Really, did anyone not see this coming? The company advertised that they read your email.
What email company doesn't do automated parsing of incoming emails? While it's generally just spam filters/training or censor-filters (for some corporate environs), how is that really any different from using it to query AdWords when you view the message? It seems less invasive than learning spam filters, since all the gmail AdWords affect is that particular call-up of the mail message, while with teaching spam filters my mail can forever impact the way the system works.
From what I've read even the free creature editor comes with SecuROM, so yes, you should stay far away from it.
Which is common now, apparently because the executables from "demo-esque" variants of games could often be editted (without too much difficulty) to run the full game, given the full game's data files. So if the demo doesn't have DRM, then they've just made their big DRM investment worth even less, by doing most of the hacker's/pirate's (depending on your POV) job for them already.
At least, that's the best explanation I've ever run across as to why freely distributable demos get DRM. I don't know how similar the CreatureCreator is to Spore, but it might be the same logic anyway.
The US has largely gotten out of the "Pay us to launch your stuff" business (relatively speaking). It's largely for "dual use" concerns - ie, we won't launch your nice peaceful SatilliteX because we're concerned it might be possible to use it for Military_or_Technological_Purpose_We_Don't_Like, or that the information you'd acquire via use of our launch vehicle might be applicable to aformentioned purpose. Therefore, we won't do business with you - go pay Russia, ESA, or one of the emerging launch-capable nations like India and Japan.
It's been argued this is a rather unfortunate policy, as it's driven business from the US to other countries, and business => $$$ => development/research funding.
You say that "that is a luxury that most other studios don't have." And I disagree entirely. There is nothing stopping a studio from pushing their dates back. The only reason they don't is that they feel if they don't make their release date, then they will miss out of customers.
Not every studio has a bankroll like Blizzard. Lack of money to pay employees/rent/utilities tends to stop development.
How does demanding all of that information follow from what I said? My points are: 1.) that anonymity is used to avoid accountability and 2.) that a society in which anonymity is frequent is one in which people will lie about important parts of their lives in ways that make it harder for all of us and that strengthen McCarthyite tactics. Was the bolding too subtle for you last time? Do I need to make the type flash and surround it with arrows? How do my disclosing my height and weight or any of those other things relate to either of those points?
I never denied that there is a place for anonymity. Quite the contrary. But from what I can see, it is used as a crutch by many who shouldn't at times that they shouldn't. If I were female I would be more reluctant to be as public as I am. If I had a lot of money or were better known I would be more careful.
(emphasis original)
So if I read that right, you're essentially saying anonymity is a necessary evil?
In the bold parts, you seem to paint anonymity as, essentially, and evil. It "make[s] it harder for all of us and that strengthen McCarthyite tactics." Yet right in the next paragraph, you point out that people in situations different from yours would have a greater need for anonymity - and not some small segments of the population, as your first example (females) covers about half the population. What about a woman with a "corporate job" and "more money"?
The "accountability" that the anonymity of the internet is used to avoid is used both for good and ill. A haven for persecuted minorities, ways to gather and share with minimal threat of physical violence, to themselves and their loved ones.
Conceptually, it feels lightly reminscent of VCRs or Bittorrent - sure, it is abused and misused by a great many, but denying it to all results in a far worse loss. With VCRs, we're talking about copyright and IP, but with anonymity, it's about people's meatspace lives and sense of personal safety. The greater stakes make the anonymity all the more valuable.
The "average" nondescript heterosexual white male Christian 9-5 working American might not have a lot to fear. But what if I said I was a transexual? or a Sunni? or an immigrated Saudi? or anyone else, fearing persecution for what they are rather than who they are?
A thief walks into a fine winery and takes a bottle without paying for it. Just walks out the door. Two days later, the thief comes back and asks what food might go well with the wine he stole. The store, shocked and appalled at how brazen thieves are becoming, puts locks on the cabinets and asks that people contact an employee, who is nearby and ready to help at any time, to get wine out of the case. That seems closer to a once-and-never-after activation, which this is not. To use the wine metaphor, it's more like the shop put a lock on the wine bottle, so that every time you want to pour a glass you need to contact an employee to open it for you.
As for the piracy issue itself, I'm fond of the Stardock way of looking at it: judging your potential customer base by the number of people who are likely to use your software makes little sense, but is what most companies seem to do. Instead, judge your customer base on the number of people who are likely to buy your software.
Don't open a wine shop in a devoted-to-dryness town.
As was pointed out on Countdown/Olbermann, the bill only clearly gives immunity to civil suits. It's vague about criminal suits, leaving open the possibility for an elected Obama to pursue the telecos in a criminal case.
It's a shame too because I would love to have the fixes for the memory leaks in FF 2.0 that don't exist but FF 3.0 addresses anyway. Find a computer you don't need. Open Firefox, maybe browse a little, then leave Firefox open for a day. Check the memory usage at the end.
I've had Firefox (plain, vanilla, no add-ons etc) taking up hundreds of megs of memory on a windows machine from doing little other than sitting open for a couple of days (based on Task Manager's "Processes"->"Mem Usage" listing, and based on Task Manager's "Performance" tab, watching the Memory Usage History as I close Firefox).
Personally, this is one "business method" patent I'm glad was granted. Amazon holding the "One-Click" patent, and not licensing it, means there is no danger of accidentally "one-click" ordering from any other retailer.
I don't know about you, but I *like* websites giving me a couple clicks of opportunities to confirm wth I am about to order. This patent guarentees that they'll at least require a "second" click, enforcing an opportunity to undo accidents.
Where was it referred to as a "NASA spacecraft"? I looked over the summary and the press release, and it was always referred to as the "Ulysses spacecraft". The closest phrase was "The spacecraft was provided by ESA.", or references to the NASA/ESA "mission" or "project" not "spacecraft".
Most NASA press releases I've seen tend to mention the manufacturer, good or bad, if it's a US company. When it's European, mentions of the contractor are a lot rarer, though Italy seems to be good at getting its name in there (probably because the US has had some construction contracts with them, outside of their ESA agreements). For example, looking over the Mars Polar Lander news release archive, the attributions to NASA vs contractors seem similar to MER and Phoenix press releases.
From what I understand, Phoenix's on-board memory is sufficiently limited that they cannot keep the entire set of "normal" operations on-board (ie, the library would take up too much space). So for each day's actions, they have to include the relevant subsets of the library in with the command code. If those library excerpts are included in the line count (it would make sense from a "upload size" perspective, if not from a "programming" perspective), that could explain it.
Also, be careful with comparisons with the rovers. While the rover arms and the Phoenix arm are related, they've got some critical differences. One that makes the Phoenix arm movements far more complex is lack of any kind of touch/pressure sensor - the rovers' have them, so you know that you've contacted the rock simply by it being triggered. With Phoenix, they instead have to base "contact" on the change in torque values at the arm joints. That means a lot more calculations, and more daily variation (based on what you expect to be impacting/digging into).
Phoenix also doesn't seem to be very self-aware (ie it can't corelate two kinds of data, such as using the stereoscopic camera to understand what the arm is doing), meaning that it has less capability to do contingency cases - it can't even notice that something has gone wrong. All of that processing, evaluation, and decision making has to be done back on Earth. The rovers are much more self-aware, in terms of sensors about their state (wheel revolutions, etc) and more complex uses of the data it acquires (hazard-avoidance cameras).
If the ISPs became legally responsible, wouldn't that simply be a motivation for them to simply drop all dubious-looking customers? Things like the proposed "three accusations and you're cut off" would probably look downright generous in comparison.
I have no numbers of course, but simply cutting off the most suspicious customers seems like it wouldn't do too much harm to their bottom line, while shielding the ISP from most of the legal wrath. I can't see how a customer could have any recourse to get "reinstated", and with the pseudo-monopolies in so many places, P2P would become dancing with dialup rather than todays blank-filled russian roulette.
Am I missing something?
supplementing gaps in instruction with... group study...
While I agree whole-heartedly, and have found group study to be one of the most effective ways of gaining long term mastery of material, Group Study has been all but expressly prohibited in CS at both colleges I attended. CS departments seem excessively concerned about cheating and copying/taking credit for work which is not your own, and as such *any* discussion with *anyone* about material related to assignments (which, naturally, includes most of the material covered) is a violation of academic integrity (and potentially grounds for expulsion).
A few individual professors would relax those rules, but that was the official department policy and was followed in most courses I took.
Except that in modern day, it's linked to/Christian/ Passover rather than Jewish Passover, date-wise. They are computed rather differently.
(like this year, where Easter falls on Mar23 but Passover is Apr19-Apr26)
As for building space stations, it really does make more sense to have a light man-rated vehicle that has 99.9999% reliability and a big dumb booster with 99% reliability sending up the big pieces. A shuttle really isn't needed for building anything in space -- things like the cargo bay arm should be a part of the station already. I believe one of the cut modules for the station would have been a super-arm, a multi-segmented robot that could walk it's way around the station, anchoring itself on special pads that would provide support and power. One or two of these arms could move anywhere on the station and help attach incoming modules every time they're boosted.
The station actually does have its own robotic arm, Canadarm2 (also known as "the Big Arm"), which fits your description. Both ends of it can serve as the base or as the grapple, allowing it to "walk" from grapple fixture to grapple fixture along the station. It is also supported by the Mobile Transporter, basically a couple of carts (3 I think) that can move along the station's truss, at least one of which has a relevant grapple fixture (Power and Data Grapple Fixture, PDGF). Further, the next shuttle mission will be bringing up an optional arm attachment that will let Canadarm2 do some tasks that would formerly have required the fine precision work of an EVA astronaut (the attachment is the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator, SPDM, better known as "Dextre").
Both the shuttle arm (Canadarm) and the station arm (Canadarm2) can supply power to what they're attached to, though they do so in at least semi-incompatible ways (the station arm can't power the shuttle's sensor boom arm extension, for example).
As far as two launch systems, one for cargo and one for people, that seems to be what they're aiming for with the next generation - a small, man-rated Ares launcher for the crew vehicle, and a larger non-man-rated Ares launcher for cargo. It's not something that would help with the unfinished station (since it was designed around the shuttle's cargo bay, which has a rather unique mounting system that is impractical for adapting to a rocket launcher, as I understand it), but could be used for future projects. It does require two launchs in close proximity (presuming you need a specially-trained crew to do some aspect of the cargo deploy/install, as is common for station components), but NASA seems to find that acceptible nowadays.
Aside from the "coolness" factor of the shuttle, its functional uniqueness was its ability to bring stuff back to Earth (ie its "downmass" capacity). While that has obvious applications for experiments (sometimes you want the "thing" back, rather than just data, so you can do further experiments or study on the ground), it also has proven useful for the station & spaceflight - the shuttle has brought back expended materials, failed components and such, which let them study how and why the failed, as well as meaning they can refurbish the existing hardware rather than build brand-new replacements. Nothing planned can match that, unfortunately.
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Recall that this whole Superbowl brouhaha started when drafthouse movie theaters tried to show it for "free". Non-profits such as churches are in a different category, and should fall under fair use.
I think points 3 and 4 are rather relevant here (they're using virtually the whole work, possibly without the Half-Time show but otherwise complete), and the impact on the market is also their concern (big gathering takes the place of many small gatherings, which potentially impacts ratings, as others have mentioned).
Also in clause 1, you highlight the phrase, but while the churches are "nonprofit" it doesn't seem like this would qualify as "educational purpose" (at least that's not what the football is for - it's just to get people in the door). It seems more like a nonprofit advertising or a not-for-profit commercial-style use, since it is essentially being used to promote the value of and awareness of the services rendered by the nonprofit organization.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think the law here is/right/ nor do I like what the NFL is doing, but from my IANAL view the NFL does seem to be acting entirely within its legal rights.
The problem is that the younger generations, who have grown up with the net, likely missed out on the "first" rules. They came in after that was no longer the blaring omnipresent message - now it is but the quiet background, where it is easy for those unfamiliar with it to miss its cautioning cry.
In my area, the public transit system (buses & subway) is actually doing the same thing as TFA points to - raising the prices to discourage usage*. Yes, the public mass transportation system is raising prices explicitly to discourage usage during peak times.
Sometimes I just don't follow the logic...
----
* (the system has raised fares several times in the past few years, but those were pitched as explicitly to deal with trying to balance the ailing budget and pay for needed maintenance; this is fare increase did not include those arguments, and was pitched quite differently than those had been)
They didn't really talk much about the underhanded tricks of Congress in my high school government class.
Either you went to school a long time ago, or you went to a really bad school. A pretty hefty portion of my (public highschool) government class was spent studying (common, legal) congressional tricks.
"Price Gouging" is for life-essentials - like food, water, shelter. A cellphone plan isn't a life essential. The merchants may be overcharging, and there may need to be legal action against them, but they're not _gouging_. Keep that term for when people are going to die without the goods.
(Yes, increased communication can save lives, but that does not appear to be the tack the court case is going with, and I would argue that cellphones are still on a different tier from sustinance and protection from the elements)
</Pet-Peeve>
That's what many people were hoping for following the shutdown of the Earth & Beyond MMO. However, EA pointed out how much of an investment a MMO engine is and what a significant asset it represents to the company - it'd be easier to upgrade/revamp their existing engine than create a new one from scratch if they were to make a new MMO, for example. Plus, releasing the engine would give an enormous boost to their competition in later MMOs, which is of special concern since the subscription MMO client base is generally (or at least was) a relatively limited pool of customers.
At least, that was the response given at the time by Electronic Arts. I imagine that the case would be similar for Auto Assault and NCSoft, overall.
First and foremost - if there is a small chance of catastrophic loss of vehicle, then measures should be taken to prevent that.
You say this, then go on to say that they should purposefully increase the risk of catastrophic loss for no reason other than experimentation. An EVA is considered on of the riskiest things done on-orbit (though that risk is confined to the EVA astronauts), and having an astronaut work on the heatshield creates an opportunity to further damage it. The current damage is not considered a crew risk, mearly a schedule risk (that if damage were to occur during entry, repairs could substantially increase the turn-around time before Endeavour could be flown again - and preliminary simulations indicate no such damage is likely).
They've expressed a policy of on-orbit tests being under controlled circumstances -- in the payload bay, on pre-damaged tiles -- with minimal risk to damaging the shuttle itself. Sounds like a reasonable policy to me....
Slashdot Mirror
Really, did anyone not see this coming? The company advertised that they read your email.
What email company doesn't do automated parsing of incoming emails? While it's generally just spam filters/training or censor-filters (for some corporate environs), how is that really any different from using it to query AdWords when you view the message? It seems less invasive than learning spam filters, since all the gmail AdWords affect is that particular call-up of the mail message, while with teaching spam filters my mail can forever impact the way the system works.
From what I've read even the free creature editor comes with SecuROM, so yes, you should stay far away from it.
Which is common now, apparently because the executables from "demo-esque" variants of games could often be editted (without too much difficulty) to run the full game, given the full game's data files. So if the demo doesn't have DRM, then they've just made their big DRM investment worth even less, by doing most of the hacker's/pirate's (depending on your POV) job for them already.
At least, that's the best explanation I've ever run across as to why freely distributable demos get DRM. I don't know how similar the CreatureCreator is to Spore, but it might be the same logic anyway.
The US has largely gotten out of the "Pay us to launch your stuff" business (relatively speaking). It's largely for "dual use" concerns - ie, we won't launch your nice peaceful SatilliteX because we're concerned it might be possible to use it for Military_or_Technological_Purpose_We_Don't_Like, or that the information you'd acquire via use of our launch vehicle might be applicable to aformentioned purpose. Therefore, we won't do business with you - go pay Russia, ESA, or one of the emerging launch-capable nations like India and Japan. It's been argued this is a rather unfortunate policy, as it's driven business from the US to other countries, and business => $$$ => development/research funding.
You say that "that is a luxury that most other studios don't have." And I disagree entirely. There is nothing stopping a studio from pushing their dates back. The only reason they don't is that they feel if they don't make their release date, then they will miss out of customers.
Not every studio has a bankroll like Blizzard. Lack of money to pay employees/rent/utilities tends to stop development.
How does demanding all of that information follow from what I said? My points are: 1.) that anonymity is used to avoid accountability and 2.) that a society in which anonymity is frequent is one in which people will lie about important parts of their lives in ways that make it harder for all of us and that strengthen McCarthyite tactics. Was the bolding too subtle for you last time? Do I need to make the type flash and surround it with arrows? How do my disclosing my height and weight or any of those other things relate to either of those points?
I never denied that there is a place for anonymity. Quite the contrary. But from what I can see, it is used as a crutch by many who shouldn't at times that they shouldn't. If I were female I would be more reluctant to be as public as I am. If I had a lot of money or were better known I would be more careful.
(emphasis original)
So if I read that right, you're essentially saying anonymity is a necessary evil?
In the bold parts, you seem to paint anonymity as, essentially, and evil. It "make[s] it harder for all of us and that strengthen McCarthyite tactics." Yet right in the next paragraph, you point out that people in situations different from yours would have a greater need for anonymity - and not some small segments of the population, as your first example (females) covers about half the population. What about a woman with a "corporate job" and "more money"?
The "accountability" that the anonymity of the internet is used to avoid is used both for good and ill. A haven for persecuted minorities, ways to gather and share with minimal threat of physical violence, to themselves and their loved ones.
Conceptually, it feels lightly reminscent of VCRs or Bittorrent - sure, it is abused and misused by a great many, but denying it to all results in a far worse loss. With VCRs, we're talking about copyright and IP, but with anonymity, it's about people's meatspace lives and sense of personal safety. The greater stakes make the anonymity all the more valuable.
The "average" nondescript heterosexual white male Christian 9-5 working American might not have a lot to fear. But what if I said I was a transexual? or a Sunni? or an immigrated Saudi? or anyone else, fearing persecution for what they are rather than who they are?
As for the piracy issue itself, I'm fond of the Stardock way of looking at it: judging your potential customer base by the number of people who are likely to use your software makes little sense, but is what most companies seem to do. Instead, judge your customer base on the number of people who are likely to buy your software.
Don't open a wine shop in a devoted-to-dryness town.
As was pointed out on Countdown/Olbermann, the bill only clearly gives immunity to civil suits. It's vague about criminal suits, leaving open the possibility for an elected Obama to pursue the telecos in a criminal case.
I've had Firefox (plain, vanilla, no add-ons etc) taking up hundreds of megs of memory on a windows machine from doing little other than sitting open for a couple of days (based on Task Manager's "Processes"->"Mem Usage" listing, and based on Task Manager's "Performance" tab, watching the Memory Usage History as I close Firefox).
Personally, this is one "business method" patent I'm glad was granted. Amazon holding the "One-Click" patent, and not licensing it, means there is no danger of accidentally "one-click" ordering from any other retailer. I don't know about you, but I *like* websites giving me a couple clicks of opportunities to confirm wth I am about to order. This patent guarentees that they'll at least require a "second" click, enforcing an opportunity to undo accidents.
That's probably why it's expected to "end on or about July 1", rather than a hard-and-fast date.
Where was it referred to as a "NASA spacecraft"? I looked over the summary and the press release, and it was always referred to as the "Ulysses spacecraft". The closest phrase was "The spacecraft was provided by ESA.", or references to the NASA/ESA "mission" or "project" not "spacecraft".
It's an ESA spacecraft (built by "Dornier Systems, Germany (now Astrium)"), with a mix of US & European instruments, launched by NASA (shuttle + Boeing + McDonnell Douglas), operated from NASA (JPL) by a joint NASA/ESA team.
Most NASA press releases I've seen tend to mention the manufacturer, good or bad, if it's a US company. When it's European, mentions of the contractor are a lot rarer, though Italy seems to be good at getting its name in there (probably because the US has had some construction contracts with them, outside of their ESA agreements). For example, looking over the Mars Polar Lander news release archive, the attributions to NASA vs contractors seem similar to MER and Phoenix press releases.
From what I understand, Phoenix's on-board memory is sufficiently limited that they cannot keep the entire set of "normal" operations on-board (ie, the library would take up too much space). So for each day's actions, they have to include the relevant subsets of the library in with the command code. If those library excerpts are included in the line count (it would make sense from a "upload size" perspective, if not from a "programming" perspective), that could explain it.
Also, be careful with comparisons with the rovers. While the rover arms and the Phoenix arm are related, they've got some critical differences. One that makes the Phoenix arm movements far more complex is lack of any kind of touch/pressure sensor - the rovers' have them, so you know that you've contacted the rock simply by it being triggered. With Phoenix, they instead have to base "contact" on the change in torque values at the arm joints. That means a lot more calculations, and more daily variation (based on what you expect to be impacting/digging into).
Phoenix also doesn't seem to be very self-aware (ie it can't corelate two kinds of data, such as using the stereoscopic camera to understand what the arm is doing), meaning that it has less capability to do contingency cases - it can't even notice that something has gone wrong. All of that processing, evaluation, and decision making has to be done back on Earth. The rovers are much more self-aware, in terms of sensors about their state (wheel revolutions, etc) and more complex uses of the data it acquires (hazard-avoidance cameras).
If the ISPs became legally responsible, wouldn't that simply be a motivation for them to simply drop all dubious-looking customers? Things like the proposed "three accusations and you're cut off" would probably look downright generous in comparison. I have no numbers of course, but simply cutting off the most suspicious customers seems like it wouldn't do too much harm to their bottom line, while shielding the ISP from most of the legal wrath. I can't see how a customer could have any recourse to get "reinstated", and with the pseudo-monopolies in so many places, P2P would become dancing with dialup rather than todays blank-filled russian roulette. Am I missing something?
I'm pretty sure that'd make the original $3M look like pocket change.
Except that in modern day, it's linked to /Christian/ Passover rather than Jewish Passover, date-wise. They are computed rather differently.
(like this year, where Easter falls on Mar23 but Passover is Apr19-Apr26)
Both the shuttle arm (Canadarm) and the station arm (Canadarm2) can supply power to what they're attached to, though they do so in at least semi-incompatible ways (the station arm can't power the shuttle's sensor boom arm extension, for example).
As far as two launch systems, one for cargo and one for people, that seems to be what they're aiming for with the next generation - a small, man-rated Ares launcher for the crew vehicle, and a larger non-man-rated Ares launcher for cargo. It's not something that would help with the unfinished station (since it was designed around the shuttle's cargo bay, which has a rather unique mounting system that is impractical for adapting to a rocket launcher, as I understand it), but could be used for future projects. It does require two launchs in close proximity (presuming you need a specially-trained crew to do some aspect of the cargo deploy/install, as is common for station components), but NASA seems to find that acceptible nowadays.
Aside from the "coolness" factor of the shuttle, its functional uniqueness was its ability to bring stuff back to Earth (ie its "downmass" capacity). While that has obvious applications for experiments (sometimes you want the "thing" back, rather than just data, so you can do further experiments or study on the ground), it also has proven useful for the station & spaceflight - the shuttle has brought back expended materials, failed components and such, which let them study how and why the failed, as well as meaning they can refurbish the existing hardware rather than build brand-new replacements. Nothing planned can match that, unfortunately.
Also in clause 1, you highlight the phrase, but while the churches are "nonprofit" it doesn't seem like this would qualify as "educational purpose" (at least that's not what the football is for - it's just to get people in the door). It seems more like a nonprofit advertising or a not-for-profit commercial-style use, since it is essentially being used to promote the value of and awareness of the services rendered by the nonprofit organization.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think the law here is
The problem is that the younger generations, who have grown up with the net, likely missed out on the "first" rules. They came in after that was no longer the blaring omnipresent message - now it is but the quiet background, where it is easy for those unfamiliar with it to miss its cautioning cry.
In my area, the public transit system (buses & subway) is actually doing the same thing as TFA points to - raising the prices to discourage usage*. Yes, the public mass transportation system is raising prices explicitly to discourage usage during peak times.
...
Sometimes I just don't follow the logic
----
* (the system has raised fares several times in the past few years, but those were pitched as explicitly to deal with trying to balance the ailing budget and pay for needed maintenance; this is fare increase did not include those arguments, and was pitched quite differently than those had been)
They didn't really talk much about the underhanded tricks of Congress in my high school government class.
Either you went to school a long time ago, or you went to a really bad school. A pretty hefty portion of my (public highschool) government class was spent studying (common, legal) congressional tricks.
"Price Gouging" is for life-essentials - like food, water, shelter. A cellphone plan isn't a life essential. The merchants may be overcharging, and there may need to be legal action against them, but they're not _gouging_. Keep that term for when people are going to die without the goods.
(Yes, increased communication can save lives, but that does not appear to be the tack the court case is going with, and I would argue that cellphones are still on a different tier from sustinance and protection from the elements)
</Pet-Peeve>
Wait, that followup presumes that a reporter will followup with a politician on an unfulfilled promise. Where do you come up with such crazy ideas?
That's what many people were hoping for following the shutdown of the Earth & Beyond MMO. However, EA pointed out how much of an investment a MMO engine is and what a significant asset it represents to the company - it'd be easier to upgrade/revamp their existing engine than create a new one from scratch if they were to make a new MMO, for example. Plus, releasing the engine would give an enormous boost to their competition in later MMOs, which is of special concern since the subscription MMO client base is generally (or at least was) a relatively limited pool of customers.
At least, that was the response given at the time by Electronic Arts. I imagine that the case would be similar for Auto Assault and NCSoft, overall.
First and foremost - if there is a small chance of catastrophic loss of vehicle, then measures should be taken to prevent that.
....
You say this, then go on to say that they should purposefully increase the risk of catastrophic loss for no reason other than experimentation. An EVA is considered on of the riskiest things done on-orbit (though that risk is confined to the EVA astronauts), and having an astronaut work on the heatshield creates an opportunity to further damage it. The current damage is not considered a crew risk, mearly a schedule risk (that if damage were to occur during entry, repairs could substantially increase the turn-around time before Endeavour could be flown again - and preliminary simulations indicate no such damage is likely).
They've expressed a policy of on-orbit tests being under controlled circumstances -- in the payload bay, on pre-damaged tiles -- with minimal risk to damaging the shuttle itself. Sounds like a reasonable policy to me