Nuts. The mere use of a word like "overcoverage" means that the report is subjective, not objective. Where's the objective standard for the correct amount of coverage? Or, too little coverage? What's "correct"? "What's "too little"? If you think that some writer is payng too much attention to Apple, then stop reading that writer. Don't start making absurd claims about "overcoverage".
As for the logic behind the assertion that the use of a particular brand of computer compels media people to write about that brand, well, that's as logical as claiming that a food critic who eats Cheerios ever day for breakfast is driven to review only packaged cereals. Why are people so willing to attack alleged driven behavior in others while claiming they themsevles are exempt?
Frankly, one of the reasons that media people don't write a lot about Intel boxes, as opposed to Apple hardware, is that they're all essentially the same. So what if Dell or H-P repackage the usual mix of boards, chips and drives and slap on a new name? Who cares?
The chips Apple uses don't matter. Commercial vendors want to know if there's money to be made by adding a new platform. If the move to Intel expands Apple's marketshare, then your chances for getting your CAD programs goes up.
If I wasn't an American, I'd look at this little temper tantrum and say: "Why should I let the Americans run the Internet? I didn't vote for any of those people." (Some of you don't get a chance to cast a meaningful vote for anything or anyone, but that's another story.)
But, I am, in fact, an American, so I say pretty much the same thing: "Why should I let the UN or the EU run the Internet? I didn't vote for any of those people."
As a matter of fact, whoever you are, where ever you are, you didn't vote for anyone running the net today, and, no no matter who wins this spat, you won't be able to vote for them tomorrow.
Don't know about you, but if I don't get a chance to vote for 'em, I really don't see much difference between one undemocratic, unrepresentative functionary and the next.
A software license is not a contract. No one signs anything. If you sign a car loan contract with your local bank, they're a signatory, too. Later, if you find that the bank is violating the terms of that contract, you can take legal action. (Obviously, you can't if they're abiding by the contract and only your interpretation of its terms has changed.)
Many, probably most, software licenses appear to be non-contractual attemptd by product marketers to absolve themselves of any and all responsibility for that product. Software vendors should be no more immune to legal action prompted by damage and injury caused by faults in their products than anyone else. The law cannot single out a specific kind of product or vendor and exempt them.
If the typical softwware license was repurposed for surgeons, it would not and should not protect them from malpractice suits. Who would use a surgeon who refused to accept responsibility for his or her work? What court would throw out a malpractive suit simply because the surgeon issued a piece of paper disavowing that responsibility?
Another example: Car repair shops often display a placard telling customers to stay out of the work areas and asserting that the shop isn't responsible for what happens if a customer enters a work area. But, if a customer does enter that work area and is injured, that sign won't protect the shop, especially if negligence on the part of the shop can be shown to have contributed to the injury.
Software, a product like any other, should be held to the same standards. If it does what is ssays it will do, however poorly, that's not actionable. But, if it can be shown that negligence by the developers or vendors contributed to injuring or damaging another party, then that ought to be actionable. E.g., if an email program failed to block an attack on a business network by failing to incorporate security routines that were otherwise widely adopted in the industry, then that vendor and those developers ought to be held liable for the financial damages caused by the attack. The typical software license should offer no protection; only if a specific reference to that specific attack and an admission that the software deliberately fails to include protection against it is included in the license would I be willing to absolve the developers/vendor from responsibility.
You're making a specious argument. When you release your software, you accept responsibility for its impact on other people. Nothing you say alters that. For example, you might enjoy making children's furniture that also happens to burst into flame. If you keep it all to yourself, that's your problem. If you let other people acquire the furniture, then nothing you can say will eliminate your responsiblity for distributing a dangerous product.
If you are unwilling to accept responsibility for the damage done by your code, then don't let anyone else use it.
The price people pay for hybrids represents something of a guilt tax paid by the affluent. While they'll probably never recoup the price of the hybrid in gasoline savings, they will, in fact, be reducing their usage of the stuff, which is not a bad thing.
Prices will need to be no higher, preferably lower, than current car prices if hybrids or any other similar alternative technologies are to have a lasting environmental impact. Only the economically privileged can afford to spend more to use less energy.
>> Microsoft intentionally breaks things from release to release..
Well, of course. That's great marketing strategy.
It is also Microsoft setting the rules for the game the open source challengers are playing. Their determining the design specs for StarOffice/OpenOffice. As long as MS can do that, open source will be a distant also-ran.
StarOffice and OpenOffice or AnyotherKindofOfficeClone won't replace Office so long as their major selling point is compatibility with Office. If someone is looking for their first bundle of office applications, then StarOffice has a chance. But, why would existing, satisfied, MSOfifice users spend cash to replace Office with something whose claim to fame is that it is (almost) compatible with Office? Why endure the hassle of running macros and conversion programs to convince StarOffice to digest your MSOffice documents when you already have MSOffice to do that job quite nicely, without the conversions and the macros.
Anything that has a chance to replace MSOffice needs to deliver capabilities that are an order of magnitude better, and it needs to inundate the marketplace with shiny shrinkwrapped boxes.
Let's be clear, Clipper won't be of much use to rescue people actually on the Moon, since it won't have the capability to land on the lunar surface.
That said, there's orbiting the Moon and then there's obiting the Moon.
First, you can follow an elongated orbital path around Earth that just happens to get close enough to the Moon that it's gravity alters your path and swings you around the backside of the Moon and then towards Earth. That's the path followed by Apollo 8. The vehicle does not actually enter Lunar orbit.
Second, the vehicle uses internal rockets or thrusters to insert itself into a permanent Lunar orbit. Leaving orbit to return to Earth requires another application of thrust to accelerate out of orbit.
I suspect Clipper could handle the first variation, but not the second, making its rescue ability effectively nil.
But...if the guy doesn't, in fact, keep copies offsite, or if his employer claims he broke the terms of his employment by making and removing those copies from the employer's facilities, his claim to the code, if not actual possession of it, is much, much weaker.
Indeed, if he has no written agreement from his employer approving development of that code on company time using company facilities, it is only his word against their's in a court contest.
My essential point is that any contract that he prepares should cover all possible scenarios; he should not rely on the continuance of his current friendly relationship with his boss, or gamble that his employer's behavior won't change in the future, expecially if he sniffs profit potential in that code.
Don't forget access to your code sitting on their hardware. Protecting your copyright won't be of much use if the only copy of your code is sitting on their machines and you aren't allowed near them and your network account was cancelled 5 minutes after you were terminated. Or, if the company attempts to nullify the contract on the grounds that you illegally removed or copied code on their machines.
Don't assume today's friendliness will be there tomorrow. Treat it as a potentially adversarial relationship, even if it isn't.
Determine if the existing terms of your employment might override any contract, giving your employer the ability to argue in court that the arrangement was never valid.
Of course, get a lawyer. If the potential gain from protecting your rights isn't enough to pay for an attorney, maybe you ought not to bother.
By failure I mean: way more expensive/lower quality/slower than if created by open competition rather than public funding.
The troublle with that pro-market statement is that the market only does something if it is profitable. Unless you arbitrarily limit activities in the public good to only activities that are profitable, a moment's reflection will identify any number of unprofitable activities that the market won't touch but are essential, not just contributory, to the public good.
On the flip side, many profitable activities do not benefit the public.
It is of no consequece if certain activities supporting the public good are expensive, of lower quality, or delivered more slowly than the market might, because the market will not deliver them at all.
My experience shows that using Fink is, indeed, problematic. Just as using any dependency resolver to install pacakges from a variety of uncoordinated sources has been problematic for me on Linux.
I suspect "compilation errors" may refer to mistakes by the package creators, not errors that appear duing an install-time compile.
In any case, hasn't this been done before? This is hardly any more impressive than porting KDE to BSD.
Flown much recently? As a result of 9-11. cockpit doors are locked in flight, and have been for a few years. At the same time, existing doors were replaced by sturdy metal doors to prevent someone from simply chopping their way through to the crew.
Your notion of adding a second external door would require redesign and refit of every aircraft, which is unlikely ffor financial and aerodynamic reasons. Also, the crew needs access to the passenger section, especially during non-hijacking emergencies..
Remind me never to fly in a spacecraft you designed. If you can't tell the difference between a docking port and an escape rocket... (If the thing is jettisoned on the way up, can you explain how it is going to be used to dock with anything?)
Any mission to the Moon -- all of them -- will follow one od threde basic lfight plans: 1) Direct launch of all payload from Earth to the lunar surface and return; 2) Lunar orbit rendevous using one or more launches; 3) Earth orbit rendevous using one or more launches/ Apollo used Number Two; VSE will use Number Three. So, of course, it is reminiscent of Apollo. Physics says it has to be that way.
Ditto the shape of the capsule. Who cares if someone has sketched out "innovative" capsule shapes? When you're constrained by budget to do something, you don't spend money doing unnecessary and risky innovation. Bush told NASA to go to the Moon, not invent new ways of getting there. I wouldn't have minded if Griffin had proposed building new Saturn 5's.
Bad Post: Misinformative and Wrong
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NASA's New Shuttle
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· Score: 3, Informative
It's sad that this is the kind of post that passes for infomative.
First of all, for those who actually read rather than just look at pictures, there's a lot more information at the NASA site than what the OP writes here, and, unlike that post, it is correct.
Now...
>> There appears to be an Apollo age escape tower on the crew capsule. This doubles as a docking port.
No. That's part of the abort apparatus. it is jettisoned during the trip to orbit. It has nothing to do with docking.
>> The mission plan given is basically the same one used on Apollo.
Wrong. There are significant differences with Apollo, including flight profile, length of stay, size of crew, and the ability to land anywhere on the Moon (Apollo was confined to equatorial regions).
>> We use big booster to light up millions of tonnes of mass... Kind of pathetic,
It is not pathetic. That's how rockets work. Almost all the mass in a rocket is propellant.
>> I'm surprised they didn't even consider the Big Gemini design...
Probably because it is essentially the same design: a blunt conical object with a heatshield. We've seen more than 40 years worth of avionics and electronic advances since Gemini. There's no reason to resurrect the dead. Remember, too, the CEV is supposed to bulk up for the Mars trip. Gemini couldn't survive more than a few weeks. (It barely made it through the two-week endurance mission.)
>> Anyone who thinks NASA is taking a step back (except for the capsule...
The capsule is not a backward step. That's equivalent to lamenting the lack of innovation in aircraft design because they all have wings. If you design a spacecraft to be launched by rocket from and to return to a planetary surface, that's the vehicle shape you'll have: conical for aerodynamic purposes during launch, with a blunt heat shield on the other end. So long as we launch such vehicles via rockets, that's what they're going to look like. (Remember, we don't have the technology to protect leading wing entries at escape veleocity speed, which a returning lunar mission will see. A returning Mars mission will reenter at higher speed.)
>> With this HLV booster, we could put a brand new space station whereever the hell we want it...
I agree with you. As someone who spent several years on the government side as the liaison between the government and the contractor, charged with ensuring that both sides understood each other, I had a very similar experience.
Staffers did not want to attend requirements meetings, primarily because it took time away from their jobs. In many, cases staffers were happy with the existing architecture and did not want to see it replaced. Likewise, many doubted the abiliity of the contractor to deliver an appropriate product.. Many of those who would attend repeated requirments sessions had a narrown, tunnel, view of their work process and no understanding of how their work fit in with the work of the organization. Finally, the eventual review and vetting of the draft requirements was usually left to myself and a very few others, since the other particpating staffers had all scampered for the hills. None of them relished the notion of reviewing the contents of several hundred pages of requirements.
Ditto your comment on stovepipes. I would add that the funding process encourages that, because offices could not build stovepipes without the authority to spend.
!. I've said nothing about voting or privileges versus rights. I've said the right to protect and benefit from a work i create is a natirual right, not a gift of government. Rights are inalienable, meeaning that no one can take them away. Therefore, government can only attempt to thwart the exercise of rights. If government could create or eliminate rights, then rights would clearly not be inalienable. You would do better to attempt to rebut argument I've made rather than arguments I have not made.
2. If an when I share my book with someone, I share only those rights I choose. If I do not choose to share or transfer the right to copy and redsitribute my work then no one else has that right. The anti-copyright crowd wants to argue that "sharing" (which they've redefined to be a euphemism for "acquisition") involves transfer of all rights. But tht is demonstrably wrong. You have no rights to my work unless I ssay so. Simple acquisition of my work, or a copy of my work, in no way gives you any rights. For example, allowing a publisher to read the manuscript does not also grant that publisher the right to publish the book. He can only acquire that right by my explicit transfer of that right to him. The publishers only acquires the specific rights I transfer. Buyers and readers of the books marketed by the published acquire only those rights I explicitly transfer to them. If I do not share rights with someone, it is impossible for them to acquire those rights. Since all rights regarding the book originate with me, how cojuld anyone else acquire any of those rights unless by trabsfer from me?
3. Throughout human history almost all the rights of almost every human being were oppressed by government, and still are in large measure. You are arguing that if a government blocks the exercise of a right, it is not a natural right. That is obviously incorrect.
4. Who is to determine the "spirit of the original law" if not us? The founders are not alive to tell us. And, I am happy they are not. I would not want to abdicate my responsibilities to make my own decisons to a handful of ancient politicians turned oracles. Why have representatives and judges if every question is best answered by those we agree know the "truth" of the founders' intent? The founders were people just like us, only with a more limited exposure to the world and a weaker commitment to democracy. They certainly did not shy from interpreting the meaning of the Constitution to support their own needs and their own political agendas. If the people who wrote it behaved that way, why should we not also?
5. Copyright is not about ideas. Copyright is about physical objects called books, digitized files, etc. Ideas are non-corporeal creations that cannot be owned, transfered or acquired. If I have an idea for a piece of fiction and create a work of symbolic representation called a book extrapolating from that idea, I have exclusive rights to that book, not the idea. If you have the same idea, I have no right to it or any work you create based on it. if you seek to acquire my idea. we would find that it is impossible to transfer my idea to you without resorting to creating a symbolic expression of it which may, or may not, induce a similar idea in you. The idea is not its expression, and the expression is not the idea. Sloganeering that describes copyright as an "ideology that ideas can truly be owned" is rooted either in deep ignorance or deep crassness.
Sedition laws are almost as reprehensible as racism, so I see little reason to choose sides here.
But, bloggers should expect no free pass compared with other means of publication. The laws that apply to publishing -- sanctions and protecions -- ought to apply to every blogger just as they do to the major commericial players.
It is apparent you have no real-life experience daling with or managing relations between large organizations and large contractors.
Communication difficulties are not equivalent to learning disabilities. If that is what your shcool teaches, perhaps you ought to leave it.
In any case, i said nothing about communications, I said contractors did not understand the natrue of their customer's work or how their deliverables would actually be used by the customer's employees. I explicity did not say contractor personnel and government personnel had problems communicating with each other.
Nor did I mean to say the use of contrctors was a bad idea. Just the opposite. The government personnel involved did not possess the skills or the time to develop complex multi-million dollar IT systems. Nor do any organizations that hire contractors. The contractor acknolwedges that by employing specialists in ascertaining the customer's needs. The customer expresses those needs in terms the customers understands, and it is the contractor's responsibility to translate those expressions into engineering requirements that result in the creation of deliverables that do what the customer wants them to do.
All this is self-evidently logical. One doesn't blame the homeowner if the house designed by the architect doesn't do what the homeowner told the architect it should do.
I'm not blaming outsiders. The contractors were inside and they were planners. That's what they were paid to do: Listen to what we say we need and go off and plan, design and deliver a system that does just that.
In my experience, many techs are happiest in a world ruled by the engineering principles they apply in their work. That's why they like their work and why they are good at it. But people do not behave according ot engineering principles. They change their minds. They have budget problems. They have superiors who direct them to make changes in otherwise admirable programs. I've found that techs, particularly journeymen non-managerial techs, often have difficulty dealing with that world and come off as abrasive, arrogant and incooperative. They fail to live by the truism that the customer is always right. To give a specific example, I can't begin to count the times some low-level coder told me something could not be changed, only to see it changed quickly once I went over his head.
Again, I have not been describing a communication problem. Communciations were excellent. I am describing the contractors' failure to deliver products that did what their customers said they wanted them to do. If, in fact, the contractor had problems understanding the ogvernment, it was the cntractors' responsibility to know that and to do something about. Money flowed from the government to the contractor, and responsiblity flowed the other way.
>>...ounders believed that granting a limited protection on certain innovations would speed progress...
Yes, but, first, they believed inventors had a right to protect their inventions.
>>...copyright and patent are not inalienable, natural, moral rights but rather artificially granted rights...
Wrong. Governments can only protect or thwart existing rights. They cannot create or abolish rights. My right to protect, say, my new book is inherent in the fact that I own and have exclusive rights to the original copy, and that it is literally impossible for anyone else to acquire any rights to that original work -- including the right to read it and to make additional copies -- unless I willingly transfer those rights. Copyright law merely codifies that right, it does not create it. Absent copyright law, my rights still exist; absent copyright law, you acquire no right to use or copy my original work in any way.
>>...his order is the opposite of what the Constitution clearly states.
On other occasions, you resort to citing what you assert were the intentions of the founders, as outlined in their writings, not the Constitution. Here you confine yourself to asserting hat you argue the Constitution says. The inconsistentcies are obvious.
In any case, the Constitution means what people who are alive today say it means. The Founders themselves immediately began arguing about its interpretation and many of them altered their own views of it. Political conflict, not consensus, is the essence of democracy. Politicians and parties who extol consensus are typically seeeking to limit democracy, impose their own ideology and compel others to act only in accordance with their partisan views.
Read it again. I did not say the contractors were incompetent. Nor did I say the government was incompetent.
In fact, both were very competent at their respective professions. But, they spoke two different languages and worked in two different cultures. Contractors did not, and could not, understand the day-to-day use the government would make of the tools they delivered. That is understandable because only the people who spent their careers doing that work had that understanding. Government employees were not experts in requirements building and systems design. And that was equally understandable.
So, after sitting in dozens of meeting dozens of different government staffers trying to explain the nature of their business to a few lead analysts and requirements writers, after spending hours and days revetting the requirement specs delivered by the contractor, it was a common experience to watch the government take delivery of the new system only to hear employees and management declare: It doesn't do what we told them we wanted it to do.
The failure here is the contractors'. (More than one, since I saw this happen with different contractors on different projects.) They see the system they are building as an end in itself, while their customer sees it as a means to an end. When the contractor fails to understand how their customer will actually use their system, if they fail to understand the nature of their customer's business, their delivereable will fall short.
I don't think this has anything to do with competence or evasion of responsibility. It has to do with the isolation of much of tech culture from the real world and its unspoken assumption that the same kind of rigid formularic methodologies that work so well to build software will also work to satisfy their customers. it won't.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be "Norm", not "Normal?"
/. deserve no raise at all.
Obviously, the people predtending to be editors at
Nuts. The mere use of a word like "overcoverage" means that the report is subjective, not objective. Where's the objective standard for the correct amount of coverage? Or, too little coverage? What's "correct"? "What's "too little"? If you think that some writer is payng too much attention to Apple, then stop reading that writer. Don't start making absurd claims about "overcoverage".
As for the logic behind the assertion that the use of a particular brand of computer compels media people to write about that brand, well, that's as logical as claiming that a food critic who eats Cheerios ever day for breakfast is driven to review only packaged cereals. Why are people so willing to attack alleged driven behavior in others while claiming they themsevles are exempt?
Frankly, one of the reasons that media people don't write a lot about Intel boxes, as opposed to Apple hardware, is that they're all essentially the same. So what if Dell or H-P repackage the usual mix of boards, chips and drives and slap on a new name? Who cares?
The chips Apple uses don't matter. Commercial vendors want to know if there's money to be made by adding a new platform. If the move to Intel expands Apple's marketshare, then your chances for getting your CAD programs goes up.
If I wasn't an American, I'd look at this little temper tantrum and say: "Why should I let the Americans run the Internet? I didn't vote for any of those people." (Some of you don't get a chance to cast a meaningful vote for anything or anyone, but that's another story.)
But, I am, in fact, an American, so I say pretty much the same thing: "Why should I let the UN or the EU run the Internet? I didn't vote for any of those people."
As a matter of fact, whoever you are, where ever you are, you didn't vote for anyone running the net today, and, no no matter who wins this spat, you won't be able to vote for them tomorrow.
Don't know about you, but if I don't get a chance to vote for 'em, I really don't see much difference between one undemocratic, unrepresentative functionary and the next.
A software license is not a contract. No one signs anything. If you sign a car loan contract with your local bank, they're a signatory, too. Later, if you find that the bank is violating the terms of that contract, you can take legal action. (Obviously, you can't if they're abiding by the contract and only your interpretation of its terms has changed.)
Many, probably most, software licenses appear to be non-contractual attemptd by product marketers to absolve themselves of any and all responsibility for that product. Software vendors should be no more immune to legal action prompted by damage and injury caused by faults in their products than anyone else. The law cannot single out a specific kind of product or vendor and exempt them.
If the typical softwware license was repurposed for surgeons, it would not and should not protect them from malpractice suits. Who would use a surgeon who refused to accept responsibility for his or her work? What court would throw out a malpractive suit simply because the surgeon issued a piece of paper disavowing that responsibility?
Another example: Car repair shops often display a placard telling customers to stay out of the work areas and asserting that the shop isn't responsible for what happens if a customer enters a work area. But, if a customer does enter that work area and is injured, that sign won't protect the shop, especially if negligence on the part of the shop can be shown to have contributed to the injury.
Software, a product like any other, should be held to the same standards. If it does what is ssays it will do, however poorly, that's not actionable. But, if it can be shown that negligence by the developers or vendors contributed to injuring or damaging another party, then that ought to be actionable. E.g., if an email program failed to block an attack on a business network by failing to incorporate security routines that were otherwise widely adopted in the industry, then that vendor and those developers ought to be held liable for the financial damages caused by the attack. The typical software license should offer no protection; only if a specific reference to that specific attack and an admission that the software deliberately fails to include protection against it is included in the license would I be willing to absolve the developers/vendor from responsibility.
You're making a specious argument. When you release your software, you accept responsibility for its impact on other people. Nothing you say alters that. For example, you might enjoy making children's furniture that also happens to burst into flame. If you keep it all to yourself, that's your problem. If you let other people acquire the furniture, then nothing you can say will eliminate your responsiblity for distributing a dangerous product.
If you are unwilling to accept responsibility for the damage done by your code, then don't let anyone else use it.
The price people pay for hybrids represents something of a guilt tax paid by the affluent. While they'll probably never recoup the price of the hybrid in gasoline savings, they will, in fact, be reducing their usage of the stuff, which is not a bad thing.
Prices will need to be no higher, preferably lower, than current car prices if hybrids or any other similar alternative technologies are to have a lasting environmental impact. Only the economically privileged can afford to spend more to use less energy.
>> Microsoft intentionally breaks things from release to release..
Well, of course. That's great marketing strategy.
It is also Microsoft setting the rules for the game the open source challengers are playing. Their determining the design specs for StarOffice/OpenOffice. As long as MS can do that, open source will be a distant also-ran.
StarOffice and OpenOffice or AnyotherKindofOfficeClone won't replace Office so long as their major selling point is compatibility with Office. If someone is looking for their first bundle of office applications, then StarOffice has a chance. But, why would existing, satisfied, MSOfifice users spend cash to replace Office with something whose claim to fame is that it is (almost) compatible with Office? Why endure the hassle of running macros and conversion programs to convince StarOffice to digest your MSOffice documents when you already have MSOffice to do that job quite nicely, without the conversions and the macros.
Anything that has a chance to replace MSOffice needs to deliver capabilities that are an order of magnitude better, and it needs to inundate the marketplace with shiny shrinkwrapped boxes.
Let's be clear, Clipper won't be of much use to rescue people actually on the Moon, since it won't have the capability to land on the lunar surface.
That said, there's orbiting the Moon and then there's obiting the Moon.
First, you can follow an elongated orbital path around Earth that just happens to get close enough to the Moon that it's gravity alters your path and swings you around the backside of the Moon and then towards Earth. That's the path followed by Apollo 8. The vehicle does not actually enter Lunar orbit.
Second, the vehicle uses internal rockets or thrusters to insert itself into a permanent Lunar orbit. Leaving orbit to return to Earth requires another application of thrust to accelerate out of orbit.
I suspect Clipper could handle the first variation, but not the second, making its rescue ability effectively nil.
But...if the guy doesn't, in fact, keep copies offsite, or if his employer claims he broke the terms of his employment by making and removing those copies from the employer's facilities, his claim to the code, if not actual possession of it, is much, much weaker.
Indeed, if he has no written agreement from his employer approving development of that code on company time using company facilities, it is only his word against their's in a court contest.
My essential point is that any contract that he prepares should cover all possible scenarios; he should not rely on the continuance of his current friendly relationship with his boss, or gamble that his employer's behavior won't change in the future, expecially if he sniffs profit potential in that code.
Don't forget access to your code sitting on their hardware. Protecting your copyright won't be of much use if the only copy of your code is sitting on their machines and you aren't allowed near them and your network account was cancelled 5 minutes after you were terminated. Or, if the company attempts to nullify the contract on the grounds that you illegally removed or copied code on their machines.
Don't assume today's friendliness will be there tomorrow. Treat it as a potentially adversarial relationship, even if it isn't.
Determine if the existing terms of your employment might override any contract, giving your employer the ability to argue in court that the arrangement was never valid.
Of course, get a lawyer. If the potential gain from protecting your rights isn't enough to pay for an attorney, maybe you ought not to bother.
By failure I mean: way more expensive/lower quality/slower than if created by open competition rather than public funding.
The troublle with that pro-market statement is that the market only does something if it is profitable. Unless you arbitrarily limit activities in the public good to only activities that are profitable, a moment's reflection will identify any number of unprofitable activities that the market won't touch but are essential, not just contributory, to the public good.
On the flip side, many profitable activities do not benefit the public.
It is of no consequece if certain activities supporting the public good are expensive, of lower quality, or delivered more slowly than the market might, because the market will not deliver them at all.
My experience shows that using Fink is, indeed, problematic. Just as using any dependency resolver to install pacakges from a variety of uncoordinated sources has been problematic for me on Linux.
I suspect "compilation errors" may refer to mistakes by the package creators, not errors that appear duing an install-time compile.
In any case, hasn't this been done before? This is hardly any more impressive than porting KDE to BSD.
Flown much recently? As a result of 9-11. cockpit doors are locked in flight, and have been for a few years. At the same time, existing doors were replaced by sturdy metal doors to prevent someone from simply chopping their way through to the crew.
Your notion of adding a second external door would require redesign and refit of every aircraft, which is unlikely ffor financial and aerodynamic reasons. Also, the crew needs access to the passenger section, especially during non-hijacking emergencies..
Remind me never to fly in a spacecraft you designed. If you can't tell the difference between a docking port and an escape rocket... (If the thing is jettisoned on the way up, can you explain how it is going to be used to dock with anything?)
Any mission to the Moon -- all of them -- will follow one od threde basic lfight plans: 1) Direct launch of all payload from Earth to the lunar surface and return; 2) Lunar orbit rendevous using one or more launches; 3) Earth orbit rendevous using one or more launches/ Apollo used Number Two; VSE will use Number Three. So, of course, it is reminiscent of Apollo. Physics says it has to be that way.
Ditto the shape of the capsule. Who cares if someone has sketched out "innovative" capsule shapes? When you're constrained by budget to do something, you don't spend money doing unnecessary and risky innovation. Bush told NASA to go to the Moon, not invent new ways of getting there. I wouldn't have minded if Griffin had proposed building new Saturn 5's.
It's sad that this is the kind of post that passes for infomative.
First of all, for those who actually read rather than just look at pictures, there's a lot more information at the NASA site than what the OP writes here, and, unlike that post, it is correct.
Now...
>> There appears to be an Apollo age escape tower on the crew capsule. This doubles as a docking port.
No. That's part of the abort apparatus. it is jettisoned during the trip to orbit. It has nothing to do with docking.
>> The mission plan given is basically the same one used on Apollo.
Wrong. There are significant differences with Apollo, including flight profile, length of stay, size of crew, and the ability to land anywhere on the Moon (Apollo was confined to equatorial regions).
>> We use big booster to light up millions of tonnes of mass... Kind of pathetic,
It is not pathetic. That's how rockets work. Almost all the mass in a rocket is propellant.
>> I'm surprised they didn't even consider the Big Gemini design...
Probably because it is essentially the same design: a blunt conical object with a heatshield. We've seen more than 40 years worth of avionics and electronic advances since Gemini. There's no reason to resurrect the dead. Remember, too, the CEV is supposed to bulk up for the Mars trip. Gemini couldn't survive more than a few weeks. (It barely made it through the two-week endurance mission.)
>> Anyone who thinks NASA is taking a step back (except for the capsule...
The capsule is not a backward step. That's equivalent to lamenting the lack of innovation in aircraft design because they all have wings. If you design a spacecraft to be launched by rocket from and to return to a planetary surface, that's the vehicle shape you'll have: conical for aerodynamic purposes during launch, with a blunt heat shield on the other end. So long as we launch such vehicles via rockets, that's what they're going to look like. (Remember, we don't have the technology to protect leading wing entries at escape veleocity speed, which a returning lunar mission will see. A returning Mars mission will reenter at higher speed.)
>> With this HLV booster, we could put a brand new space station whereever the hell we want it...
Why?
Geez...
The letter doesn't seem terribly "vitriolic" to me. Obviously, someone has never received a letter from a lawyer.
I agree with you. As someone who spent several years on the government side as the liaison between the government and the contractor, charged with ensuring that both sides understood each other, I had a very similar experience.
Staffers did not want to attend requirements meetings, primarily because it took time away from their jobs. In many, cases staffers were happy with the existing architecture and did not want to see it replaced. Likewise, many doubted the abiliity of the contractor to deliver an appropriate product.. Many of those who would attend repeated requirments sessions had a narrown, tunnel, view of their work process and no understanding of how their work fit in with the work of the organization. Finally, the eventual review and vetting of the draft requirements was usually left to myself and a very few others, since the other particpating staffers had all scampered for the hills. None of them relished the notion of reviewing the contents of several hundred pages of requirements.
Ditto your comment on stovepipes. I would add that the funding process encourages that, because offices could not build stovepipes without the authority to spend.
!. I've said nothing about voting or privileges versus rights. I've said the right to protect and benefit from a work i create is a natirual right, not a gift of government. Rights are inalienable, meeaning that no one can take them away. Therefore, government can only attempt to thwart the exercise of rights. If government could create or eliminate rights, then rights would clearly not be inalienable. You would do better to attempt to rebut argument I've made rather than arguments I have not made.
2. If an when I share my book with someone, I share only those rights I choose. If I do not choose to share or transfer the right to copy and redsitribute my work then no one else has that right. The anti-copyright crowd wants to argue that "sharing" (which they've redefined to be a euphemism for "acquisition") involves transfer of all rights. But tht is demonstrably wrong. You have no rights to my work unless I ssay so. Simple acquisition of my work, or a copy of my work, in no way gives you any rights. For example, allowing a publisher to read the manuscript does not also grant that publisher the right to publish the book. He can only acquire that right by my explicit transfer of that right to him. The publishers only acquires the specific rights I transfer. Buyers and readers of the books marketed by the published acquire only those rights I explicitly transfer to them. If I do not share rights with someone, it is impossible for them to acquire those rights. Since all rights regarding the book originate with me, how cojuld anyone else acquire any of those rights unless by trabsfer from me?
3. Throughout human history almost all the rights of almost every human being were oppressed by government, and still are in large measure. You are arguing that if a government blocks the exercise of a right, it is not a natural right. That is obviously incorrect.
4. Who is to determine the "spirit of the original law" if not us? The founders are not alive to tell us. And, I am happy they are not. I would not want to abdicate my responsibilities to make my own decisons to a handful of ancient politicians turned oracles. Why have representatives and judges if every question is best answered by those we agree know the "truth" of the founders' intent? The founders were people just like us, only with a more limited exposure to the world and a weaker commitment to democracy. They certainly did not shy from interpreting the meaning of the Constitution to support their own needs and their own political agendas. If the people who wrote it behaved that way, why should we not also?
5. Copyright is not about ideas. Copyright is about physical objects called books, digitized files, etc. Ideas are non-corporeal creations that cannot be owned, transfered or acquired. If I have an idea for a piece of fiction and create a work of symbolic representation called a book extrapolating from that idea, I have exclusive rights to that book, not the idea. If you have the same idea, I have no right to it or any work you create based on it. if you seek to acquire my idea. we would find that it is impossible to transfer my idea to you without resorting to creating a symbolic expression of it which may, or may not, induce a similar idea in you. The idea is not its expression, and the expression is not the idea. Sloganeering that describes copyright as an "ideology that ideas can truly be owned" is rooted either in deep ignorance or deep crassness.
Sedition laws are almost as reprehensible as racism, so I see little reason to choose sides here.
But, bloggers should expect no free pass compared with other means of publication. The laws that apply to publishing -- sanctions and protecions -- ought to apply to every blogger just as they do to the major commericial players.
It is apparent you have no real-life experience daling with or managing relations between large organizations and large contractors.
Communication difficulties are not equivalent to learning disabilities. If that is what your shcool teaches, perhaps you ought to leave it.
In any case, i said nothing about communications, I said contractors did not understand the natrue of their customer's work or how their deliverables would actually be used by the customer's employees. I explicity did not say contractor personnel and government personnel had problems communicating with each other.
Nor did I mean to say the use of contrctors was a bad idea. Just the opposite. The government personnel involved did not possess the skills or the time to develop complex multi-million dollar IT systems. Nor do any organizations that hire contractors. The contractor acknolwedges that by employing specialists in ascertaining the customer's needs. The customer expresses those needs in terms the customers understands, and it is the contractor's responsibility to translate those expressions into engineering requirements that result in the creation of deliverables that do what the customer wants them to do.
All this is self-evidently logical. One doesn't blame the homeowner if the house designed by the architect doesn't do what the homeowner told the architect it should do.
I'm not blaming outsiders. The contractors were inside and they were planners. That's what they were paid to do: Listen to what we say we need and go off and plan, design and deliver a system that does just that.
In my experience, many techs are happiest in a world ruled by the engineering principles they apply in their work. That's why they like their work and why they are good at it. But people do not behave according ot engineering principles. They change their minds. They have budget problems. They have superiors who direct them to make changes in otherwise admirable programs. I've found that techs, particularly journeymen non-managerial techs, often have difficulty dealing with that world and come off as abrasive, arrogant and incooperative. They fail to live by the truism that the customer is always right. To give a specific example, I can't begin to count the times some low-level coder told me something could not be changed, only to see it changed quickly once I went over his head.
Again, I have not been describing a communication problem. Communciations were excellent. I am describing the contractors' failure to deliver products that did what their customers said they wanted them to do. If, in fact, the contractor had problems understanding the ogvernment, it was the cntractors' responsibility to know that and to do something about. Money flowed from the government to the contractor, and responsiblity flowed the other way.
>> ...ounders believed that granting a limited protection on certain innovations would speed progress...
...copyright and patent are not inalienable, natural, moral rights but rather artificially granted rights...
...his order is the opposite of what the Constitution clearly states.
Yes, but, first, they believed inventors had a right to protect their inventions.
>>
Wrong. Governments can only protect or thwart existing rights. They cannot create or abolish rights. My right to protect, say, my new book is inherent in the fact that I own and have exclusive rights to the original copy, and that it is literally impossible for anyone else to acquire any rights to that original work -- including the right to read it and to make additional copies -- unless I willingly transfer those rights. Copyright law merely codifies that right, it does not create it. Absent copyright law, my rights still exist; absent copyright law, you acquire no right to use or copy my original work in any way.
>>
On other occasions, you resort to citing what you assert were the intentions of the founders, as outlined in their writings, not the Constitution. Here you confine yourself to asserting hat you argue the Constitution says. The inconsistentcies are obvious.
In any case, the Constitution means what people who are alive today say it means. The Founders themselves immediately began arguing about its interpretation and many of them altered their own views of it. Political conflict, not consensus, is the essence of democracy. Politicians and parties who extol consensus are typically seeeking to limit democracy, impose their own ideology and compel others to act only in accordance with their partisan views.
Read it again. I did not say the contractors were incompetent. Nor did I say the government was incompetent.
In fact, both were very competent at their respective professions. But, they spoke two different languages and worked in two different cultures. Contractors did not, and could not, understand the day-to-day use the government would make of the tools they delivered. That is understandable because only the people who spent their careers doing that work had that understanding. Government employees were not experts in requirements building and systems design. And that was equally understandable.
So, after sitting in dozens of meeting dozens of different government staffers trying to explain the nature of their business to a few lead analysts and requirements writers, after spending hours and days revetting the requirement specs delivered by the contractor, it was a common experience to watch the government take delivery of the new system only to hear employees and management declare: It doesn't do what we told them we wanted it to do.
The failure here is the contractors'. (More than one, since I saw this happen with different contractors on different projects.) They see the system they are building as an end in itself, while their customer sees it as a means to an end. When the contractor fails to understand how their customer will actually use their system, if they fail to understand the nature of their customer's business, their delivereable will fall short.
I don't think this has anything to do with competence or evasion of responsibility. It has to do with the isolation of much of tech culture from the real world and its unspoken assumption that the same kind of rigid formularic methodologies that work so well to build software will also work to satisfy their customers. it won't.