Besides, since when has the RIAA shut down anything? Their M.O. is lawsuits, and you can't sue if there is no traffic going.
Increasingly, the RIAA's M.O. is to get their bought-and-paid-for congresscritters to pass laws imposing criminal penalties for stepping on their business model. (See the next story.) If you're complacent about this, you're not paying attention.
"I've got to tell you we spend more time on the computer network attack business than we do on computer network defense because so many people at very high levels are interested," said former CNA commander, Air Force Maj. Gen. John Bradley...
IOW, folks in the Echelons Beyond Reality love the idea of Matrix-style hacking of an enemy network because it's sexy and cool (even though they probably have no idea what real hacking entails) and aren't interested in the boring old-fashioned business of securing our own networks from attack. Okay, guys, here's a quick quiz: of the following possible combatants, which one has the most to lose in the event of an enemy hacker penetrating its computer security?
a) al-Qaeda b) China c) the United States d) North Korea
So you are saying that people who want higher quality wireless services should have to pay once for the municipal "free" version and again for the premium service?
Yes. See below.
Or do you think that a tax credit or refund should be available for those who wish to waive their "right" to free municipal wifi?
Suppose you hire a security guard for your home or business. Further suppose that the guard is able to deal with any security problems you encounter, and you never have to call the cops. Do you get a tax refund for the city for the police services you didn't use? Doesn't work that way.
We pay taxes for all kinds of government services we, personally, never use, because those services help society as a whole function smoothly. Deal with it.
Without making a refund available, municipal wifi will 1) make better alternatives infinitely more expensive
Please explain how. I see no mechanism to cause this.
2) add a surcharge for next generation technology in the form of the tax levied to pay for the system
See above.
3) kill off potential offerings from private firms who have already invested in technology not anticipating municipal wifi projects.
Two answers to this one: first, so what? Suppose crime goes up, and in response, the city expands the police department. Does this hurt private security firms? Sure, but the overall benefit of reduced crime, most people will agree, is worth it.
Second, we keep hearing advocates of private networks blather about how much better private service must be than public. Fine: prove it. Build it ("it" being a superior network at a reasonable price) and the customers will come. I'll say it again: a municipal wifi network at a low (or zero) price does nothing to prevent Verizon or whoever from offering a better service, say WiMax, at a somewhat higher price, any more than -- to switch metaphors -- the existence of a city bus network prevents Ford from selling cars.
It is a law of the universe just like gravity.
Suuure it is.
Marxists and Randroids may not agree on much, but they share an unfortunate tendency to confuse economic observations with physical reality. Ultimately, arguing with economic fanatics is no more rewarding than arguing with religious fanatics, so I'll stop now.
You're missing my point. It's true that Verizon faces competition; it's also true that, given their CEO's comments, that competition in and of itself is clearly not enough to force adoption of new technology. The "competition creates innovation" meme is nice in theory, but often falls far short of its adherents' claims in practice.
Furthermore, I'm not aware that any of the municipal wifi schemes prevent Verizon, or whoever, from offering their allegedly better service at the same time. If private providers are more likely to offer WiMax (an unproven assertion, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument) than are municipal providers, then I see no problem with a two-tier system: current 802.11b service at low (or no) cost on the municipal network, and WiMax or some other markedly better service at higher cost on the private network for those who want to pay for it.
Precisely what incentive do you think Verizon (or whoever) will have to upgrade their wifi networks that municipal wifi won't have? Specifics, please; sputtering about "competition creates innovation" isn't especially persuasive when you have the CEO of the largest wireless service provider in the country (and therefore, most likely, the world) telling us that we can't expect our cell phones in our houses, ferchrissakes.
There's a good argument to be made that we won the Cold War because Sputnik scared the hell out of us, and spurred us to pour enormous amounts of money into science and technology. To a large degree, we're still living off the fruits of the Cold War sci/tech boom; and there's no similar impetus around the corner to keep things going at the same pace. Which is a pity.
I don't think he was psychotic. I think that once it came down to preparing for the actual fight, he knew there was a good possibility he was going to get his ass kicked by a girl, and escalated the conditions for the fight to a point where he knew she'd back off to avoid that possibility. I also seriously doubt that he had ever actually gouged anyone's eye out, or had any idea if he really had the stomach for it or not.
There is a fundamental difference between radio and TV on the one hand, and the internet on the other. If you set up a web server in your house, and I set up a web server in my house next door, we're not stepping on each other's toes; someone accessing your server has no effect on mine, and vice versa. But if you set up a radio or TV broadcast tower on your roof, and I set up another one on mine, and we're broadcasting at the same frequency, we are very definitely interfering with each other. We either have to be separated in space or in frequency for both broadcasts to work; and there's only so much of both to go around.
This fundamental physical limitation on broadcasting, combined with the fact that radio waves happily cross state lines, is, in fact, the only Constitutional reason the government is able to regulate communication at all. (There are all sorts of un-Constitutional reasons, of course.) Now, if you want to argue that the government should get out of the business of regulating communications regardless -- "let the market decide" if there's an interference problem -- that's a legitimate argument, but pretending broadcasting is the same thing as setting up a web site is just silly.
The moon has a habit of turning alot, not only in circles but it also makes of habit about spinning on its axis. This would result in alot of Pointing At The Earth action...
When you're in a discovery-oriented field, a lot of things are going to sound like bullshit but will be totally legitimate.
I strongly disagree. Good writing is good writing, no matter what the subject matter; the most revolutionary discoveries can (and should) be presented in a style that is accessible to readers knowledgeable in the field. On the other hand, buzzword-laden crap is pretty much a sure sign that the author has no meaningful contribution to make; and when buzzword-laden crap is what you get in the majority of papers published, which is pretty much where CS is right now, something is seriously wrong. The fact that randomly generated papers look so much like "real" ones is a sign of a field in serious trouble.
They could also... hmmm, I don't know, let's see... on the basis of no actual science whatsoever, based on loony racial theories centered on things like hair color and head shape, decide that some groups are superior and others inferior, and start trying to breed the superior ones to create a race of supermen for world conquest, while putting the inferior ones in death camps. Or they could, based on loony economic theories centered on the writings of long-dead philosophers, decide that all property must be owned and distributed by the state, and kill anyone who disagrees with them. Or... well, you get the idea. Honestly, on the list of Bad Things To Be Scared Of Governments Doing, abuse of genetic data gathered for an anthropology project is way down on the list.
Their price doesn't go down with volume. You forget, these are government contracts. $14,000 hammers, and the whole mess.
Yawn. Propaganda. In fact, the DoD manages to get very good economies of scale on large manufacturing projects. (There's plenty of DoD money being wasted, of course, but it tends to be in other ways.) There's no reason NASA couldn't get the same kind of advantages, if we were willing to fund the space program at reasonable levels.
We could, and should, be building space vehicles (both reusable and one-time Big Dumb Boosters) the way the Navy has ships built. Shuttles really aren't even comparable to capital ships, more like destroyers or mid-sized transports. Use the same basic design for each one, and mass-produce many of the parts, but also improve each successive one to come off the line based on lessons learned from previous models and on advances in technology. Unfortunately, this would require a level of vision and committment to space that we're not going to see any time soon, no matter which party is in power.
Sorry. Understand that on/., there are a lot of people who deliberately drop well-written trolls into discussions (as opposed to the endless flood of crap that can easily be spotted) and often put the fact that they're deliberate trolls into their user names. I actually started writing my response before I saw your user name, and then thought, Oh, hell, I'm being trolled, but I started writing this response and don't want to waste it, so here goes.
Anyway.
It is part of geek culture, because it is something geeks care about a lot it would seem. It may well also be part of other areas, but I don't see most people understanding or even caring about the issue... I am quite geeky. If I find it to be this way, what will normal users think?
The point I was trying to make is that no matter how geeky the subject may appear, it still belongs in the realm of business law rather than, say, the fine points of writing readable Perl code.;) And it's complicated, therefore, because the law is complicated. Writing open-source licenses that will stand up to the scrutiny of the hordes of lawyers BigSoftwareCo. Inc. has as its disposal is a real accomplishment. (And there's no guarantee that anyone has actually succeeded yet.) Am I happy with this state of affairs? Of course not; IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer, in case you haven't picked up on that abbreviation yet) and have no desire to become one. But I do desire, very much, to protect the software I write from what I consider abusive business practices -- and like it or not, that means speaking the lawyers' language, at least to a degree.
And talking about it, like it or not, requires speaking the geeks' language, because you're quite right that it's mostly geeks who care. Look, I'm sorry that you've been treated poorly, and I'm sorry that I'm one of the people who has done so. But you have to understand that every culture has its own language, and coming onto/. complaining about the use of terms like "GPL" and "BSD" is kind of like going to a medical conference and complaining that everyone is using lots of Latin words.
If I point you to a particular site (and the OSI site to which I linked in my previous post really is an excellent resource for anyone who cares about this issue) it's because I think that they've done a better job of explaining things than I can. You're right that you should be able to learn about the issue from online discussions, here and elsewhere, but part of the learning process is taking people's advice about how to learn.
Speaking from the point of view of someone less deeply engrossed in the geek culture, I'd like to say that these licenses confuse the hell out of me.
GPL? BSD? I mean, to me it means very little. Then again, it may well be important, but it'd be nice if we could see some sort of umbrella license that made it all clear to normal people. Free, open source, software should have a clear explanation of the terms in simple language, this way it'd be more likely that people would read them, instead of just clicking "I Agree". All these acronyms confuse lots of people!
"Normal people" can very easily read the licenses in question on the OSI site or one of about a bazillion other sites, as well as lots and lots of commentary. These licenses are, in fact, much simpler than all the garbage Microsoft et al. throw at you above the "I Agree" button -- and even better, with open source programs, in the overwhelming majority of cases, you don't have to click an "I Agree" button to use the software! As a rule of thumb: if you write or distribute software, you should pay attention to the differences between the licenses; if all you do is use it, it's really not important.
And this is really not a geek culture issue; it's a business law issue, about an aspect of that field which happens to be mostly the concern of geeks.
Finally, if we use acronyms a lot, it's because typing out the full names gets tedious. If you want to engage in the discussion in a meaningful way (which, given your user name, I doubt...) then you should spend the requisite, I don't know, ten minutes or so to learn the terminology.
Can't speak for anyone else, but for myself, I care about the Artistic License, which to me has always seemed a very nice middle ground between BSD and GPL. I'd be sorry to see it drop off the OSI-approved list.
The just-released report includes results of a survey of more than 1,400 IT executives... (emphasis mine)
I.e., not sysadmins or developers. I think it's quite reasonable to assume that in many cases, the people actually doing the work are using whatever tool best fits the task -- unless they're hamstrung by stupid company policies, of course -- and not bothering to tell the PHBs, either because they don't think it's worth mentioning or because they're afraid of being shut down.
Mercury (after the first couple of missions), Gemini, and Apollo all placed their payloads in Earth orbit before they did anything else. Mercury and Gemini never left Earth orbit at all. Apollo, which did of course go to the moon (after leaving EO), required more thrust overall than any other space venture in history, because it had to boost everything necessary for reaching the Moon into EO. The Saturn V was the most powerful booster ever built, period. Even the modern Energiya can't match it.
Today it is trivial to reverse engineer and duplicate someone else's hard work. In the old days it was often sufficient to simply keep the designs secret.
You're kidding, right? It is a hell of a lot easier to disassemble and copy a mechanical device with big moving parts than to decompile any non-trivial program, or take apart and examine any modern electronic hardware. As a rule in the 19th c., once any useful device got to the frontier, it was fair game for anyone who wanted to make a copy.
I was going to write a long flame about the ad hominem attack and general ignorance displayed in the rest of your post, but you know, I just don't care enough.
Saying that Chinese and Soviet technological progress was slow because of poor IP is a huge non sequitur. It has a lot more to do with the fact of their being dictatorships, and the fact that science and technological innovation tend not to thrive in societies where questioning the status quo is discouraged by force of arms. For a counterexample, as many other posters have pointed out, the early US made "Yankee ingenuity" a byword in an age when our IP protection was pretty much nil.
1. If an Indonesian lab can get cold fusion working, I'll bet there's an Indonesian company that can produce a working power plant using it. The same is true of any country that has the infrastructure to support serious research.
2. If an Indonesian entity (be it a university lab, a company, whatever) tried to patent something so incredibly useful... do you imagine for a minute that this would keep some large US company with good political connections from getting the US patent on it, and making a mint?
[shrug] Maybe you wouldn't ask for an explanation of the acronyms; I would, and feel better for it.
Look, I have nothing against specialization. It's what keeps the world running, after all -- else we'd all be sitting in our own caves, chipping out our own flint spearheads. I accept that there are many people who know many things I don't, and if the things they know are useful to me, I'm more than willing to give them money to use their knowledge on my behalf. (I am also, of course, glad to take their money in return for the use of my own knowledge.) But there is, to my mind, a difference between not being a complete Rennaisance man -- a feat that nobody can really manage, given the complexity of the world -- and being deliberately helpless.
It's deliberate helplessness, deliberate ignorance, that bothers me. I like explaining things to people, and when my less geeky friends and co-workers ask me a computer question, I gladly answer. I use plain English as much as possible, only dropping into jargon when there's no other choice. If they don't understand what I'm saying, I will find a different way to explain it until they do. But when they cover their ears and say "la la la I can't hear you!" when I'm answering the questions they asked, showing them what went wrong and how to keep it from happening again... there's only so much of that my temper can take, especially when I know that this attitude on their part pretty much guarantees they're going to call me back to fix the same stupid problem next week.
Slashdot Mirror
The most impressive enginering feats were done with slave labor.
Please name some of these feats. If you're thinking of the Pyramids, BTW, you're wrong.
Besides, since when has the RIAA shut down anything? Their M.O. is lawsuits, and you can't sue if there is no traffic going.
Increasingly, the RIAA's M.O. is to get their bought-and-paid-for congresscritters to pass laws imposing criminal penalties for stepping on their business model. (See the next story.) If you're complacent about this, you're not paying attention.
"I've got to tell you we spend more time on the computer network attack business than we do on computer network defense because so many people at very high levels are interested," said former CNA commander, Air Force Maj. Gen. John Bradley ...
IOW, folks in the Echelons Beyond Reality love the idea of Matrix-style hacking of an enemy network because it's sexy and cool (even though they probably have no idea what real hacking entails) and aren't interested in the boring old-fashioned business of securing our own networks from attack. Okay, guys, here's a quick quiz: of the following possible combatants, which one has the most to lose in the event of an enemy hacker penetrating its computer security?
a) al-Qaeda
b) China
c) the United States
d) North Korea
Think fast!
So you are saying that people who want higher quality wireless services should have to pay once for the municipal "free" version and again for the premium service?
Yes. See below.
Or do you think that a tax credit or refund should be available for those who wish to waive their "right" to free municipal wifi?
Suppose you hire a security guard for your home or business. Further suppose that the guard is able to deal with any security problems you encounter, and you never have to call the cops. Do you get a tax refund for the city for the police services you didn't use? Doesn't work that way.
We pay taxes for all kinds of government services we, personally, never use, because those services help society as a whole function smoothly. Deal with it.
Without making a refund available, municipal wifi will 1) make better alternatives infinitely more expensive
Please explain how. I see no mechanism to cause this.
2) add a surcharge for next generation technology in the form of the tax levied to pay for the system
See above.
3) kill off potential offerings from private firms who have already invested in technology not anticipating municipal wifi projects.
Two answers to this one: first, so what? Suppose crime goes up, and in response, the city expands the police department. Does this hurt private security firms? Sure, but the overall benefit of reduced crime, most people will agree, is worth it.
Second, we keep hearing advocates of private networks blather about how much better private service must be than public. Fine: prove it. Build it ("it" being a superior network at a reasonable price) and the customers will come. I'll say it again: a municipal wifi network at a low (or zero) price does nothing to prevent Verizon or whoever from offering a better service, say WiMax, at a somewhat higher price, any more than -- to switch metaphors -- the existence of a city bus network prevents Ford from selling cars.
It is a law of the universe just like gravity.
Suuure it is.
Marxists and Randroids may not agree on much, but they share an unfortunate tendency to confuse economic observations with physical reality. Ultimately, arguing with economic fanatics is no more rewarding than arguing with religious fanatics, so I'll stop now.
You're missing my point. It's true that Verizon faces competition; it's also true that, given their CEO's comments, that competition in and of itself is clearly not enough to force adoption of new technology. The "competition creates innovation" meme is nice in theory, but often falls far short of its adherents' claims in practice.
Furthermore, I'm not aware that any of the municipal wifi schemes prevent Verizon, or whoever, from offering their allegedly better service at the same time. If private providers are more likely to offer WiMax (an unproven assertion, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument) than are municipal providers, then I see no problem with a two-tier system: current 802.11b service at low (or no) cost on the municipal network, and WiMax or some other markedly better service at higher cost on the private network for those who want to pay for it.
Oops, typed too fast. That should have been "... expect our cell phones to work in our houses ...." above, of course.
Precisely what incentive do you think Verizon (or whoever) will have to upgrade their wifi networks that municipal wifi won't have? Specifics, please; sputtering about "competition creates innovation" isn't especially persuasive when you have the CEO of the largest wireless service provider in the country (and therefore, most likely, the world) telling us that we can't expect our cell phones in our houses, ferchrissakes.
There's a good argument to be made that we won the Cold War because Sputnik scared the hell out of us, and spurred us to pour enormous amounts of money into science and technology. To a large degree, we're still living off the fruits of the Cold War sci/tech boom; and there's no similar impetus around the corner to keep things going at the same pace. Which is a pity.
I don't think he was psychotic. I think that once it came down to preparing for the actual fight, he knew there was a good possibility he was going to get his ass kicked by a girl, and escalated the conditions for the fight to a point where he knew she'd back off to avoid that possibility. I also seriously doubt that he had ever actually gouged anyone's eye out, or had any idea if he really had the stomach for it or not.
Ah hah. That clears it up. Thanks. ;)
You do realize that "the government" isn't actually a single monolithic entity? Don't you?
There is a fundamental difference between radio and TV on the one hand, and the internet on the other. If you set up a web server in your house, and I set up a web server in my house next door, we're not stepping on each other's toes; someone accessing your server has no effect on mine, and vice versa. But if you set up a radio or TV broadcast tower on your roof, and I set up another one on mine, and we're broadcasting at the same frequency, we are very definitely interfering with each other. We either have to be separated in space or in frequency for both broadcasts to work; and there's only so much of both to go around.
This fundamental physical limitation on broadcasting, combined with the fact that radio waves happily cross state lines, is, in fact, the only Constitutional reason the government is able to regulate communication at all. (There are all sorts of un-Constitutional reasons, of course.) Now, if you want to argue that the government should get out of the business of regulating communications regardless -- "let the market decide" if there's an interference problem -- that's a legitimate argument, but pretending broadcasting is the same thing as setting up a web site is just silly.
The moon has a habit of turning alot, not only in circles but it also makes of habit about spinning on its axis. This would result in alot of Pointing At The Earth action ...
... no.
Um
When you're in a discovery-oriented field, a lot of things are going to sound like bullshit but will be totally legitimate.
I strongly disagree. Good writing is good writing, no matter what the subject matter; the most revolutionary discoveries can (and should) be presented in a style that is accessible to readers knowledgeable in the field. On the other hand, buzzword-laden crap is pretty much a sure sign that the author has no meaningful contribution to make; and when buzzword-laden crap is what you get in the majority of papers published, which is pretty much where CS is right now, something is seriously wrong. The fact that randomly generated papers look so much like "real" ones is a sign of a field in serious trouble.
Yes, they could.
... hmmm, I don't know, let's see ... on the basis of no actual science whatsoever, based on loony racial theories centered on things like hair color and head shape, decide that some groups are superior and others inferior, and start trying to breed the superior ones to create a race of supermen for world conquest, while putting the inferior ones in death camps. Or they could, based on loony economic theories centered on the writings of long-dead philosophers, decide that all property must be owned and distributed by the state, and kill anyone who disagrees with them. Or ... well, you get the idea. Honestly, on the list of Bad Things To Be Scared Of Governments Doing, abuse of genetic data gathered for an anthropology project is way down on the list.
They could also
Their price doesn't go down with volume. You forget, these are government contracts. $14,000 hammers, and the whole mess.
Yawn. Propaganda. In fact, the DoD manages to get very good economies of scale on large manufacturing projects. (There's plenty of DoD money being wasted, of course, but it tends to be in other ways.) There's no reason NASA couldn't get the same kind of advantages, if we were willing to fund the space program at reasonable levels.
We could, and should, be building space vehicles (both reusable and one-time Big Dumb Boosters) the way the Navy has ships built. Shuttles really aren't even comparable to capital ships, more like destroyers or mid-sized transports. Use the same basic design for each one, and mass-produce many of the parts, but also improve each successive one to come off the line based on lessons learned from previous models and on advances in technology. Unfortunately, this would require a level of vision and committment to space that we're not going to see any time soon, no matter which party is in power.
Sorry. Understand that on /., there are a lot of people who deliberately drop well-written trolls into discussions (as opposed to the endless flood of crap that can easily be spotted) and often put the fact that they're deliberate trolls into their user names. I actually started writing my response before I saw your user name, and then thought, Oh, hell, I'm being trolled, but I started writing this response and don't want to waste it, so here goes.
... I am quite geeky. If I find it to be this way, what will normal users think?
;) And it's complicated, therefore, because the law is complicated. Writing open-source licenses that will stand up to the scrutiny of the hordes of lawyers BigSoftwareCo. Inc. has as its disposal is a real accomplishment. (And there's no guarantee that anyone has actually succeeded yet.) Am I happy with this state of affairs? Of course not; IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer, in case you haven't picked up on that abbreviation yet) and have no desire to become one. But I do desire, very much, to protect the software I write from what I consider abusive business practices -- and like it or not, that means speaking the lawyers' language, at least to a degree.
/. complaining about the use of terms like "GPL" and "BSD" is kind of like going to a medical conference and complaining that everyone is using lots of Latin words.
Anyway.
It is part of geek culture, because it is something geeks care about a lot it would seem. It may well also be part of other areas, but I don't see most people understanding or even caring about the issue
The point I was trying to make is that no matter how geeky the subject may appear, it still belongs in the realm of business law rather than, say, the fine points of writing readable Perl code.
And talking about it, like it or not, requires speaking the geeks' language, because you're quite right that it's mostly geeks who care. Look, I'm sorry that you've been treated poorly, and I'm sorry that I'm one of the people who has done so. But you have to understand that every culture has its own language, and coming onto
If I point you to a particular site (and the OSI site to which I linked in my previous post really is an excellent resource for anyone who cares about this issue) it's because I think that they've done a better job of explaining things than I can. You're right that you should be able to learn about the issue from online discussions, here and elsewhere, but part of the learning process is taking people's advice about how to learn.
Speaking from the point of view of someone less deeply engrossed in the geek culture, I'd like to say that these licenses confuse the hell out of me.
...) then you should spend the requisite, I don't know, ten minutes or so to learn the terminology.
GPL? BSD? I mean, to me it means very little. Then again, it may well be important, but it'd be nice if we could see some sort of umbrella license that made it all clear to normal people. Free, open source, software should have a clear explanation of the terms in simple language, this way it'd be more likely that people would read them, instead of just clicking "I Agree". All these acronyms confuse lots of people!
"Normal people" can very easily read the licenses in question on the OSI site or one of about a bazillion other sites, as well as lots and lots of commentary. These licenses are, in fact, much simpler than all the garbage Microsoft et al. throw at you above the "I Agree" button -- and even better, with open source programs, in the overwhelming majority of cases, you don't have to click an "I Agree" button to use the software! As a rule of thumb: if you write or distribute software, you should pay attention to the differences between the licenses; if all you do is use it, it's really not important.
And this is really not a geek culture issue; it's a business law issue, about an aspect of that field which happens to be mostly the concern of geeks.
Finally, if we use acronyms a lot, it's because typing out the full names gets tedious. If you want to engage in the discussion in a meaningful way (which, given your user name, I doubt
Can't speak for anyone else, but for myself, I care about the Artistic License, which to me has always seemed a very nice middle ground between BSD and GPL. I'd be sorry to see it drop off the OSI-approved list.
The just-released report includes results of a survey of more than 1,400 IT executives ... (emphasis mine)
I.e., not sysadmins or developers. I think it's quite reasonable to assume that in many cases, the people actually doing the work are using whatever tool best fits the task -- unless they're hamstrung by stupid company policies, of course -- and not bothering to tell the PHBs, either because they don't think it's worth mentioning or because they're afraid of being shut down.
You are so deeply wrong here it isn't funny.
Mercury (after the first couple of missions), Gemini, and Apollo all placed their payloads in Earth orbit before they did anything else. Mercury and Gemini never left Earth orbit at all. Apollo, which did of course go to the moon (after leaving EO), required more thrust overall than any other space venture in history, because it had to boost everything necessary for reaching the Moon into EO. The Saturn V was the most powerful booster ever built, period. Even the modern Energiya can't match it.
Today it is trivial to reverse engineer and duplicate someone else's hard work. In the old days it was often sufficient to simply keep the designs secret.
You're kidding, right? It is a hell of a lot easier to disassemble and copy a mechanical device with big moving parts than to decompile any non-trivial program, or take apart and examine any modern electronic hardware. As a rule in the 19th c., once any useful device got to the frontier, it was fair game for anyone who wanted to make a copy.
I was going to write a long flame about the ad hominem attack and general ignorance displayed in the rest of your post, but you know, I just don't care enough.
Saying that Chinese and Soviet technological progress was slow because of poor IP is a huge non sequitur. It has a lot more to do with the fact of their being dictatorships, and the fact that science and technological innovation tend not to thrive in societies where questioning the status quo is discouraged by force of arms. For a counterexample, as many other posters have pointed out, the early US made "Yankee ingenuity" a byword in an age when our IP protection was pretty much nil.
Two answers:
... do you imagine for a minute that this would keep some large US company with good political connections from getting the US patent on it, and making a mint?
1. If an Indonesian lab can get cold fusion working, I'll bet there's an Indonesian company that can produce a working power plant using it. The same is true of any country that has the infrastructure to support serious research.
2. If an Indonesian entity (be it a university lab, a company, whatever) tried to patent something so incredibly useful
[shrug] Maybe you wouldn't ask for an explanation of the acronyms; I would, and feel better for it.
... there's only so much of that my temper can take, especially when I know that this attitude on their part pretty much guarantees they're going to call me back to fix the same stupid problem next week.
Look, I have nothing against specialization. It's what keeps the world running, after all -- else we'd all be sitting in our own caves, chipping out our own flint spearheads. I accept that there are many people who know many things I don't, and if the things they know are useful to me, I'm more than willing to give them money to use their knowledge on my behalf. (I am also, of course, glad to take their money in return for the use of my own knowledge.) But there is, to my mind, a difference between not being a complete Rennaisance man -- a feat that nobody can really manage, given the complexity of the world -- and being deliberately helpless.
It's deliberate helplessness, deliberate ignorance, that bothers me. I like explaining things to people, and when my less geeky friends and co-workers ask me a computer question, I gladly answer. I use plain English as much as possible, only dropping into jargon when there's no other choice. If they don't understand what I'm saying, I will find a different way to explain it until they do. But when they cover their ears and say "la la la I can't hear you!" when I'm answering the questions they asked, showing them what went wrong and how to keep it from happening again