OK. I am beginning to see what you mean. Now I see that it is not the issue here.
The Alice-Bob agreement is a contract only if there is consideration. But what is consideration? Is money the only acceptable form of consideration?
The agreement gives Alice, the skeptic, the high ground. Bob in agreeing to take the alien ship away is saying that Alice is vindicated. Until the alien ship actually crashed, and the consideration - Alice's vinidication - is forfeit. Bob is then entitled to cash in on the forfeit by claiming the ship (since he maintained its existence) for his vindication. It sounds inadequate, but one only needs to show consideration, as your same link shows, not adequency! Consideration (in the form of vindication) goes both ways in this case, right?
This entire idea of consideration doesn't make sense from the betting point of view. Lawyers frequently offer this option: "I'll fight your case for no charge. But if you win, I get 50 percent of damages." Sounds like a good deal right? But where is the consideration to the lawyer when the case is lost? This contract is void! Yet people are doing this all the time, in the USA.
My conclusion is that consideration is an essential point here. But one has to be flexible about what form consideration takes!
Well, the GPL is phrased as an "if... then" statement. If you modify the code, and choose to distribute it, then you must include the code to whoever you distribute to.
This means that there is a violation only when the if clause is satisfied and the then clause not. In the other cases, you have entered into a licence which does not restrict your freedom in any way. Quid Pro Quo is in effect in all cases. If you distrbute and pass the changes back, the original provider gets the changes. Something for something else. If you don't make modifications, or don't distribute, nothing is taken, nothing given.
This makes it different from the alien case you are making an analogy to. Bob should probably have said, "If an alien lands, I'll haul the ship away for you, and cleanup the lawn for you too." When Alice assents to this agreement, she is in effect agreeing to let Bob haul the ship away. How she assents to this agreement (by accepting money or otherwise) is immaterial. The point is that there should be some sign of assent. It seems that "consideration" should be part of the contract, and not confused with the issue of whether the contract is entered into at all.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, said that Mattel might be able to argue that the GPL is invalid because users don't pay for the free software. "Nonexclusive licenses given for free are generally revocable, even if they purport to be irrevocable," Volokh said. "Even if the GPL license in cphack is treated as signed and is covered by 205(e), it might still be revocable by Mattel as the new owners of the cphack copyright." "It is unfortunately not quite as solid a case for the good guys as the GNU license theory would have at first led us to believe," he said.
I am glad those cphack authors did such a poor job of assigning their rights to the GPL. If this is true, then we should stress just how botchy their job of assigning this copyright to the FSF is. Thinking of the huge volume of fine free software, I just can't visualize it as going away just like that. If it is, I would like to support RMS in his fight to keep the GPLed software free.
And now for the rant: The logic of this line of argument is detestable, really. Why indeed should contracts be drafted around the concept of money. Whatever happened to quid pro quo? The GPL says: "Use this software as you like, change it as you like. But let's share that change." This is not a commercial transaction. The last time I heard, contracts/licenses covering non-monetary forms of compensation are legal and enforceable. Many free software programmers are NOT in it for the money.
Let's see, suppose cphack was liscenced under the artistic liscense. Would there be any protection against Mattel preventing you from redistributing it? Going by copyright law, it seems that there is no such protection.
Someone correct me on this, becuase I can't seem to differentiate between the Artistic Liscense and public domain software.
The GPL is supposed to protect against that, by introducing the idea of liscensing different versions of the program. If the GPL offers no such protection, then it is in effect the same as the Artistic Liscence. Note, the "supposed". As it is, there is doubt whether the code is explicitly licensed under the GPL, since it does not carry the GPL, and only one line says "licensed under the GPL".
I have written code for GNOME, and I know how painful it was to get started.
BUT having said that, I must say that once I got it, it was a real breeze. Somehow, the steep learning curve always plateaus out. Maybe that's a cool philosophy to live by, no?
Well, I can't say I advocate this for everyone. But that's the difference.
"I am troubled by the broader notion that Bezos and his industry are entitled to special protection."
This is the kind of lawyerspeak that is so disgusting.
Firstly, Bezos and his industry is a very large industry. It represents very diverse businesses and encompasses a wide range of the business activities that we can benefit from in the future. If the whole industry get some special protection, its not special! There are no concession, so stop pretending that it is. It just reflects on the distinction that we see as evident between business method patents and technology patents. This distinction is similar to the distinction between patenting a screwdriver, and patenting a method of holding a screwdriver.
Next Jeff Bezos is by no means representative of the industry. In fact, a number of people in the industry disagree strongly with his method of doing business. So attacking Bezos himself does nothing for us, the people you are supposed to defend!
Again, there is the subtext. No special concession is asked for. No privilege. In fact, we are asking the people who have been given this privilege of holding business patents (for offensive or defensive purposes) to give them up. To stop ligitating each other to death. For the common good. It's just like a lawyer to paint this argument into something it is not.
The bar claims that the current system is good. But many, many people from Nobel-winning scientists to writers like James Gleick, businessmen like Tim O'Reilly, Jeff Bezos, and the thousands of signatures in Tim O'Reilly's letter.
So this is my question to this bar of lawyers: Where's your proof that the current system is good? For whose interest does it benefit, and at the expense of whose interest?
I would really appreciate an honest reply. But not expecting one.
Seriously, the idea of powered armour comes from so many Sci-Fi sources that one can hardly stop.
In Homer's Illiad, Achilles could be considered to have personal armor, except his heel...
Heinlein's Starship Troopers
H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, where the Martians could be considered to be wearing some kind of suit.
Asimov's Foundation, with his reference to personal force fields.
Marvel's Iron Man?
Macross
Mobile Suit Gundam
Hey, maybe I'm stretching it, but surely somewhere there's a first?:-)
But that's not where the fun of Lego is!
on
Lego CAD
·
· Score: 4
I hate to sound so critical. After all, this is cool. One can really let one's imagination run wild, unlimited by the physical numbers of bricks available. But all CAD software is like that.
The fun of Lego is to build, within the constraints of the number of bricks, and the constraints of physics and engineering, that cool toy you want to have! Half the fun is determining things like "What size of car can I build, since I have only x bricks?". Stuff like that. This teaches a kid mental planning. It's wonderful how such a thing can build tactile and physical experience for small kids!
Not really opposed to this, mind you. Just wondering what it is for. The kid in all of us, I guess.
The problem then goes back to that covered in the old GPL/BSD licensing debate.
What are you going to do about those corporations, who take what you make, make something better, feed that to your friends, and refuse to allow you to create from what they have made?
One ton of Mills and Boons pulp romances is not equivalent to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet,/i>. Guess what, Romeo and Juliet is a terribly original story either.
Basically, it all boils down to what art is.
Not all works of art are similarly valued.
Not all tastes are the same.
Sometimes, form and style outweigh originality.
Tastes change over time, and it is an interesting history to keep track of those changes, to document where they arise from.
In view of this, it is very important to keep as much of our cultural heritage as alive as possible.
Those who seek to use copyright law to prevent this are precisely contradicting these ideals. On one hand, they desire to contribute to culture and profit from it (nothing wrong with that). But they refuse to contribute to culture in any other ways other than on their own terms, far beyond their own lifetimes.
Firstly, the entire Universe may be a free lunch. It may be that there was a vacuum fluctuation so great that the universe was born just like that. At least, that is the gut feeling of quite a few cosmologists.
Next, Your life is a free lunch. As a feotus, you took nourishment freely from your mother, without her consent. If she did not want to feed you, she would have to starve herself. There's no way she could have borne you without you taking that free lunch, short of an abortion. (If your mom is pro-life, congratulations, a Free Lunch).
Then you were given all sorts of love - free. Nourishment as a baby - free. The air you breathe is free. So were the nappies on your bare bottomed buttocks. So were the first reading lessons. I could go on and on. In fact, you can see what not getting these things do, when you see the wretched poor children of third world nations. Since you are posting on slashdot, you are one of the privileged few. Don't be a hypocrite! You are here becuase you got many things free, from our society who values children and the future!
People say "Shakespeare is dead - he can't collect anymore." Bullshit. All copyrighted stuff should go back to the public domain, sooner or later. Why? Beucase of our social contract. Imagine how impoverished you would have to be, if you can't even read the children's fables, Aesop's fables, Grimm Brother's Fairy Tales, etc. How early would you have got to read? Not convinced. Go a few centuries back and look at what the literacy level was. How many books were there? And who are the illiterate? Naturally the poor, who can't get the books to read.
Consider Micheal Faraday, one of the discoverers of the laws of electricity. Apprenticed to a book binder, he read from the books (for free!) and taught himself enough science to enter the Royal Society. If there is any example of the liberating power of "free books" this is it!
The thing is that you are assuming it is easy to find a backdoor, that it would be obvious. ALL THE MOST OBVIOUS EXPLOITSARE KNOWN. You have to be really clever to see something that someone else does not have.
That is what most people miss. It's not about you the hacker vs the machine. With close source, that would be the case. But with open source it is about you the hacker vs other hackers.
that guy who was a squeaky clean kid that shouts "Yippee!", assemble droids, become an ace fighter pilot, get to kiss Natalie Portman, wield a lightsabre, then don blackboots, and a dark helmet, kill millions and millions of innocents, then be forgiven by my talented son, the last of the Jedi...
Yeah! That this the most important thing everyone is missing here - the moral high ground.
It does no good to keep harping on what are essentially good arguments for MP3. What needs to be done is to _show_ people, a high profile case that demostrate conclusively that MP3's can be legal, that one does not have to have a history of being a warez d00d to defend MP3.
This really needs to be done to demostrate the morally dubious arguments against MP3 by the MPAA and RIAA.
Really now, what would opening the source of the "wince" do to an already dying OS? Firstly, WinCE products are losing marketshare. And more products are coming out, either based upon linuxce or PalmOS.
Why should opensource developers spend time helping a product that's losing marketshare? It won't help scratch any itches, that for sure.
What excuse does MS have for this move? So that the code can be "out there"? Oh please, don't make me laugh! A ploy to make open-source seem untenable? Right. *giggle*
It is good to see a major author like Stephen King give electronic publishing such a major push. This is probably a trial by his publisher to see if the idea works. There is nothing for for Stephen King to lose, really. If successful, he will be known (to the unwashed masses) as a pioneer. If not, he can always print dead-tree copies for sale in conventional markets.
But is the idea going to take off? Are there any open document formats available for use on handheld's like PalmPilots? What is the user experience like? Are the fonts readable? Can one page throught it with one hand? I would imagine that its cool, given that it would be easy to curl up in bed with such a thing. How many people will it reach? Does this mean that those who can't afford a gizmo like that will eventually lose out?
Yeah. That's what happened at my screening too. This is simply a movie that insults its audience.
If I wrote the script, I would have the WOMAN astronaut do a quick estimate, within seconds, of how much fuel and how far to go. When her husband tells her there is not enough fuel, she can tell him, "Well I'm doing x gees. I'm at d distance from you. I have about w amount of fuel to get back. Do the math. I can just about make it!"
Now that would have impressed the hell out of the audience, and made us all believe that these are well trained, flexible and smart astronauts trying their very best under the circumstances they had no control over. Score one too for portraying a smart woman in Hollywood.
But no! Instead we get asinine crap like the astronauts having poor impulse control in orbit around Mars! This is not a good publicity stunt for you NASA!
Space is cold. The water in your face would freeze and boil. That could account for the frozen head.
A hull breach of that size would not be that bad. What was surprising is how deeply it penetrated. Must be a seriously large micrometoerite to do that!
You are right about the liquids in space freezing and sublimating.
You are right about the momentum. But consider the amount of cutting, it should be possible to pretend that we have moved into a frame of reference where she was stationary and the hook moving. Or that the hook wasn't that heavy.
Conservation of momentum is hard to see when you have rockets firing, What's conserved is the cloud of gas, plus the spinning ship. Hard to see clouds of gas. It's perfectly posssible to thrust in such a way as to concel the spin.
I think you are forgetting the scale. You only worry about orbital mechanics if the distances involved are really huge. Most of the human figures were about a few 100 of meters apart only. That's nothing on the scale on Mars. (Actuually, its less if you relied upon eyeballing their apparent sizes.)
No orbital mechanics necessary. Newtonian physics is enough.
You'd think that with all the time spent on the gorgeous centrifugal spaceship that they'd get the physics right. NO!!!!
SPOILER ALERT!!! (Not that it matters anyway)
The rescue attempt in space was ridiculous. So they had to abandon ship when their engines blew up? OK. Fine with me. Do a 1 km walk to the old module still in orbit. No problem. Tim Robbins bouncing off the module becuase he can't get a firm grip - going too fast? No problem
But someone tell the producers about angular momentum. He gyrated wildly when trying to grab hold! Why isn't he spinning?? OK - maybe he didn't gyrate to hard. Forgive.
Then he *stops*! Sort of just hangs there in space. This is space. Pressure is low. There is no drag, he shold have continued going on! Granted, they said that over the intercom. But he doesn't look like he's moving with respect to the module. OK, maybe between all the cuts, you can't tell. Fine. Forgive.
Next the rescue attempt. I don't understand this. Same problem. What's the big deal about the fuel? Rockets give thrust. Why give so much thrust if you wanted to save fuel? Someone tell them about Newton's law please. You don't need fuel to maintain motion! So the rescue is slower if you don't move too fast. Big deal! It can be done!
Then the rescuer - the woman astronaught, goes to the *half-way* point (burning fuel in the process) and stops. Shoots the tether, wanting the other guy to take it. Hello?? If they guy grabs the tether, and they reel him him, she will end up in more than the half-way point! Someone tell them about Newton's third law please!
But that's no problem! After all, you don't need much thrust to come back, provided you are willing to wait. But no!! The 1/2-tank is the point of no return? Hahaha! If your space had drag, and the rescuer were to try to return with the poor victim, you will need more fuel than half a tank to come back, becuase your combined masses are larger!
Actually, I am not too sure if it was 1/2-way or 1/2 tank. Either way, it could not have been done!
Some realism! And I don't even want to get into all that space-alien hokey business!
Well, you get it and you didn't. Yes, Amazon has a duty to its shareholders. Sue your competitor or get sued. Fear drives us all around. You got that.
But what makes you think if you get sued by your shareholders, you'd lose? What makes Amazon think the 1-click patent holds up? Everyone is jumping the gun here. There is need to employ judgement here, to see whether a case has merits or not. To have some faith in the judiciary process.
This is precisely what RMS is doing. You can't argue against that by citing fears. Show me why the 1-click patent is worth patenting. Don't try to justify the actions of cowards!
Slashdot Mirror
The Alice-Bob agreement is a contract only if there is consideration. But what is consideration? Is money the only acceptable form of consideration?
The agreement gives Alice, the skeptic, the high ground. Bob in agreeing to take the alien ship away is saying that Alice is vindicated. Until the alien ship actually crashed, and the consideration - Alice's vinidication - is forfeit. Bob is then entitled to cash in on the forfeit by claiming the ship (since he maintained its existence) for his vindication. It sounds inadequate, but one only needs to show consideration, as your same link shows, not adequency! Consideration (in the form of vindication) goes both ways in this case, right?
This entire idea of consideration doesn't make sense from the betting point of view. Lawyers frequently offer this option: "I'll fight your case for no charge. But if you win, I get 50 percent of damages." Sounds like a good deal right? But where is the consideration to the lawyer when the case is lost? This contract is void! Yet people are doing this all the time, in the USA.
My conclusion is that consideration is an essential point here. But one has to be flexible about what form consideration takes!
This means that there is a violation only when the if clause is satisfied and the then clause not. In the other cases, you have entered into a licence which does not restrict your freedom in any way. Quid Pro Quo is in effect in all cases. If you distrbute and pass the changes back, the original provider gets the changes. Something for something else. If you don't make modifications, or don't distribute, nothing is taken, nothing given.
This makes it different from the alien case you are making an analogy to. Bob should probably have said, "If an alien lands, I'll haul the ship away for you, and cleanup the lawn for you too." When Alice assents to this agreement, she is in effect agreeing to let Bob haul the ship away. How she assents to this agreement (by accepting money or otherwise) is immaterial. The point is that there should be some sign of assent. It seems that "consideration" should be part of the contract, and not confused with the issue of whether the contract is entered into at all.
But IANAL. I maybe naive and just plain wrong.
And now for the rant: The logic of this line of argument is detestable, really. Why indeed should contracts be drafted around the concept of money. Whatever happened to quid pro quo? The GPL says: "Use this software as you like, change it as you like. But let's share that change." This is not a commercial transaction. The last time I heard, contracts/licenses covering non-monetary forms of compensation are legal and enforceable. Many free software programmers are NOT in it for the money.
Someone correct me on this, becuase I can't seem to differentiate between the Artistic Liscense and public domain software.
The GPL is supposed to protect against that, by introducing the idea of liscensing different versions of the program. If the GPL offers no such protection, then it is in effect the same as the Artistic Liscence. Note, the "supposed". As it is, there is doubt whether the code is explicitly licensed under the GPL, since it does not carry the GPL, and only one line says "licensed under the GPL".
BUT having said that, I must say that once I got it, it was a real breeze. Somehow, the steep learning curve always plateaus out. Maybe that's a cool philosophy to live by, no?
Well, I can't say I advocate this for everyone. But that's the difference.
It's not about fairness. It's about the long term future of your country. Go get some perspective.
Look at what Andrew Schulman had to do to demystify the Window95 hype.
Look at all the undocumented functionality that MS Word used, but nobody else knew about, until it was reverse engineered.
This is the kind of lawyerspeak that is so disgusting.
Firstly, Bezos and his industry is a very large industry. It represents very diverse businesses and encompasses a wide range of the business activities that we can benefit from in the future. If the whole industry get some special protection, its not special! There are no concession, so stop pretending that it is. It just reflects on the distinction that we see as evident between business method patents and technology patents. This distinction is similar to the distinction between patenting a screwdriver, and patenting a method of holding a screwdriver.
Next Jeff Bezos is by no means representative of the industry. In fact, a number of people in the industry disagree strongly with his method of doing business. So attacking Bezos himself does nothing for us, the people you are supposed to defend!
Again, there is the subtext. No special concession is asked for. No privilege. In fact, we are asking the people who have been given this privilege of holding business patents (for offensive or defensive purposes) to give them up. To stop ligitating each other to death. For the common good. It's just like a lawyer to paint this argument into something it is not.
End of rant.
So this is my question to this bar of lawyers: Where's your proof that the current system is good? For whose interest does it benefit, and at the expense of whose interest?
I would really appreciate an honest reply. But not expecting one.
- In Homer's Illiad, Achilles could be considered to have personal armor, except his heel
... - Heinlein's Starship Troopers
- H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, where the Martians could be considered to be wearing some kind of suit.
- Asimov's Foundation, with his reference to personal force fields.
- Marvel's Iron Man?
- Macross
- Mobile Suit Gundam
Hey, maybe I'm stretching it, but surely somewhere there's a first?The fun of Lego is to build, within the constraints of the number of bricks, and the constraints of physics and engineering, that cool toy you want to have! Half the fun is determining things like "What size of car can I build, since I have only x bricks?". Stuff like that. This teaches a kid mental planning. It's wonderful how such a thing can build tactile and physical experience for small kids!
Not really opposed to this, mind you. Just wondering what it is for. The kid in all of us, I guess.
What are you going to do about those corporations, who take what you make, make something better, feed that to your friends, and refuse to allow you to create from what they have made?
One ton of Mills and Boons pulp romances is not equivalent to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet,/i>. Guess what, Romeo and Juliet is a terribly original story either.
Basically, it all boils down to what art is.
- Not all works of art are similarly valued.
- Not all tastes are the same.
- Sometimes, form and style outweigh originality.
- Tastes change over time, and it is an interesting history to keep track of those changes, to document where they arise from.
In view of this, it is very important to keep as much of our cultural heritage as alive as possible.Those who seek to use copyright law to prevent this are precisely contradicting these ideals. On one hand, they desire to contribute to culture and profit from it (nothing wrong with that). But they refuse to contribute to culture in any other ways other than on their own terms, far beyond their own lifetimes.
This is just not what civilization is about.
Firstly, the entire Universe may be a free lunch. It may be that there was a vacuum fluctuation so great that the universe was born just like that. At least, that is the gut feeling of quite a few cosmologists.
Next, Your life is a free lunch. As a feotus, you took nourishment freely from your mother, without her consent. If she did not want to feed you, she would have to starve herself. There's no way she could have borne you without you taking that free lunch, short of an abortion. (If your mom is pro-life, congratulations, a Free Lunch).
Then you were given all sorts of love - free. Nourishment as a baby - free. The air you breathe is free. So were the nappies on your bare bottomed buttocks. So were the first reading lessons. I could go on and on. In fact, you can see what not getting these things do, when you see the wretched poor children of third world nations. Since you are posting on slashdot, you are one of the privileged few. Don't be a hypocrite! You are here becuase you got many things free, from our society who values children and the future!
People say "Shakespeare is dead - he can't collect anymore." Bullshit. All copyrighted stuff should go back to the public domain, sooner or later. Why? Beucase of our social contract. Imagine how impoverished you would have to be, if you can't even read the children's fables, Aesop's fables, Grimm Brother's Fairy Tales, etc. How early would you have got to read? Not convinced. Go a few centuries back and look at what the literacy level was. How many books were there? And who are the illiterate? Naturally the poor, who can't get the books to read.
Consider Micheal Faraday, one of the discoverers of the laws of electricity. Apprenticed to a book binder, he read from the books (for free!) and taught himself enough science to enter the Royal Society. If there is any example of the liberating power of "free books" this is it!
That is what most people miss. It's not about you the hacker vs the machine. With close source, that would be the case. But with open source it is about you the hacker vs other hackers.
that guy who was a squeaky clean kid that shouts "Yippee!", assemble droids, become an ace fighter pilot, get to kiss Natalie Portman, wield a lightsabre, then don blackboots, and a dark helmet, kill millions and millions of innocents, then be forgiven by my talented son, the last of the Jedi ...
I remember playing on their Indigo series of workstations. Seems like the music composition stuff was all there, but I didn't really check it out.
Maybe it was all rather rudimentary? Does anyone have a better idea of SGI's offerings? How about if getting them to port some sound stuff to Linux?
It does no good to keep harping on what are essentially good arguments for MP3. What needs to be done is to _show_ people, a high profile case that demostrate conclusively that MP3's can be legal, that one does not have to have a history of being a warez d00d to defend MP3.
This really needs to be done to demostrate the morally dubious arguments against MP3 by the MPAA and RIAA.
Why should opensource developers spend time helping a product that's losing marketshare? It won't help scratch any itches, that for sure.
What excuse does MS have for this move? So that the code can be "out there"? Oh please, don't make me laugh! A ploy to make open-source seem untenable? Right. *giggle*
But is the idea going to take off? Are there any open document formats available for use on handheld's like PalmPilots? What is the user experience like? Are the fonts readable? Can one page throught it with one hand? I would imagine that its cool, given that it would be easy to curl up in bed with such a thing. How many people will it reach? Does this mean that those who can't afford a gizmo like that will eventually lose out?
If I wrote the script, I would have the WOMAN astronaut do a quick estimate, within seconds, of how much fuel and how far to go. When her husband tells her there is not enough fuel, she can tell him, "Well I'm doing x gees. I'm at d distance from you. I have about w amount of fuel to get back. Do the math. I can just about make it!"
Now that would have impressed the hell out of the audience, and made us all believe that these are well trained, flexible and smart astronauts trying their very best under the circumstances they had no control over. Score one too for portraying a smart woman in Hollywood.
But no! Instead we get asinine crap like the astronauts having poor impulse control in orbit around Mars! This is not a good publicity stunt for you NASA!
No orbital mechanics necessary. Newtonian physics is enough.
SPOILER ALERT!!! (Not that it matters anyway)
The rescue attempt in space was ridiculous. So they had to abandon ship when their engines blew up? OK. Fine with me. Do a 1 km walk to the old module still in orbit. No problem. Tim Robbins bouncing off the module becuase he can't get a firm grip - going too fast? No problem
But someone tell the producers about angular momentum. He gyrated wildly when trying to grab hold! Why isn't he spinning?? OK - maybe he didn't gyrate to hard. Forgive.
Then he *stops*! Sort of just hangs there in space. This is space. Pressure is low. There is no drag, he shold have continued going on! Granted, they said that over the intercom. But he doesn't look like he's moving with respect to the module. OK, maybe between all the cuts, you can't tell. Fine. Forgive.
Next the rescue attempt. I don't understand this. Same problem. What's the big deal about the fuel? Rockets give thrust. Why give so much thrust if you wanted to save fuel? Someone tell them about Newton's law please. You don't need fuel to maintain motion! So the rescue is slower if you don't move too fast. Big deal! It can be done!
Then the rescuer - the woman astronaught, goes to the *half-way* point (burning fuel in the process) and stops. Shoots the tether, wanting the other guy to take it. Hello?? If they guy grabs the tether, and they reel him him, she will end up in more than the half-way point! Someone tell them about Newton's third law please!
But that's no problem! After all, you don't need much thrust to come back, provided you are willing to wait. But no!! The 1/2-tank is the point of no return? Hahaha! If your space had drag, and the rescuer were to try to return with the poor victim, you will need more fuel than half a tank to come back, becuase your combined masses are larger!
Actually, I am not too sure if it was 1/2-way or 1/2 tank. Either way, it could not have been done!
Some realism! And I don't even want to get into all that space-alien hokey business!
But what makes you think if you get sued by your shareholders, you'd lose? What makes Amazon think the 1-click patent holds up? Everyone is jumping the gun here. There is need to employ judgement here, to see whether a case has merits or not. To have some faith in the judiciary process.
This is precisely what RMS is doing. You can't argue against that by citing fears. Show me why the 1-click patent is worth patenting. Don't try to justify the actions of cowards!