio recording an album, I might hope to recover my costs for that six months through the sale of my album. The $10 or $15 I charge for it would be expected to recompense the actual costs I incurred while producing it. Without limits on derived works, some teenager could rip my carefully-prepared album within minutes of its release, add a cheesy techno drumbeat to each track, and put it out on his bit torrent or sell/give away copies of it under the notion that his addition constitutes a "new creative expression" of which he is the sole owner.
Not that I have anything against techno drumbeats in general, but in this case I might take intellectual issue with the artistic rape of my work. If the derived work is presented as a new serious offering, I have the legal right not to consent to that use of it. But, for example, a parody of it would be allowed under Fair Use, and the parody naturally would have to include or allude to enough of my work to make the parody identifiable. A creator of a work does relinquish some control over it by publishing it.
I take commercial issue with the loss I might suffer from having my work made available (albeit in altered form) in ways that don't generate revenue for me. The availability of the work, or portions of it, from a different source dilutes demand for the real thing, whether the teenager charges money or not. The addition of a cheesy drumbeat does not create a new creative work in which its creator enjoys sole intellectual ownership and can do with what he wants, especially if the act of derivation entails far less work than the original creation.
Copyright is not about creative freedom; it's about commercial protection for those who make their living being creative. Copyright is not about protecting the rights of people to build upon the creations of others; it's about paying people for the convenience of building sbustantially upon their work.
I am an artist on a number of recordings published by various RIAA members. I don't hold the copyright on that performance; the publisher does. As part of the deal to distribute my work, I had to sign over my copyright to them. I have no standing to enjoin against illegal use of that recording, nor to license others to use it.
To make matters worse, one of those recordings is a modest artistic success. But the publisher (in his infinite wisdom) has decided that it's no longer financially viable to distribute it. So when people ask where they can get a copy of it, I have to tell them they can't. I can't legally make them a copy of my own performance, and they can't buy it from the publisher.
I have asked the publisher repeatedly to sell me back the rights to my own work so that I can distribute it myself, but so far they have not budged. Needless to say I do not record for them anymore. So much for my big break.
A lot of the proposals for dealing with the RIAA presume that the business model centers largely around selling physical or downloaded copies of the recordings themselves. That's not quite the business model.
Selling discs (or even legal MP3s) requires a capital outlay for production, promotion, and distribution. Those costs are relatively fixed. They vary somewhat depending on the number of items produced, and vary considerably depending on the mode of distribution. But they do represent a substantial, inflexible cost. Retail prices are also relatively fixed by market forces. So you have a relatively inflexible margin. Thus it all depends on whether you sell enough discs to cover your costs. With a fixed capital outlay and unpredictable revenue, you risk losing money.
Instead consider licensing fees. Activity not allowed under Fair Use requires a license from the copyright holder, and there is no limit imposed on how much the copyright holder can charge in licensing fees. He can essentially charge as much as he thinks the licensee is willing to pay. And since granting a license requires almost no actual work and no capital outlay from the copyright holder, a license fee is pure profit. There is essentially no business risk associated with holding on to out-of-print material in hopes of licensing it. Therefore it's considered a valuable revenue stream.
Remixes constitute derived works that are not generally allowed under Fair Use. So in this case the RIAA is likely trying to recover license fees. If the derived work is expected to be successful, the copyright holder will typically charge a higher license fee. So the fact that this particular DJ is very popular actually works against him because the RIAA is missing out on higher license fees. They have a greater incentive to go after him than to let him do his thing in peace. But you can see why the RIAA is not placated by the notion that remixes help sales. They'd much rather have the license fee.
Make no mistake. If you sign over your intellectual property to a distributor, he will treat it simply as a commodity to be bought, sold, and manipulated in any way he can in order to make money, whether or not your side interests are served in the process. The fact that the commodity is something in which you have an intellectual and emotional stake, and which represents something to which you may wish your name to remain attached, does not even enter into their thinking.
Privacy must exist because all people are different and cannot refrain from judging others or exerting control over them out of self-interest that may be irrationally intolerant of such differences. Therefore people have a right to attempt to control what others know about them.
Privacy must also exist because not everyone is honorable. If you believe that privacy has no moral justification, then I challenge you to post here all the credentials someone here would need in order to open a line of credit in your name.
Just because your kids dont want you to know every single detail of their life doesnt mean that they are hooking up with 35 year olds.
Corollary: Just because you don't want the IRS to have unfettered access to your banking records doesn't mean you are funding anti-American insurgents in Kreplakistan.
The desire for privacy is deeply rooted in human nature regardless of age. As children become older they assert that right more aggressively. And if the parents have been successful, older children can rely on their own instincts to exercise that privacy without self-destruction. It's not wrong for a child to want to do even innocent things away from watchful eyes. The notion that scrutiny itself is unpleasant, even where there's nothing being hidden, forms the basis of our right to privacy. The question then becomes, at what point do the harmful consequences of scrutiny outweigh the harmful consequences of naivete and vulnerability in children.
I believe it's misguided concern for parents to deny to their older children every semblance of privacy. Humans can't help but to crave privacy, and if parents are overly restrictive or inappropriately intrusive, an older child resorts to increasingly dangerous means of circumventing them. The higher the fence, the worse the consequences of falling while trying to climb it. I've seen adolescents and young adults driven literally into insanity by paranoid parents.
I think a lot of people would agree with a parent who takes steps to verify that his 12-year-old daughter isn't sleeping with older men or downing vodka by the glassful. But where I live, some parents also believe that Harry Potter books are from the devil and take equally stringent steps to ensure their 12-year-old daughter isn't reading them. So with those premises in mind, is a 12-year-old girl who sneaks over to her friend's house to read the latest Harry Potter book at equal risk as the same girl who picks the lock on the liquor cabinet or courts high school boys for sex?
Not everyone who works for the IRS is honorable and can be trusted not to misuse my bank records. Similarly not every parent imposes reasonable rules on children. The answer in both cases is that a reasonable degree of freedom must be presumed, even where the potential exists to misuse that freedom.
Last I checked, you had to be at least 14 in order to have a Myspace profile without violating their terms of service. You know your daughter best, but does it bother you that your daughter is using a service intended for older people?
Die-hard Luddites still have a say in our society because somewhere along the line we perverted the notion of freedom of speech into the notion that every proposition, no matter how factually bankrupt or logically absurd, is equally worthy of continued attention. The marketplace of ideas ensures that each idea is given a fair hearing at least once, but it shouldn't represent that all ideas are similarly good. Everyone has a right to be heard, but not a right to be believed.
Exotic propulsion technologies do indeed hold promise for the future, but newer doesn't necessarily mean better in the short term. When there are human lives or billions of dollars of commerce at stake, people generally want to stick to what they know works and improve it only through deliberate refinement. New technologies have qualitative unknowns that may prove dangerous. Eventually research and development and limited operation deployment will provide us a knowledge base suitable to introducing new technologies into roles currently being played by more mature solutions. But for the short term we will use chemical rockets because that's what we know a great deal about.
That said, changing the fuel formulation for a rocket engine is not trivial, especially when one wishes to qualify the end product for human spaceflight. The chemical and physical properties of the fuel affect many parameters in rocket design and must be extensively understood before the design can be considered safe. Since design margins in that business come at a measurable performance penalty, it is customary to design with narrow margins. For there to be a "technology risk" in changing from RP-1 or LH2 to methane may be as simple as acknowledging that the projected improvement in safety or performance is not worth qualifying the new designs.
Some topics remain "controversial" only because some people refuse to face facts. All sides of many issues are not created factually equal and there should be no requirement to make it appear as if they were.
Yep. Part of the problem is that content providers didn't care as much about piracy in the analog olden days. You could easily "rip" a vinyl record to a cassette or reel-to-reel tape, and you could easily copy a VHS cassette to another one. But in those cases the copy was noticeably cruddier than the original. You got a free copy, but it was a cruddy copy, and that was a sort of self-enforcing copy protection. There was still some incentive to buy the pristine LP or VHS version instead of a pirated copy.
Copyright is a "defend it or lose it" proposition. If you don't address infringement aggressively enough, your laissez-faire attitude becomes the court's eventual standard of injury when you finally do get around to sueing someone for a serious infringement. So the RIAA and the MPAA initially took a relaxed attitude toward cottage piracy that accepted inferior quality as a consequence of illegality.
But in the digital world it is very simple to create exact copies of the distributed content. The same bits are found on the copy as on the original, and the quality at playback is indistinguishable from the original. Now there really is no incentive for the consumer to improve his experience by buying the real McCoy. But the content providers are now wallowing in the environment they created by letting people make and share informal copies. Thence DRM: the attempt to reinstate by technical means rights content providers foolishly abandoned through complacency years ago.
In my opinion, not even if they're Mensans. Mensa accepts members based on measured intelligence: the general ability to observe and reason properly. That isn't the same as knowledge: the domain-specific body of relevant fact that must be mastered in order to fuel a specialized line of reasoning. I was once a member of Mensa, but that doesn't mean I'm qualified to speak on a topic I have not studied. Just because I can answer questions of the form, "Dyspeptic is to salacious as acrimony is to [fill in blank]" doesn't mean I know what weight of oil you should put in your car. Often people of quite ordinary intelligence succeed because they know appropriate facts, many of which can be counterintuitive to those who have not been immersed in them and practiced them.
But now you're changing horses. The original comment to which I objected was your claim that moon-base technology exists now and has existed for some time; it only needs funding, presumably to deploy it. I used to work in the aerospace industry and I never saw or heard about any of that supposedly existing technology. So naturally I want to know the facts behind your claim. Now you're telling me we could have something in 50 years. That's not remotely the same thing. Saying it already exists and saying we "could have it" in some number of decades are two polar opposites.
Could we have self-sustaining lunar operations bases in 50 years? I don't think so, but I'll give you full marks for optimism. The danger here is that you don't inspire people by telling them something already exists when in fact it doesn't. I think part of the current apathy stems from the broken promises of the past. In 1975 we were promised weekly low-cost access to low Earth orbit, and we didn't get it. What is to be gained by promising people lunar self-sufficiency in some short number of years when that's just as unlikely?
This has nothing to do with short-sightedness. Apollo was short-sighted -- necessarily so, because its 1970 deadline was a requirement of the project. NASA's new plan is considerably more ambitious and is being undertaken at a deliberate pace that helps make it more sustainable over the long term. It may mean we won't get back to the moon in 20 years, but that's the price of sustainable progress.
I don't know where you're getting the idea that the technology for a permanent base on the moon is just laying around waiting for us to employ it. I used to work in that industry and I haven't seen any of it yet. Yes, there have been various design studies by NASA and contractors, but nothing much in the way of actual engineering. To develop those abstract ideas into actual working machinery, solving the multitude of outstanding problems along the way (e.g., solar radiation), will take several years. Surprise, suprise: NASA is telling us it will take several years to develop.
Launching spacecraft from the lunar surface is only cheaper if you build the spacecraft on the lunar surface entirely from materials found there, and fuel it with material obtained on the lunar surface. If you have to ship any significant part of your spacecraft or its fuel from Earth, you are actually at a considerable disadvantage. And I'm struggling to see why it's easier. I'd much rather do spacecraft assembly, checkout, and payload integration in Earth comfort than in a hostile lunar environment. Yes, once a suitably robust, self-sustaining infrastructure exists on the moon for that sort of thing, your proposition will be quite true. But that infrustructure will be a very long time in coming. You can't use the promise of it to spur short-term activity.
Apollo took 10 years because the goal was to do it in 10 years, and that meant doing things quickly but not necessarily sustainably. The spacecraft and launch vehicles malfunctioned routinely; not always in a way that meant scrubbing the mission, but certainly in ways that made us think, "Do we really want to do it this way forever?"
Technology is not a homogeneous thing, nor is it interchangeable. The intervening 40 years of "technical development" is significant only if it is relevant. We hung up the specific moon landing tools in 1972 and generally haven't had any occasion to look at them again. Aerospace technology is not forever valid and forever practical. Once the industry stops doing something for about five years, it generally has lost the ability to do it again no matter how much propositional knowledge remains. You forget how to build it, and you move on to new methods and standards anyway.
And that all begs the question whether we want to do it the same way again. Apollo had specific, limited goals and was to be done as quickly as possible. The new missions have different objectives and different constraints. Past engineering solutions, no matter how much or little of them we know, simply won't work unmodified.
Wishful thinking aside, there simply is no magic button we can push and get a moon-capable manned space system in 5 years. That's just unrealistic. There is no "off the shelf" technology for sending humans back to the moon. There never was. That said, you'll notice we are developing new manned moon technology using the vocabulary of the manned launch vehicles we have been using for the past 20 years -- the human-rated ATK SRB design and the human-rated ET/SSME cluster.
And for your next vacation would you rather go to Hawaii, or merely receive a nice color picture of Hawaii?
Humans go to exotic and remote places themselves not because they merely wish to collect data from it, but because it is in the nature of our species to explore in person. A manned presence is not merely a necessary prerequisite to the acquisition of data; it is an end unto itself. The conquest of Mt. Everest, for example, had nothing to do with seeing what was on the top of the mountain. It was about pride in the accomplishment. NASA sent a handful of unmanned probes to the Moon that went largely unnoticed by the public. But when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, the entire Earth stopped to watch. To what do we owe that difference?
There are different kinds of space science. No one mode of exploration suffices. Those who study stellar radiation, for example, have no need actually to be there in person. In fact, unmanned probes do far better at collecting the kind of data best suited to that kind of science. But planetary science cannot be satisfied with mere telepresence. Planetary geologists need to be there. Sure, they'll do the best they can with the technology available at any given moment, but ask a planetary geologist whether he can do his job better through a little robot, or actually there in person.
The Soviets in the late 1960s and early 1970s explored the Moon remotely and with unmanned sample-return missions while the Americans sent human astronauts during the same period -- albeit likely at considerably greater cost. The Soviets got one badly placed retroreflector, a handful of grainy telemetered photographs of random terrain, and about ten ounces of undifferentiated lunar dust.
Apollo, in contrast, got a set of precisely-aligned retroreflectors and precisely-placed scientific instruments. Astronauts took 20,000 high-resolution photographs of terrain they selected according to on-site observation. They brought back 800 pounds of lunar surface material chosen according to geological significance, photographed in situ, core-sampled, and carefully-documented. The quality of the Apollo data is simply orders of magnitude greater than any achieved through unmanned technology -- all because there were trained humans there doing the science in person.
We meatbags have high-resolution color stereoscopic vision with a broad dynamic range, better than anything we can currently put into a spacecraft. We have highly capable means of locomotion that adapts to a variety of terrain and can achieve safe speeds up to several meters per second on planetary surfaces. We have a pair of manipulators easily better than anything we can currently deploy in space. And all this is controlled by an on-site computer capable of storing and applying PhD-level expertise as well as displaying helpful exploratory qualities such as curiosity and intuition. The computer is highly-adaptable and well integrated with the sensory apparatus. Even if manned exploration were only about data collection, meatbags are still much better at some useful forms of it than our little six-wheeled proxies.
If you want to send people someplace they haven't been before, or establish a permanent manned presence on the Moon, you need technology that is more durable and reliable than what we have now. And that is exactly the kind of technology that is being developed for and tested on the ISS. It's not exciting work, but it has to be done. It's absolutely crucial for the next phase of manned space exploration.
Apollo was designed and built under the pressure of a race to the Moon. As such it took liberties and employed shortcuts that are not acceptable now, especially since NASA is under increased scrutiny over safety. Apollo used technology that was very expensive, had a limited shelf life, relied on consumable resources, and ignored certain problems such as periodic solar radiation. These are perfectly defensible design choices for short-term scouting missions. Cutting those corners allowed Apollo to be developed relatively quickly. But the same strategy won't work now. We need renewable resources and much longer-lived spacecraft. We need better defenses against the environmental hazards. And since it's not a race this time, we can afford to take our time and research problems deliberately.
NASA has no mandate to do fancy things every four or five years to keep the taxpayers entertained. In fact, NASA -- like any public institution -- can only spend its money on what the taxpayer-voted budget allows from year to year. And until recently the public has simply not granted funds to NASA to extend its manned programs to anything beyond the shuttle and the ISS. Unfortunately this is not a case where the public can sit idly by and wait for NASA to impress them. The way it works is that the public has to pass its pre-existing excitement on to NASA in the form of a mandate and a big check.
Am I the only one bothered by the report at the end of the article saying that a fresman in engineering can't immediately see through all that moon hoax nonsense? It's not enough that some 19-25 year-olds today lack the ambition to go to the Moon and Mars; they also seem to lack the brains. Any so-called engineer would believes the moon hoax garbage wouldn't last half a day working for me.
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Yep, I agree. The RIAA is just trying to make people feel bad about opposing their broken business model. They're not really proposing to raise CD prices. It's all just a ploy to maintain the illusion that the RIAA is useful and relevant.
It's clear you've never designed a spacecraft, or anything human-rated.
When you design something for reliability, you don't go get Intel's hot-off-the-press 64-bit screaming-meemie microprocessor. You use something instead that has 10 years of extensive field experience, debug cycles, and hardening under its belt. The space shuttle was designed with proven technology, not with "obsolete" technology. And contrary to popular assertion, its equipment is routinely upgraded and improved. Not with brand spanking new equipment, of course, but with newer equipment. You always use equipment that has been extensively validated, and that takes time.
Then all you'd have to do is figure out how to keep teenagers from wanting to talk to each other. Myspace thrives because there is a demand for it. You don't make demand go away by squelching supply.
Stupid parents are never going to educate their children. But the answer to that is to hold stupid parents responsible for their stupidity, not to select someone else arbitrarily to take the blame.
Consider some salient differences.
Myspace provides communication. Communication is not inherently predatory. Bars provide alcohol. Alcohol is inherently intoxicating to humans. The proprietor of a bar knows that alcohol exceeding some amount will necessarily produce intoxication. Myspace operators cannot know that communication in any amount will necessarily result in sexual predation. There is a fundamental qualitative difference between what these two kinds of service provide.
Let's say your bar has 20,000,000 patrons and is largely self-service. To what extent should you be held liable to verify the inebriation of each one of them? There is a fundamental quantitative difference between each service's clientele.
Primary responsibility for the safety of some minor rests on those closest to the minor, not with some distant corporation. If the parents failed to instruct their minor children about the dangers of communicating with strange adults and failed to pay sufficient attention to their children's activities, then I cannot see why they have been injured by the actions of Myspace. In the wake of the Columbine High School shooting, the parents of the perpetrators were taken to task for not having paid appropriate attention to what their children were doing. Now the shoe is on the other foot: other parents who have failed in exactly the same way now claim to be the victims themselves.
Or more likely, while the parents' lawyers dance all the way to the bank.
No, the point of copyright as it touches this matter is to enjoin people from profiting inappropriately from the intellectual work of others, or diluting the profits to an original creator. That means that when someone creates a work that substantially includes the work of someone else, the success of that derived work is due in some measure to the appeal of the original work, and the original creator deserves to share the success. The original creator receives consideration for his contribution, and the derivative creator receives consideration for the portion that is unique and original to him. Under copyright, all the involved creators profit -- not just the last one in the chain.
Limits on derivation under copyright also recognize that a creator of a work has an intellectual stake in it and wants some measure of control over how it is published and perceived. Just because someone publishes an original graphical creation doesn't mean he has consented to someone else's depiction of Calvin peeing on it. Copyright recognizes a limited right of a creator to control how his work is framed and presented by others.
If I spend six months in the studio recording an album, I might hope to recover my costs for that six months through the sale of my album. The $10 or $15 I charge for it would be expected to recompense the actual costs I incurred while producing it. Without limits on derived works, some teenager could rip my carefully-prepared album within minutes of its release, add a cheesy techno drumbeat to each track, and put it out on his bit torrent or sell/give away copies of it under the notion that his addition constitutes a "new creative expression" of which he is the sole owner.
Not that I have anything against techno drumbeats in general, but in this case I might take intellectual issue with the artistic rape of my work. If the derived work is presented as a new serious offering, I have the legal right not to consent to that use of it. But, for example, a parody of it would be allowed under Fair Use, and the parody naturally would have to include or allude to enough of my work to make the parody identifiable. A creator of a work does relinquish some control over it by publishing it.
I take commercial issue with the loss I might suffer from having my work made available (albeit in altered form) in ways that don't generate revenue for me. The availability of the work, or portions of it, from a different source dilutes demand for the real thing, whether the teenager charges money or not. The addition of a cheesy drumbeat does not create a new creative work in which its creator enjoys sole intellectual ownership and can do with what he wants, especially if the act of derivation entails far less work than the original creation.
Copyright is not about creative freedom; it's about commercial protection for those who make their living being creative. Copyright is not about protecting the rights of people to build upon the creations of others; it's about paying people for the convenience of building sbustantially upon their work.
I am an artist on a number of recordings published by various RIAA members. I don't hold the copyright on that performance; the publisher does. As part of the deal to distribute my work, I had to sign over my copyright to them. I have no standing to enjoin against illegal use of that recording, nor to license others to use it.
To make matters worse, one of those recordings is a modest artistic success. But the publisher (in his infinite wisdom) has decided that it's no longer financially viable to distribute it. So when people ask where they can get a copy of it, I have to tell them they can't. I can't legally make them a copy of my own performance, and they can't buy it from the publisher.
I have asked the publisher repeatedly to sell me back the rights to my own work so that I can distribute it myself, but so far they have not budged. Needless to say I do not record for them anymore. So much for my big break.
A lot of the proposals for dealing with the RIAA presume that the business model centers largely around selling physical or downloaded copies of the recordings themselves. That's not quite the business model.
Selling discs (or even legal MP3s) requires a capital outlay for production, promotion, and distribution. Those costs are relatively fixed. They vary somewhat depending on the number of items produced, and vary considerably depending on the mode of distribution. But they do represent a substantial, inflexible cost. Retail prices are also relatively fixed by market forces. So you have a relatively inflexible margin. Thus it all depends on whether you sell enough discs to cover your costs. With a fixed capital outlay and unpredictable revenue, you risk losing money.
Instead consider licensing fees. Activity not allowed under Fair Use requires a license from the copyright holder, and there is no limit imposed on how much the copyright holder can charge in licensing fees. He can essentially charge as much as he thinks the licensee is willing to pay. And since granting a license requires almost no actual work and no capital outlay from the copyright holder, a license fee is pure profit. There is essentially no business risk associated with holding on to out-of-print material in hopes of licensing it. Therefore it's considered a valuable revenue stream.
Remixes constitute derived works that are not generally allowed under Fair Use. So in this case the RIAA is likely trying to recover license fees. If the derived work is expected to be successful, the copyright holder will typically charge a higher license fee. So the fact that this particular DJ is very popular actually works against him because the RIAA is missing out on higher license fees. They have a greater incentive to go after him than to let him do his thing in peace. But you can see why the RIAA is not placated by the notion that remixes help sales. They'd much rather have the license fee.
Make no mistake. If you sign over your intellectual property to a distributor, he will treat it simply as a commodity to be bought, sold, and manipulated in any way he can in order to make money, whether or not your side interests are served in the process. The fact that the commodity is something in which you have an intellectual and emotional stake, and which represents something to which you may wish your name to remain attached, does not even enter into their thinking.
Privacy must exist because all people are different and cannot refrain from judging others or exerting control over them out of self-interest that may be irrationally intolerant of such differences. Therefore people have a right to attempt to control what others know about them.
Privacy must also exist because not everyone is honorable. If you believe that privacy has no moral justification, then I challenge you to post here all the credentials someone here would need in order to open a line of credit in your name.
Just because your kids dont want you to know every single detail of their life doesnt mean that they are hooking up with 35 year olds.
Corollary: Just because you don't want the IRS to have unfettered access to your banking records doesn't mean you are funding anti-American insurgents in Kreplakistan.
The desire for privacy is deeply rooted in human nature regardless of age. As children become older they assert that right more aggressively. And if the parents have been successful, older children can rely on their own instincts to exercise that privacy without self-destruction. It's not wrong for a child to want to do even innocent things away from watchful eyes. The notion that scrutiny itself is unpleasant, even where there's nothing being hidden, forms the basis of our right to privacy. The question then becomes, at what point do the harmful consequences of scrutiny outweigh the harmful consequences of naivete and vulnerability in children.
I believe it's misguided concern for parents to deny to their older children every semblance of privacy. Humans can't help but to crave privacy, and if parents are overly restrictive or inappropriately intrusive, an older child resorts to increasingly dangerous means of circumventing them. The higher the fence, the worse the consequences of falling while trying to climb it. I've seen adolescents and young adults driven literally into insanity by paranoid parents.
I think a lot of people would agree with a parent who takes steps to verify that his 12-year-old daughter isn't sleeping with older men or downing vodka by the glassful. But where I live, some parents also believe that Harry Potter books are from the devil and take equally stringent steps to ensure their 12-year-old daughter isn't reading them. So with those premises in mind, is a 12-year-old girl who sneaks over to her friend's house to read the latest Harry Potter book at equal risk as the same girl who picks the lock on the liquor cabinet or courts high school boys for sex?
Not everyone who works for the IRS is honorable and can be trusted not to misuse my bank records. Similarly not every parent imposes reasonable rules on children. The answer in both cases is that a reasonable degree of freedom must be presumed, even where the potential exists to misuse that freedom.
Last I checked, you had to be at least 14 in order to have a Myspace profile without violating their terms of service. You know your daughter best, but does it bother you that your daughter is using a service intended for older people?
Die-hard Luddites still have a say in our society because somewhere along the line we perverted the notion of freedom of speech into the notion that every proposition, no matter how factually bankrupt or logically absurd, is equally worthy of continued attention. The marketplace of ideas ensures that each idea is given a fair hearing at least once, but it shouldn't represent that all ideas are similarly good. Everyone has a right to be heard, but not a right to be believed.
Exotic propulsion technologies do indeed hold promise for the future, but newer doesn't necessarily mean better in the short term. When there are human lives or billions of dollars of commerce at stake, people generally want to stick to what they know works and improve it only through deliberate refinement. New technologies have qualitative unknowns that may prove dangerous. Eventually research and development and limited operation deployment will provide us a knowledge base suitable to introducing new technologies into roles currently being played by more mature solutions. But for the short term we will use chemical rockets because that's what we know a great deal about.
That said, changing the fuel formulation for a rocket engine is not trivial, especially when one wishes to qualify the end product for human spaceflight. The chemical and physical properties of the fuel affect many parameters in rocket design and must be extensively understood before the design can be considered safe. Since design margins in that business come at a measurable performance penalty, it is customary to design with narrow margins. For there to be a "technology risk" in changing from RP-1 or LH2 to methane may be as simple as acknowledging that the projected improvement in safety or performance is not worth qualifying the new designs.
Some topics remain "controversial" only because some people refuse to face facts. All sides of many issues are not created factually equal and there should be no requirement to make it appear as if they were.
Yep. Part of the problem is that content providers didn't care as much about piracy in the analog olden days. You could easily "rip" a vinyl record to a cassette or reel-to-reel tape, and you could easily copy a VHS cassette to another one. But in those cases the copy was noticeably cruddier than the original. You got a free copy, but it was a cruddy copy, and that was a sort of self-enforcing copy protection. There was still some incentive to buy the pristine LP or VHS version instead of a pirated copy.
Copyright is a "defend it or lose it" proposition. If you don't address infringement aggressively enough, your laissez-faire attitude becomes the court's eventual standard of injury when you finally do get around to sueing someone for a serious infringement. So the RIAA and the MPAA initially took a relaxed attitude toward cottage piracy that accepted inferior quality as a consequence of illegality.
But in the digital world it is very simple to create exact copies of the distributed content. The same bits are found on the copy as on the original, and the quality at playback is indistinguishable from the original. Now there really is no incentive for the consumer to improve his experience by buying the real McCoy. But the content providers are now wallowing in the environment they created by letting people make and share informal copies. Thence DRM: the attempt to reinstate by technical means rights content providers foolishly abandoned through complacency years ago.
In my opinion, not even if they're Mensans. Mensa accepts members based on measured intelligence: the general ability to observe and reason properly. That isn't the same as knowledge: the domain-specific body of relevant fact that must be mastered in order to fuel a specialized line of reasoning. I was once a member of Mensa, but that doesn't mean I'm qualified to speak on a topic I have not studied. Just because I can answer questions of the form, "Dyspeptic is to salacious as acrimony is to [fill in blank]" doesn't mean I know what weight of oil you should put in your car. Often people of quite ordinary intelligence succeed because they know appropriate facts, many of which can be counterintuitive to those who have not been immersed in them and practiced them.
But now you're changing horses. The original comment to which I objected was your claim that moon-base technology exists now and has existed for some time; it only needs funding, presumably to deploy it. I used to work in the aerospace industry and I never saw or heard about any of that supposedly existing technology. So naturally I want to know the facts behind your claim. Now you're telling me we could have something in 50 years. That's not remotely the same thing. Saying it already exists and saying we "could have it" in some number of decades are two polar opposites.
Could we have self-sustaining lunar operations bases in 50 years? I don't think so, but I'll give you full marks for optimism. The danger here is that you don't inspire people by telling them something already exists when in fact it doesn't. I think part of the current apathy stems from the broken promises of the past. In 1975 we were promised weekly low-cost access to low Earth orbit, and we didn't get it. What is to be gained by promising people lunar self-sufficiency in some short number of years when that's just as unlikely?
This has nothing to do with short-sightedness. Apollo was short-sighted -- necessarily so, because its 1970 deadline was a requirement of the project. NASA's new plan is considerably more ambitious and is being undertaken at a deliberate pace that helps make it more sustainable over the long term. It may mean we won't get back to the moon in 20 years, but that's the price of sustainable progress.
I don't know where you're getting the idea that the technology for a permanent base on the moon is just laying around waiting for us to employ it. I used to work in that industry and I haven't seen any of it yet. Yes, there have been various design studies by NASA and contractors, but nothing much in the way of actual engineering. To develop those abstract ideas into actual working machinery, solving the multitude of outstanding problems along the way (e.g., solar radiation), will take several years. Surprise, suprise: NASA is telling us it will take several years to develop.
Launching spacecraft from the lunar surface is only cheaper if you build the spacecraft on the lunar surface entirely from materials found there, and fuel it with material obtained on the lunar surface. If you have to ship any significant part of your spacecraft or its fuel from Earth, you are actually at a considerable disadvantage. And I'm struggling to see why it's easier. I'd much rather do spacecraft assembly, checkout, and payload integration in Earth comfort than in a hostile lunar environment. Yes, once a suitably robust, self-sustaining infrastructure exists on the moon for that sort of thing, your proposition will be quite true. But that infrustructure will be a very long time in coming. You can't use the promise of it to spur short-term activity.
Apollo took 10 years because the goal was to do it in 10 years, and that meant doing things quickly but not necessarily sustainably. The spacecraft and launch vehicles malfunctioned routinely; not always in a way that meant scrubbing the mission, but certainly in ways that made us think, "Do we really want to do it this way forever?"
Technology is not a homogeneous thing, nor is it interchangeable. The intervening 40 years of "technical development" is significant only if it is relevant. We hung up the specific moon landing tools in 1972 and generally haven't had any occasion to look at them again. Aerospace technology is not forever valid and forever practical. Once the industry stops doing something for about five years, it generally has lost the ability to do it again no matter how much propositional knowledge remains. You forget how to build it, and you move on to new methods and standards anyway.
And that all begs the question whether we want to do it the same way again. Apollo had specific, limited goals and was to be done as quickly as possible. The new missions have different objectives and different constraints. Past engineering solutions, no matter how much or little of them we know, simply won't work unmodified.
Wishful thinking aside, there simply is no magic button we can push and get a moon-capable manned space system in 5 years. That's just unrealistic. There is no "off the shelf" technology for sending humans back to the moon. There never was. That said, you'll notice we are developing new manned moon technology using the vocabulary of the manned launch vehicles we have been using for the past 20 years -- the human-rated ATK SRB design and the human-rated ET/SSME cluster.
And for your next vacation would you rather go to Hawaii, or merely receive a nice color picture of Hawaii?
Humans go to exotic and remote places themselves not because they merely wish to collect data from it, but because it is in the nature of our species to explore in person. A manned presence is not merely a necessary prerequisite to the acquisition of data; it is an end unto itself. The conquest of Mt. Everest, for example, had nothing to do with seeing what was on the top of the mountain. It was about pride in the accomplishment. NASA sent a handful of unmanned probes to the Moon that went largely unnoticed by the public. But when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, the entire Earth stopped to watch. To what do we owe that difference?
There are different kinds of space science. No one mode of exploration suffices. Those who study stellar radiation, for example, have no need actually to be there in person. In fact, unmanned probes do far better at collecting the kind of data best suited to that kind of science. But planetary science cannot be satisfied with mere telepresence. Planetary geologists need to be there. Sure, they'll do the best they can with the technology available at any given moment, but ask a planetary geologist whether he can do his job better through a little robot, or actually there in person.
The Soviets in the late 1960s and early 1970s explored the Moon remotely and with unmanned sample-return missions while the Americans sent human astronauts during the same period -- albeit likely at considerably greater cost. The Soviets got one badly placed retroreflector, a handful of grainy telemetered photographs of random terrain, and about ten ounces of undifferentiated lunar dust.
Apollo, in contrast, got a set of precisely-aligned retroreflectors and precisely-placed scientific instruments. Astronauts took 20,000 high-resolution photographs of terrain they selected according to on-site observation. They brought back 800 pounds of lunar surface material chosen according to geological significance, photographed in situ, core-sampled, and carefully-documented. The quality of the Apollo data is simply orders of magnitude greater than any achieved through unmanned technology -- all because there were trained humans there doing the science in person.
We meatbags have high-resolution color stereoscopic vision with a broad dynamic range, better than anything we can currently put into a spacecraft. We have highly capable means of locomotion that adapts to a variety of terrain and can achieve safe speeds up to several meters per second on planetary surfaces. We have a pair of manipulators easily better than anything we can currently deploy in space. And all this is controlled by an on-site computer capable of storing and applying PhD-level expertise as well as displaying helpful exploratory qualities such as curiosity and intuition. The computer is highly-adaptable and well integrated with the sensory apparatus. Even if manned exploration were only about data collection, meatbags are still much better at some useful forms of it than our little six-wheeled proxies.
If you want to send people someplace they haven't been before, or establish a permanent manned presence on the Moon, you need technology that is more durable and reliable than what we have now. And that is exactly the kind of technology that is being developed for and tested on the ISS. It's not exciting work, but it has to be done. It's absolutely crucial for the next phase of manned space exploration.
Apollo was designed and built under the pressure of a race to the Moon. As such it took liberties and employed shortcuts that are not acceptable now, especially since NASA is under increased scrutiny over safety. Apollo used technology that was very expensive, had a limited shelf life, relied on consumable resources, and ignored certain problems such as periodic solar radiation. These are perfectly defensible design choices for short-term scouting missions. Cutting those corners allowed Apollo to be developed relatively quickly. But the same strategy won't work now. We need renewable resources and much longer-lived spacecraft. We need better defenses against the environmental hazards. And since it's not a race this time, we can afford to take our time and research problems deliberately.
NASA has no mandate to do fancy things every four or five years to keep the taxpayers entertained. In fact, NASA -- like any public institution -- can only spend its money on what the taxpayer-voted budget allows from year to year. And until recently the public has simply not granted funds to NASA to extend its manned programs to anything beyond the shuttle and the ISS. Unfortunately this is not a case where the public can sit idly by and wait for NASA to impress them. The way it works is that the public has to pass its pre-existing excitement on to NASA in the form of a mandate and a big check.
Am I the only one bothered by the report at the end of the article saying that a fresman in engineering can't immediately see through all that moon hoax nonsense? It's not enough that some 19-25 year-olds today lack the ambition to go to the Moon and Mars; they also seem to lack the brains. Any so-called engineer would believes the moon hoax garbage wouldn't last half a day working for me.