I think that the poster's point is that "Romance" novels and the like are A) the moral equivalent of pornography and B) consumed almost exclusively by women. But for some unknown reason, it's considered just fine to read about sex, but terrible to want to watch it. It's a silly double standard.
This is a crap argument for two reasons. One is that there's no guarantee that even switching to another provider would actually help the situation. Above.net is a big backbone provider, so in practice it may be impossible to avoid using them short of building your own network. Saying that the alternative to accepting censorship is to create your own multinational corporation is not a strong argument.
The bigger point is that getting access to web sites is not an optional service for a web provider. You claim, in essence, that you get what you pay for and that if you want good service you may have to pay more for it. But your restaraunt analogy points out that there are some aspects of a service that we consider to be essential, not optional, and businesses that fail to provide them should be shut down. In restaraunts, we expect that the food and facilities will meet certain minimum standards, and we have periodic health inspections to ensure that the restaraunts are meeting those standards. We are merely expressing the view that the minimum acceptible standard for an internet provider is that they deliver the information that their users request and not censor it because they disagree with the policies of the source.
This is actually a pretty good analogy, because the kitchen of a restaraunt, like the backbone provider for an ISP, is something that's generally hidden from the end user. Most people aren't given the option of inspecting the kitchen of a restaraunt for roaches before eating there, and most users aren't given the option of finding out about their ISP's backbone providers before deciding whether to pick it. This is reasonable behavior in each case, but it means that the companies involved have a responsibility to maintain acceptible standards even when their customers aren't looking.
But membership is no longer voluntary if and when a backbone provider decides to implement RBS unilaterally. How, pray tell, does someone opt out? That's what the whole story here is about- that people who didn't want Macromedia blocked woke up to find out that it was and they had no say in the matter. That sure as hell doesn't sound voluntary to me.
With all of Bush's rhetoric about an energy crisis, why doesn't NASA latch onto this idea to secure more funding?
I would think that the answer to this is obvious: it doesn't involve improving the lot of existing mineral extraction industries. Remember that Dubya is the guy who proposed cutting funding for alternative energy research by 30% as part of his overall energy program. After all, he doesn't want to risk hurting his friends in the oil industry. Something that could actually replace fossil fuels is exactly what Dubya doesnt' want.
The most strict definition is to completly contain the orginial peice. The loosest definition is to take an idea or single line of code from the orginial.
Since GPL hasn't been tested in court, so we don't know where the line is.
But the line is almost certainly not defined by the GPL, per se, but by copyright law, on which the GPL depends. Any use of the GPLed code that doesn't rise to the level of copyright infringement shouldn't constitute a GPL violation, as the user only has to accept the GPL in order to avoid violating copyright. Therefore no copyright violation implies no GPL violation. The fact remains that what constitutes a copyright violation is rather fuzzy and has to be determined in court, but that's a potential problem with any license.
But who says that you have to make your money by selling the software? The issue is whether a company can make money by developing Free Software and then building their business around some combination of selling that software, customizing it, consulting, training, etc. MySQL is an excellent example of a company that does this kind of thing. They spend money developing a product that people like and releasing it under the GPL. They make money by providing training, support, and consulting. They also maintain the copyright to the whole program, so they can sell the right to use it as an embedded database in non-GPLed products, and the trademark, which must be licensed to advertize the use of MySQL as part of a product. IIRC, SleepyCat Software does something similar with the BerkelyDB. DB development seems to be an area where this model is quite reasonable, which is one reason that people think that Oracle could probably GPL their DB engine and remain very profitable.
Re:Mundie's real argument, and why it doesn't matt
on
Mundie Responds
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· Score: 3
The problem is, Microsoft really doesn't have a leg to stand on. Microsoft can certainly make a case that GPL'd
software is bad for Microsoft. But they have provided no evidence whatsoever that GPL'd software is bad for users.
Obviously you don't understand. Business is the only thing that matters; users are unimportant. What's good for GM^H^HMicrosoft is good for the United States, and vice versa. After all, a bunch of hobbyists could never produce a sophisticated, stable, robust operating system that anyone would actually want to use. Only businesses can do that, so anyone who wants such an operating system will just have to grab their ankles and enjoy some good old fashioned Microsoft loving.
Microsoft is standing on the shoulders of a giant so big, that they don't even realize it.
At the risk of being labeled as Redundant, Microsoft clearly does understand the size of the giant they're standing on. That's why they're attacking the GPL specifically. They love open standards and BSD style licenses; they've built their whole company on them. They're free to get their hooks in, take advantage of the interconnectivity that the use of common standards gives them, and then subtly pervert the standards to get customer lock in. The GPL was designed specifically to prevent that last step, and Microsoft is attacking it specifically for that exact reason.
But that's because OSS fanatics are trying to sell te GPL to business. You can't simultaneously say that it's bad for business but that businesses should do it anyway. OTOH, the Free Software people have never been faced with this particular dilemma. RMS has basically taken the attitude that it doesn't matter whether the GPL is good or bad for business. If you can make money on Free Software, that's great, it's a source of funding for improving the project. If you can't make money, tough.
It doesn't work as well as you might hope. A big part of the problem is that most doctors don't seem to have the time or inclination to independently research the latest medical findings. Instead they depend on pharmaceutical companies to tell them. The problems with this should be pretty obvious. This is a particularly severe problem when all of the companies have similar treatments for a problem. In that case, none of them wants to push an alternative that will cut into their cash cow. News about alternate therapies can get out, but it's slowed appreciably. And, of course, there's always some reason to doubt the new findings, which the pharmaceutical salesmen will quickly point out when the doctors ask them about it. When that doesn't work, they try pitching directly to patients so that they won't talk to their better informed doctors and find out about available alternatives.
Peptic ulcers are a classic case of this. For a long time people thought that ulcers were caused by organic problems that caused people to produce too much stomach acid. That suggested that the only treatment was a long-term regimen of antiacids or acid-blocking medicines; patients would be stuck taking them for the rest of their lives. This was obviously a lucrative field, so all of the Big Pharma companies started producing acid blocking medicines. Then somebody discovered that the excess acid production wasn't organic after all, but was caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, so ulcers could be cured by a short regimen including antiacid medication and antibiotics. Naturally, the Big Pharma companies didn't like this and they've tried very hard to keep it out of the public eye. They've tried hard to convince doctors that the new therapies are unreliable and ineffective, and now they're trying to convince people to take over the counter forms of their acid-blocking medication instead of talking to their doctors about the problem. It's disgusting, but it's also very profitable, so you can't expect Big Pharma to give it up any time soon.
There was a paper in the office of some proffesor who used a brill learning algorithn with existing genes and then had it try to guess what a ramdom genes did. It did very well in the test despite the "primitive" ai.
I think that this points out an important reason that bioinformatics is such an exciting field for computer people to get into. A lot of the work that's been done so far has been done by biologists who happen to be able to program, rather than by programmers who have learned the biology. As a result, a lot of the work uses inefficient algorithms, primitive approaches, bad statistics, and the like. People are constantly reinventing the wheel, and in many cases are making ones that barely turn. Somebody who comes into the field with a strong computer background can turn out to be a real hero just by cleaning up the useful but inelegant work that's out there already. Somebody who actually knows interesting new algorithms that can be applied to the problems can do even more.
Well, Stallman is an extremist. He takes a position that is most certainly at the extreme range of opinions about the desirability of Free Software, and that classifies him as an extremist. I'm not sure, though, that he's necessarily a fanatic, i.e. a person who can't be convinced of the wrongness of his beliefs. It's just that the ideas of extremism and fanaticism are so closely linked in peoples' minds that they can't handle the idea that somebody might hold extreme positions without being a fanatic.
I think that RMS has reached his opinions after careful consideration of the issues, and he can be convinced to change his mind if presented with convincing evidence. He was convinced, for instance, that it was reasonable to release OggVorbis under a BSD license rather than LGPL or GPL because it better served the purpose of releasing it. A lot of people were surprised by that, but IMO it's just proof that he's not some mindless ideologue but rather a man who carefully considers the consequences of his actions. More generally, while he obviously thinks that BSD-style (err X11-style) licenses are not generally the best way to go, he's not so fanatically attached to copyleft that he denies their utility, others' right to use them, or that they can be a good choice in some circumstances.
How many of you still use RealPlayer, even after they got caught stealing info off your PC?
And notice that RMS not only refrained from using Real Player but also refused to use the very popular MP3 format; he used OggVorbis instead. Why? Because MP3 has patent problems so that it's questionable if it's legal to make a Free encoder/decoder; Vorbis is free from such constraints.
It's also interesting that, unlike some/.ers, Stallman doesn't advocate simply refusing to accept patents that he doesn't think should be granted. He doesn't say, "The MP3 patents shouldn't have been granted in the first place, so it's fine to create and use Free programs that violate those patents." Instead he's strongly advocated working around the patents by using other technologies (e.g. OggVorbis, Gzip, etc.) that aren't encumbered. His attitude seems to be that we need to change bad laws instead of breaking them willy-nilly. That's a very refreshing attitude.
But businesses are not the only possible sources of software. The FSF isn't a business, but they've written a lot of good software. Linus Torvalds wasn't a business when he wrote the first version of the Linux kernel, but it was delivered, too. Debian isn't a business, but Debian GNU/Linux is a damn fine distribution. The Apache Foundation isn't a business, either, and they absolutely rule the web. There's a huge amount of good software that's written by users to fullfill their individual needs and then given away as Free Software to benefit others. It's at least as valid a development model as the more traditional for profit development system, largely because the users know exactly what they need, while outside developers don't necessarily know as well.
Hear! Hear! Despite bleating to the contrary, this point probably makes the GPL the friendliest license to companies that are trying to develop and sell Free Software. It's the one license that guarantees that your competitors have to deal with you on a level playing field. They can't just extend your work and then lock their improved source away.
Well, there was this one trial in which a large, abusive, monopolistic software company was ruled to have violated anti-trust law, though the appeal is still going on in that one. Something about Macrosoft or Microhard, wasn't it?
Re:How can they sue the large companies?
on
Magnet Patent Suits
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· Score: 2
Big companies like Compaq don't make the magnets themselves so how can they be responcable?
Because that's the way that things work. What's happening is that companies in countries with weak or no patent protection are making the products and then exporting them to countries where some of the components are covered by patents. IIRC, patent law does specify that suing the importer is the correct legal response in such a case.
Consider an analogy. Suppose I go to a country like China that doesn't respect American copyright laws and start stamping cheap Windows2000 CDs that I then try to export to the U.S. Microsoft could try to sue me, but they wouldn't get anywhere because the Chinese government would laugh at them. Their only recourse is to sue the people who are importing the non-licensed copies into the U.S. You can't very well say, "Sorry, you can't sue the people who are making the things. You're just going to have to watch those copies eat up your market share." Copyright would be meaningless if that were the case. The same thing is true if the IP involved is a patent instead of a copyright; importing goods that were made without proper license is not OK. If it were, the law wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on.
Re:The Redifinition of the American Dream
on
Magnet Patent Suits
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· Score: 2
At one time the "American Dream" had little to do with money directly.
What a crock. While your basic point, that the American Dream has has always been about freedom, is correct, the freedom to make money has always been high on the list. Remember that in a lot of countries there was no real freedom to become rich; the social and economic systems were designed to perpetuate the high status of those who were already wealthy.
Get rich quick schemes have been a part of America since forever. For every group of people who came to America searching for religious freedom, there was a group that was looking to make a buck. Before the colonists came to Plymouth so they could worship as they pleased, there was a group that went to Jamestown and nearly starved because they were all looking for gold instead of growing food. A key driving force behind the Revolution was a change in the legal status of the Northwest territories that squashed a lot of land speculation there. There's a reason that one of the things that people said about America is that it's streets are paved with gold; that's a big reason that they wanted to go there.
We don't have a way to get the construction materials into orbit from where to begin building. An expansion of space shipping by several orders of magnitude for an extended period of time would be required to ferry up an elevator's components from the planetary surface.
This particular problem is probably best solved by getting the materials in space in the first place. You'd capture a near Earth asteroid that had a high carbon content and build the elevator out of materials processed there. The excess, non-carbonaceous materials could be processed into the ballast for the outer end of the cable.
The amount of destruction is going to be strongly dependent on where the break happens and the exact design of the elevator. The one in Red Mars was essentially a worst-case scenario: a comparatively thick, non-tapered elevator (which would be possible on Mars), a thin atmosphere that didn't provide much protection against falling objects, and a break at the ballast asteroid that produced the maximum possible material to fall. In such a case you would have a particularly nasty fall. FWIW, the sabotage in that case was the deliberate separation of the ballast asteroid by destroying its achoring to the cable, rather than an attempt to break the strand itself- not something that would be defended against by anti-breakage measures.
I also think that your suggestion of designed in breakage system to chop off chunks as it fell would be a truly bad one. Adding in such a system would actually make the elevator more dangerous, as it could cause an undesired cable breakage if it were accidentally or deliberately set off when it shouldn't be. A really dastardly terrorist could crack the control system, blow up the highest mounted cable-breaking charge to precipitate a fall, and then crash the rest of the system. Then you have a falling cable and no way to stop it- the exact thing that you're trying to prevent. IMO Robinson's proposed alternative- built in anti-debris defense stations along the cable- is a more plausible solution to the problem.
A lunar elevator might well be tougher to build than a terrestrial one (I'd have to see the math to be sure). The length of the elevator depends on the speed of rotation of the body it's being built on as well as its mass- it needs to extend through the synchronous point- so the fact that the moon's rotational period is almost 30 times longer than the Earth's would mean it would be tougher than you think. Putting one on Venus would be impossible because its rotational period is so long. In that sense, it would have been a lot easier to build one on Earth a few hundred million years ago when the rotational period was shorter and the geosynchronous point was lower.
I think you're making his case for him. Sun is writing Solaris more for their high end stuff than their low end stuff, so somebody who happens to own a low-end Sun box may well be happier with Linux than with Solaris. Telling him to compare Solaris with Linux on an E450 isn't very useful if his box is an Ultra 5. He needs to compare them on the platform that he's going to be running them on. The fact that the Ultra5 is more comprable to a PC may be evidence that he should look at a PC instead of a Sun the next time he goes shopping for a new box, but as long as he's talking about current hardware he needs to consider what OS will get him the most out of it, which it sounds like even you admit is Linux.
Oh yeah - take supplementals just in case you do something silly like try skimping on some food group or other.
This is a very important bit of advice. Make sure that you get enough of the vitamins and minerals you need! You need more than calories to keep you going, and if you're not getting enough of the other things your body will let you know just the same way that it lets you know you're not getting enough calories. You'll get hungry, and try to eat more in order to get those other nutrients, meaning more calories and weight gain.
Let me Nth that. One exceptionally cool thing that's part of this is a weight watching program that you can get for your Palm. The best part about it is that it has an adequate focus on staying at your desired weight, unlike most diets that only concentrate on losing the weight in the first place. If you don't want to yo-yo, this is a good place to look.
ISTR that the technology needed to manufacture gene chips is actually much simpler than you'd believe. In particular it turned out to be possible to do it using a reprogrammed inkjet printer using the right reagents in place of the standard four colors of ink. The setup cost was still reasonably steep- something like $10,000- but not out of the range of affordability for a dedicated hobbiest. This was a big issue specifically because it brought the technology within the reach of a lot of less well funded labs, rather than just the big boys. Despite the trend of biology toward big science, there's still a lot of great work that can be done on a very tight budget.
And, of course, a lot of the upcoming work in biology is going to be computational rather than experimental. You may not believe it, but it is quite possible to generate publishable results on a home computer. There's even some real suggestion that interesting problems like protein folding are going to be solved not by brute force but by better algorithms. I recently went to the Tolman Medal talk by Bill Goddard, who claims to be able to narrow the field to about 10-20 possible folds per protein right now and may be able to get it to a single prediction soon. That's using some fairly beefy computing power, but nothing like the LottaFLOPS zillion node clusters that people are discussing building to deal with the folding problem. It's entirely possible that protein folding will be doable with a home computer in a decade.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the poster's point is that "Romance" novels and the like are A) the moral equivalent of pornography and B) consumed almost exclusively by women. But for some unknown reason, it's considered just fine to read about sex, but terrible to want to watch it. It's a silly double standard.
This is a crap argument for two reasons. One is that there's no guarantee that even switching to another provider would actually help the situation. Above.net is a big backbone provider, so in practice it may be impossible to avoid using them short of building your own network. Saying that the alternative to accepting censorship is to create your own multinational corporation is not a strong argument.
The bigger point is that getting access to web sites is not an optional service for a web provider. You claim, in essence, that you get what you pay for and that if you want good service you may have to pay more for it. But your restaraunt analogy points out that there are some aspects of a service that we consider to be essential, not optional, and businesses that fail to provide them should be shut down. In restaraunts, we expect that the food and facilities will meet certain minimum standards, and we have periodic health inspections to ensure that the restaraunts are meeting those standards. We are merely expressing the view that the minimum acceptible standard for an internet provider is that they deliver the information that their users request and not censor it because they disagree with the policies of the source.
This is actually a pretty good analogy, because the kitchen of a restaraunt, like the backbone provider for an ISP, is something that's generally hidden from the end user. Most people aren't given the option of inspecting the kitchen of a restaraunt for roaches before eating there, and most users aren't given the option of finding out about their ISP's backbone providers before deciding whether to pick it. This is reasonable behavior in each case, but it means that the companies involved have a responsibility to maintain acceptible standards even when their customers aren't looking.
But membership is no longer voluntary if and when a backbone provider decides to implement RBS unilaterally. How, pray tell, does someone opt out? That's what the whole story here is about- that people who didn't want Macromedia blocked woke up to find out that it was and they had no say in the matter. That sure as hell doesn't sound voluntary to me.
I would think that the answer to this is obvious: it doesn't involve improving the lot of existing mineral extraction industries. Remember that Dubya is the guy who proposed cutting funding for alternative energy research by 30% as part of his overall energy program. After all, he doesn't want to risk hurting his friends in the oil industry. Something that could actually replace fossil fuels is exactly what Dubya doesnt' want.
But the line is almost certainly not defined by the GPL, per se, but by copyright law, on which the GPL depends. Any use of the GPLed code that doesn't rise to the level of copyright infringement shouldn't constitute a GPL violation, as the user only has to accept the GPL in order to avoid violating copyright. Therefore no copyright violation implies no GPL violation. The fact remains that what constitutes a copyright violation is rather fuzzy and has to be determined in court, but that's a potential problem with any license.
But who says that you have to make your money by selling the software? The issue is whether a company can make money by developing Free Software and then building their business around some combination of selling that software, customizing it, consulting, training, etc. MySQL is an excellent example of a company that does this kind of thing. They spend money developing a product that people like and releasing it under the GPL. They make money by providing training, support, and consulting. They also maintain the copyright to the whole program, so they can sell the right to use it as an embedded database in non-GPLed products, and the trademark, which must be licensed to advertize the use of MySQL as part of a product. IIRC, SleepyCat Software does something similar with the BerkelyDB. DB development seems to be an area where this model is quite reasonable, which is one reason that people think that Oracle could probably GPL their DB engine and remain very profitable.
Obviously you don't understand. Business is the only thing that matters; users are unimportant. What's good for GM^H^HMicrosoft is good for the United States, and vice versa. After all, a bunch of hobbyists could never produce a sophisticated, stable, robust operating system that anyone would actually want to use. Only businesses can do that, so anyone who wants such an operating system will just have to grab their ankles and enjoy some good old fashioned Microsoft loving.
At the risk of being labeled as Redundant, Microsoft clearly does understand the size of the giant they're standing on. That's why they're attacking the GPL specifically. They love open standards and BSD style licenses; they've built their whole company on them. They're free to get their hooks in, take advantage of the interconnectivity that the use of common standards gives them, and then subtly pervert the standards to get customer lock in. The GPL was designed specifically to prevent that last step, and Microsoft is attacking it specifically for that exact reason.
But that's because OSS fanatics are trying to sell te GPL to business. You can't simultaneously say that it's bad for business but that businesses should do it anyway. OTOH, the Free Software people have never been faced with this particular dilemma. RMS has basically taken the attitude that it doesn't matter whether the GPL is good or bad for business. If you can make money on Free Software, that's great, it's a source of funding for improving the project. If you can't make money, tough.
It doesn't work as well as you might hope. A big part of the problem is that most doctors don't seem to have the time or inclination to independently research the latest medical findings. Instead they depend on pharmaceutical companies to tell them. The problems with this should be pretty obvious. This is a particularly severe problem when all of the companies have similar treatments for a problem. In that case, none of them wants to push an alternative that will cut into their cash cow. News about alternate therapies can get out, but it's slowed appreciably. And, of course, there's always some reason to doubt the new findings, which the pharmaceutical salesmen will quickly point out when the doctors ask them about it. When that doesn't work, they try pitching directly to patients so that they won't talk to their better informed doctors and find out about available alternatives.
Peptic ulcers are a classic case of this. For a long time people thought that ulcers were caused by organic problems that caused people to produce too much stomach acid. That suggested that the only treatment was a long-term regimen of antiacids or acid-blocking medicines; patients would be stuck taking them for the rest of their lives. This was obviously a lucrative field, so all of the Big Pharma companies started producing acid blocking medicines. Then somebody discovered that the excess acid production wasn't organic after all, but was caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, so ulcers could be cured by a short regimen including antiacid medication and antibiotics. Naturally, the Big Pharma companies didn't like this and they've tried very hard to keep it out of the public eye. They've tried hard to convince doctors that the new therapies are unreliable and ineffective, and now they're trying to convince people to take over the counter forms of their acid-blocking medication instead of talking to their doctors about the problem. It's disgusting, but it's also very profitable, so you can't expect Big Pharma to give it up any time soon.
I think that this points out an important reason that bioinformatics is such an exciting field for computer people to get into. A lot of the work that's been done so far has been done by biologists who happen to be able to program, rather than by programmers who have learned the biology. As a result, a lot of the work uses inefficient algorithms, primitive approaches, bad statistics, and the like. People are constantly reinventing the wheel, and in many cases are making ones that barely turn. Somebody who comes into the field with a strong computer background can turn out to be a real hero just by cleaning up the useful but inelegant work that's out there already. Somebody who actually knows interesting new algorithms that can be applied to the problems can do even more.
Well, Stallman is an extremist. He takes a position that is most certainly at the extreme range of opinions about the desirability of Free Software, and that classifies him as an extremist. I'm not sure, though, that he's necessarily a fanatic, i.e. a person who can't be convinced of the wrongness of his beliefs. It's just that the ideas of extremism and fanaticism are so closely linked in peoples' minds that they can't handle the idea that somebody might hold extreme positions without being a fanatic.
I think that RMS has reached his opinions after careful consideration of the issues, and he can be convinced to change his mind if presented with convincing evidence. He was convinced, for instance, that it was reasonable to release OggVorbis under a BSD license rather than LGPL or GPL because it better served the purpose of releasing it. A lot of people were surprised by that, but IMO it's just proof that he's not some mindless ideologue but rather a man who carefully considers the consequences of his actions. More generally, while he obviously thinks that BSD-style (err X11-style) licenses are not generally the best way to go, he's not so fanatically attached to copyleft that he denies their utility, others' right to use them, or that they can be a good choice in some circumstances.
And notice that RMS not only refrained from using Real Player but also refused to use the very popular MP3 format; he used OggVorbis instead. Why? Because MP3 has patent problems so that it's questionable if it's legal to make a Free encoder/decoder; Vorbis is free from such constraints.
It's also interesting that, unlike some /.ers, Stallman doesn't advocate simply refusing to accept patents that he doesn't think should be granted. He doesn't say, "The MP3 patents shouldn't have been granted in the first place, so it's fine to create and use Free programs that violate those patents." Instead he's strongly advocated working around the patents by using other technologies (e.g. OggVorbis, Gzip, etc.) that aren't encumbered. His attitude seems to be that we need to change bad laws instead of breaking them willy-nilly. That's a very refreshing attitude.
But businesses are not the only possible sources of software. The FSF isn't a business, but they've written a lot of good software. Linus Torvalds wasn't a business when he wrote the first version of the Linux kernel, but it was delivered, too. Debian isn't a business, but Debian GNU/Linux is a damn fine distribution. The Apache Foundation isn't a business, either, and they absolutely rule the web. There's a huge amount of good software that's written by users to fullfill their individual needs and then given away as Free Software to benefit others. It's at least as valid a development model as the more traditional for profit development system, largely because the users know exactly what they need, while outside developers don't necessarily know as well.
Hear! Hear! Despite bleating to the contrary, this point probably makes the GPL the friendliest license to companies that are trying to develop and sell Free Software. It's the one license that guarantees that your competitors have to deal with you on a level playing field. They can't just extend your work and then lock their improved source away.
Well, there was this one trial in which a large, abusive, monopolistic software company was ruled to have violated anti-trust law, though the appeal is still going on in that one. Something about Macrosoft or Microhard, wasn't it?
Because that's the way that things work. What's happening is that companies in countries with weak or no patent protection are making the products and then exporting them to countries where some of the components are covered by patents. IIRC, patent law does specify that suing the importer is the correct legal response in such a case.
Consider an analogy. Suppose I go to a country like China that doesn't respect American copyright laws and start stamping cheap Windows2000 CDs that I then try to export to the U.S. Microsoft could try to sue me, but they wouldn't get anywhere because the Chinese government would laugh at them. Their only recourse is to sue the people who are importing the non-licensed copies into the U.S. You can't very well say, "Sorry, you can't sue the people who are making the things. You're just going to have to watch those copies eat up your market share." Copyright would be meaningless if that were the case. The same thing is true if the IP involved is a patent instead of a copyright; importing goods that were made without proper license is not OK. If it were, the law wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on.
What a crock. While your basic point, that the American Dream has has always been about freedom, is correct, the freedom to make money has always been high on the list. Remember that in a lot of countries there was no real freedom to become rich; the social and economic systems were designed to perpetuate the high status of those who were already wealthy.
Get rich quick schemes have been a part of America since forever. For every group of people who came to America searching for religious freedom, there was a group that was looking to make a buck. Before the colonists came to Plymouth so they could worship as they pleased, there was a group that went to Jamestown and nearly starved because they were all looking for gold instead of growing food. A key driving force behind the Revolution was a change in the legal status of the Northwest territories that squashed a lot of land speculation there. There's a reason that one of the things that people said about America is that it's streets are paved with gold; that's a big reason that they wanted to go there.
This particular problem is probably best solved by getting the materials in space in the first place. You'd capture a near Earth asteroid that had a high carbon content and build the elevator out of materials processed there. The excess, non-carbonaceous materials could be processed into the ballast for the outer end of the cable.
The amount of destruction is going to be strongly dependent on where the break happens and the exact design of the elevator. The one in Red Mars was essentially a worst-case scenario: a comparatively thick, non-tapered elevator (which would be possible on Mars), a thin atmosphere that didn't provide much protection against falling objects, and a break at the ballast asteroid that produced the maximum possible material to fall. In such a case you would have a particularly nasty fall. FWIW, the sabotage in that case was the deliberate separation of the ballast asteroid by destroying its achoring to the cable, rather than an attempt to break the strand itself- not something that would be defended against by anti-breakage measures.
I also think that your suggestion of designed in breakage system to chop off chunks as it fell would be a truly bad one. Adding in such a system would actually make the elevator more dangerous, as it could cause an undesired cable breakage if it were accidentally or deliberately set off when it shouldn't be. A really dastardly terrorist could crack the control system, blow up the highest mounted cable-breaking charge to precipitate a fall, and then crash the rest of the system. Then you have a falling cable and no way to stop it- the exact thing that you're trying to prevent. IMO Robinson's proposed alternative- built in anti-debris defense stations along the cable- is a more plausible solution to the problem.
A lunar elevator might well be tougher to build than a terrestrial one (I'd have to see the math to be sure). The length of the elevator depends on the speed of rotation of the body it's being built on as well as its mass- it needs to extend through the synchronous point- so the fact that the moon's rotational period is almost 30 times longer than the Earth's would mean it would be tougher than you think. Putting one on Venus would be impossible because its rotational period is so long. In that sense, it would have been a lot easier to build one on Earth a few hundred million years ago when the rotational period was shorter and the geosynchronous point was lower.
I think you're making his case for him. Sun is writing Solaris more for their high end stuff than their low end stuff, so somebody who happens to own a low-end Sun box may well be happier with Linux than with Solaris. Telling him to compare Solaris with Linux on an E450 isn't very useful if his box is an Ultra 5. He needs to compare them on the platform that he's going to be running them on. The fact that the Ultra5 is more comprable to a PC may be evidence that he should look at a PC instead of a Sun the next time he goes shopping for a new box, but as long as he's talking about current hardware he needs to consider what OS will get him the most out of it, which it sounds like even you admit is Linux.
This is a very important bit of advice. Make sure that you get enough of the vitamins and minerals you need! You need more than calories to keep you going, and if you're not getting enough of the other things your body will let you know just the same way that it lets you know you're not getting enough calories. You'll get hungry, and try to eat more in order to get those other nutrients, meaning more calories and weight gain.
Let me Nth that. One exceptionally cool thing that's part of this is a weight watching program that you can get for your Palm. The best part about it is that it has an adequate focus on staying at your desired weight, unlike most diets that only concentrate on losing the weight in the first place. If you don't want to yo-yo, this is a good place to look.
ISTR that the technology needed to manufacture gene chips is actually much simpler than you'd believe. In particular it turned out to be possible to do it using a reprogrammed inkjet printer using the right reagents in place of the standard four colors of ink. The setup cost was still reasonably steep- something like $10,000- but not out of the range of affordability for a dedicated hobbiest. This was a big issue specifically because it brought the technology within the reach of a lot of less well funded labs, rather than just the big boys. Despite the trend of biology toward big science, there's still a lot of great work that can be done on a very tight budget.
And, of course, a lot of the upcoming work in biology is going to be computational rather than experimental. You may not believe it, but it is quite possible to generate publishable results on a home computer. There's even some real suggestion that interesting problems like protein folding are going to be solved not by brute force but by better algorithms. I recently went to the Tolman Medal talk by Bill Goddard, who claims to be able to narrow the field to about 10-20 possible folds per protein right now and may be able to get it to a single prediction soon. That's using some fairly beefy computing power, but nothing like the LottaFLOPS zillion node clusters that people are discussing building to deal with the folding problem. It's entirely possible that protein folding will be doable with a home computer in a decade.