It takes two to tango. Contractors cause more problems than their government clients.
In a former life I was a government employee deeply involved in bringing several IT systems online, from writing requirements to staff training to getting rid of something we didn't like.
Corruption of government employees was not an issue. Lack of research by government wasn't an issue.
The biggest single problem I saw was the creation of inadequate requirement specs. I saw this happen over and over for two reasons: 1) Governmenr employees lacked the technological backgrounded needed to express their needs in terms that their IT contractors could understand; 2) Contractors, especially those hired to help write the requirements, lacked awareness of their clients business needs and processes.
So, in effect, the government knew what it wanted to do but not how to translate that into a requirements doc, and the contractors did not know very much, and did not want to know very much, about the work done by their client. As a result contractors threw assorted pieces of their IT catalog against business processes they only vaguely understood.
I don't know how it works in DC, but in my environment, it would have been the contractor's responsibility to check the Apache website for that caveat about the Windows version. That's what they're paid to do.
So, I stay where I was: The Founding Fathers supported patents and explicitly gave Congress the power to regulate them. The founders believed in an individual's right to protect his inventions.
Whether or not software patents might attract lawyers is not relevant. One does not give up a natural right simply because someone else hires a lawyer.
It is of primary importance that people be allowed to exercise their right to protect and benefit from their inventions. The innovative affects that accrue to society are secondary. Better to retain the former and lose the latter than the reverse.
I know nothing about the range of low-power transmitters, but would the same results be achieved if the station was relocated just outside the Astrodome?
While there are obvious advantages to being inside the dome -- access to information -- being next door might be better than nothing.
1. I've read the works of the founding fathers, especially Madison's notes from the Convention. They adamantly supported the need to incentivize inventors and authors, which is why they believed in and gave Congress the power to control patents and copyright. If they had opposed patents and copyright, they would have written their ban into the Constitution.
2....software patents most decidedly do NOT promote progress and, in fact, quite the opposite... That's certonaly the opinion of the free software folks, strongly colored by ideology. Whether that belief has any relation with reality is a matter of debate. Those opposing that view could argue, for example, and with considerable evidence on their side, that closedd and proprietary and patented software is responsible for the personal computer revolution and its innovations, while free software is essentially marked by incessant minor iterations of white room rewrites of UNIX code from at last two decades ago. One side would point to Windows and the Mac as significant inovations, while the other would point to Linux. But, Linux, it wold be argued, is simply a white room copy of Unix. What innovation is that?
3. Whatever you or I think the new GPL is reasonable is irrelevant. The license is meaningless if not enforced. That means going to court to try to get a court order to prevent someone from using a free software product that was acquired in a perfectly legal manner. E.g. if the user of the software brings a patent case against its developer, the GPL would attempt to bar that person's use of a product that had already been acquired in a perfectly legal manner. I don't see a court agreeing with that.
4. As sketched above, RMS is trying to tell someone that their continued use of a product is contingent upon their future avoidance of activity to which he is ideologically opposed. That's restrictive in my book.
5. There is no "must" about agreeing with the terms of th GPL before using GPL'd software. it runs just fine if you don't read the license. In my opinion, licenses like the GPL and most commercial EULA's carry no more weight that signs often posted in places like auto repair shops: "Enter at Your Own Risk. No Customers." Hanging signs like that in a wide open repair depot won't protect anyone from a suit if a customer walks in and has a transmission dropped on his foot.
I don't agree with your views of the Constitution and patents, including software patents, but, ignoring that, how is this new GPL to be enforced? I see no chance that courts will uphold a license that attempts to restrict previous and unrelated activity.
This license makes as mch sense as outlawing GPL'd software for people wo wear blue shirts or who eat meat or who otherwise manage to annoy RMS.
RMS is simply trying to advance his own personal partisian political agenda by restricting the rights of others. He has adopted the methods he's been decrying for decades. He has exposed his hypocrisy for all to see.
This is just an attempt to hijack the free software movment to serve the political agenda of RMS and others like him. Fundamentally, there is no diference between RMS telling me I can use his code and Microsoft telling me I can't use their code.
Here in the States, the right to patent is guaranteed by the Constitution. if RMs or the FSF sue a company with software patents to prevent them from using free software, the company will argue -- successfully -- that the GPL illegally attempts to restrict their Constitutionally guaranteed right to patent.
Trying to block the use of something you claim is otherwise free to all because a comoany or an individual holds a patent is morally and legally equivalent to refusing to sell to someone because you don't like their voting record. That's illegal and, soon, so will this repressive GPL.
>> "...he loses the right to use free software..."
How can I lose my right to something that is free?
If proprietary licenses are wrong, how can a GPL that says I can't use free sotfware be right?
This McCarthyite move represents the bastardization of free software to serve the partisan political agenda of some of its adherents.
And, how is this new GPL to be enforced? Will someone create and maintain a blacklist? How will the GPL Police stop blacklisted individuals from using free software?
>>...we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles...
Ptting aside the fact that coming back deserves to be the highlight of any sapceflight, these spoiled brats don't know what they're talking about.
The Discovery mission objectives were all met, including servicing ISS, fixing its gryro, and collecting the trash. That's what the Shuttle was designed to do. It is a fair to argue that the Shuttle doesn't go anywhere. But it isn't fair to wallow in ignorance and whine that the last mission didn't inpire you.
Checking the tiles and pulling out those little pieces of cloth ought to be seen as simple examples of needed maintenance performed by the crew. We'll need that capability on every future mission. You don't imagine, do you, that 500-day missions to Mars will go perfectly, that nothing unexpected will break? Those crews better damn well fix it, because being 40 millin miles away is a lot diffeerent than being 200 miles away.
Space travel is not a voyeur sport, contrary to the opinions of many. We're not doing it to make to turn 50-7ear-old SF into reality.
People who want to see real space travel ought to busy themselves doing somethig useful, like inventing propulsion systems that can get us to Mars in a few weeks or less.
Complaints like this should be more properly addressed by removing the offending images from the hosting site, not by asking Google to black them out. The images, of course, will still be visible to anyone who comes to the site by some route other than Google. It also reflect a basic misunderstanding of what Google is and how it works.
However, why not alter the content of your site if it was accessed via Google, or any other search engine? Want some content to be seen only by people who actually come directly to your site? Don't let Google see it or index it.
Anyone, not just the government, who controls the network and the hardware can "modify and control content routed" through them, if they want to do that.
The post office can read your mail if it chooses; the phone company can listen in, if it chooses; your neighbors can peek in your windows, if they choose; the guy who delivers your pizza can sprinkle poison on it, if he chooses.
You think a receipt is an invasion of privacy? Why?
Your purcchase of cheezy poofs is a two-way transaction. It is not true that "it's no one's business but mine". It is also the business of the seller.
Do you oppose paper receipts? The paper receipt simply reflects data that is already stored digitally. If you used a credit card, the information is stored in multiple locations.
Changing the location of one instance of that information -- from paper to a chip inside the product - has no effect on anyone's privacy.
Embed the receipt in a chip inside the product. Check that receipt on returns. Printed receipts become info only. Crooks might try to alter the data stored on that chip, but that could be curtailed if the chip was programmed to be written to only once and to wipe data if a second attempt took place.
I'm not ignoring your point. I don't agree with you.
The size of the Shuttle, or any other vehicle, has no relation to its reusability. Shuttle's reusability was knowingly compromised by the decision to go with the existing design. (Reusability also pushes the state of the art, even today.) No efffort is made to recover the tank, the solids take a bath in the ocean, and tiles need to be tended after every flight. None of that is a mistake, or had anything to do with size or payload capacity. Competing designs were considered, weighed against perceptions of budget and political realities, and one design was selected.
One of the competing designs was even bigger. The crewed orbiter was ferried aloft by a winged and crewed booster vehicle that was flown back to a runway. Both vehicles would have been prepped for reuse. The configuration would have looked something like a DC-9 sitting on top of a 747. Considerably larger than the existing Shuttle, yet arguably much more reusable.
Nor is the tank "destroyed", as you claim. The tank works just fine. The use of insulating foam is routine in liquid-fueled vehicles. The insulation is needed to keep the volatile fueled and oxidizer from warming up -- remember, we're talking about sustances that are gases in their natural state so must be kept chilled to a few hundred degrees below zero to be stable as liquids. Vehicles like the Shuttle sit on the pad for hours after fueling. Hence, the need for the foam.
Now, the foam is a problem. uniquely, for the Shuttle because it can fall back and hit the Orbiter. That can happen because the Orbiter is along the side of the tank, and that, in tirn, happened because a deliberate decision was made to build it that way. Otherwise, foam and ice have harmlessly been falling off launch vehicles for decades, harmlessly because the payload, rather sensibly, is on top of everything.
What obligation does Eric Schmidt have to talk with anyone in the media if he doesn't wnat to? None.
Can a search engine that index publicly accessible data violated someone's privacy? No. If information is available to the public, it isn't private. Maybe it ought not to be available, but once its is, sorry, you can't claim a search engine violated your privacy.
So, is Schmidt's claim that CNET used Google to violate his privacy lame? Yes, but so is anyone else who's smiling because they think Schmidt ust got a taste of his own medicine.
Google, like other corporations, is "public" only in the sense that it sells stock to the public. Corporations make use of established, legally required, avenues to communicate with their shareholders. Google may or may not be obligated to answer its shareholders, but it no obligation to talk to anyone in the media. Google's officers and employees have no more obligation to talk to reporters than they do to talk with you and me.
As for privacy: Google -- as a search engine -- isn't violating anyone's privacy. Google facilitates access to information that someone else has already made publicly available. Schmidt's charge that CNET violated his privacy may or may not be misdirected. but charges here Schmidt is only getting a does of his own medicine are also misdirected. If anyone has violated Schmidt's privacy, it is the people who made his private info accessible to the public, not the search engine that indexed it.
Thanks. It'd be HF for me. VHF has never gotten me excited.
When my father was a kid, in the American midwest, he was into SWL'ing. He used a Hallicrafters that was about as big as two microwaves; a big, heavy, solid metal box. His antenna was a longwire that ran down the street on the top of telephone poles for three blocks -- about 1000 feet. His interest was MW, and he had QSL's from 10-watt MW stations in the middle-of-nowhere Australia and others in that ballpark. Kinda difficult to repeat now, I suspect.
So, all his stories spoiled me, I guess. That 1000 foot longwire would be nice.
I'm in an apartment and really don't want to hassle with jury-rigged antennas and going to QRP to cut back on annoying the neighbors. If I had room for a decent antenna, I'd have my license.
(I've looked at some of those so-called "invisible" and other antennas marketed at apartment and condo dwellers, but I'm pretty skeptical. There's never any discussion of their abilities on the receive side of an exchange. Just how good at reception can a few feet of wire hidden on a balcony really be?)
Not to pan amateur radio (I wish I had my license) but why the excitement about hearing a signal from a couple hundred miles away? If that guy in Key West had a chat with another amateur in, say, Pensacola, that would be routine.
Another post filled with deliberate bias and deliberate ignorance.
Rutan's little ship reached an arbitary altitude by building up a small head of steam and coasting the rest of the way. Aircraft capable of the same trick have been flying for decades.
Rutan's ship is a deadend because it doesn't include any of the avionics and other equipment needed for orbital flight. Most importantly, the re-entry technique it uses does not work from LEO. The craft would burn and disintegrate. LEO re-entry requires a heatshield. Re-entering at more than 17000 mph generates a lot more energy than falling backwards from 60 miles ar a few mach number. Spaceship One is not capable of LEO flight or re-entry, and Rutan has acknowledged that.
>> The first Mercury flights were suborbita
The Mercury was designed for LEO flight. The first missions were suborbital test flights. The basic point that you deliberately ignore is that SpaceShip One is incapable of orbital flight.
>>...the shuttle...going to be retired in failure.
The Shuttle has been flying successfully for almost 30 years. You seem to be defining success as perfection.
>>...You can trash Soyuz and Progress...
What trashing? They are very much smaller, very much less capable vehicles. All I did was spaek the truth: Soyuz and Progress alone cannot adequately support ISS, and in no way can they even pretend to be able to complete the station. You couldn't even staff the ISS at full crew complement because there is no way to attac enough empty Soyuz's to it to effect an escape. And, yes, the Soyuz has suffered safety downtime in its 40-year history. The last time only a few years ago after re-entry failures.
>>...NASA has squandered $100 billion on a half finished space station...
Wrong. You demonstrate your ignorance of how things work. NASA spends money on the Shuttle and ISS because the President and Congress command them to do that. I/m neither a fan of ISS or the Shuttle concept but at least I have smarts enough to know who determines NASA's missions.
>>...Only shuttle mission that had any coolness factor...
Figures. A Slashdot loser measuring things by how "cool" he thinks they are. Go away, child.
>>...observing someone who has been successful at challenging engineering projects recently...
I'm not questioning Rutan's engineering skills. I'm questioning the relevancy of what he's engineered. Spaceship One is a dead end. It was a purpose-built vehicle designed to meet the demands of a contest. it is no more a spaceship than the Bell X-1. You can't grow or extend that vehicle into something that can take crew and cargo to and from LEO. If someone makes $100k a pop taking rich people on joyrides, more power to them, but I can't say that it holds my interest.
>>...Other than the current NASA administrator how many people can you actually name in NASA's manned space program...
So what? Noteriety is not an indicator of skill and ability.Besides, Federal employees are prohibited from engaging in the kind of grandstanding and personal PR that Rutan seems to enjoy. Perhaps if they could, and they were as wealthy as Rutan, they might help fund some shows about themselves for PBS.
>>...The astronauts are all good enough people but they are a dime a dozen...
Again, so what? Do you think people on the street know who Rutan is? Or his pilots? Be serious, OK? And, last I knew, becoming an astronaut was a rite of passage through a rather strenuous multi-year program. Hardly a "dime a dozen"....you might have noticed NASA failed to do that very thing...
What failure was that? ISS seems to be in orbit. And your dead wrong about the dependence on the Russians. The agreement to let the Russians and other partners build and launch modules was part of a political and diplomatic agenda that was out of NASA hands. ISS contrucctoin was delayed while NASA waited for the Russians to complete their modules, and the Russian space program has received significant financial support from the U.S. since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
>>...It could become a Russian only space station if the shuttle is grounded for another year or more, or if its end of lifed before there is a replacement.
The Russians lack the capability to carry enough cargo to and from the station to support it on their own with anything more than a 2-man caretaker crew, Even then, they have no real means of bringing trash off the station or even bring down anything but the smallest of experiements. Soyuz capsules have about as much room as a Porsche.
when you talk about a Shuttle replacement, you are embracing a misnomer. There will be no replacement for the Shuttle. NASA will build vehicles to support the VSE objectives. The contract for both the CEV and the cargo heavy-lift vehicle will require them to be able to fly to ISS, but that is their primary mission. The ISS plays no role in the VSE, and I'd guess Mike Griffin wouldn't shed many tears if it vanished tomorrow. Nor would I. It is purposeless.
Finally, I have to say that I can't understand your animosity toward NASA. Like many others, you want to damn them while seeing the praises of private sector people like Rutan. You're all forgetting that, excepting Rutan, no one in the private sector has gotten off the ground. And, as I said, Rutan's flights are a dead end. If NASA wants to contract out flights and services to businesses that have already demonstrated their capability, fine. But why should NASA pay billionaires billions of dollars just for promises delivered on PowerPoint slides? Space travel is too important to wait for cowboys, rich geeks and a Brit billionaire to do something real.
LEO has nothing to do with it. If two vehicles have the same payload capacity, they can put identical payloads into identical orbits. Ditto anything that requires escape velocity, like going to the Moon or Mars.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes two to tango. Contractors cause more problems than their government clients.
In a former life I was a government employee deeply involved in bringing several IT systems online, from writing requirements to staff training to getting rid of something we didn't like.
Corruption of government employees was not an issue. Lack of research by government wasn't an issue.
The biggest single problem I saw was the creation of inadequate requirement specs. I saw this happen over and over for two reasons: 1) Governmenr employees lacked the technological backgrounded needed to express their needs in terms that their IT contractors could understand; 2) Contractors, especially those hired to help write the requirements, lacked awareness of their clients business needs and processes.
So, in effect, the government knew what it wanted to do but not how to translate that into a requirements doc, and the contractors did not know very much, and did not want to know very much, about the work done by their client. As a result contractors threw assorted pieces of their IT catalog against business processes they only vaguely understood.
I don't know how it works in DC, but in my environment, it would have been the contractor's responsibility to check the Apache website for that caveat about the Windows version. That's what they're paid to do.
So, I stay where I was: The Founding Fathers supported patents and explicitly gave Congress the power to regulate them. The founders believed in an individual's right to protect his inventions.
Whether or not software patents might attract lawyers is not relevant. One does not give up a natural right simply because someone else hires a lawyer.
It is of primary importance that people be allowed to exercise their right to protect and benefit from their inventions. The innovative affects that accrue to society are secondary. Better to retain the former and lose the latter than the reverse.
I know nothing about the range of low-power transmitters, but would the same results be achieved if the station was relocated just outside the Astrodome?
While there are obvious advantages to being inside the dome -- access to information -- being next door might be better than nothing.
1. I've read the works of the founding fathers, especially Madison's notes from the Convention. They adamantly supported the need to incentivize inventors and authors, which is why they believed in and gave Congress the power to control patents and copyright. If they had opposed patents and copyright, they would have written their ban into the Constitution.
...software patents most decidedly do NOT promote progress and, in fact, quite the opposite... That's certonaly the opinion of the free software folks, strongly colored by ideology. Whether that belief has any relation with reality is a matter of debate. Those opposing that view could argue, for example, and with considerable evidence on their side, that closedd and proprietary and patented software is responsible for the personal computer revolution and its innovations, while free software is essentially marked by incessant minor iterations of white room rewrites of UNIX code from at last two decades ago. One side would point to Windows and the Mac as significant inovations, while the other would point to Linux. But, Linux, it wold be argued, is simply a white room copy of Unix. What innovation is that?
2.
3. Whatever you or I think the new GPL is reasonable is irrelevant. The license is meaningless if not enforced. That means going to court to try to get a court order to prevent someone from using a free software product that was acquired in a perfectly legal manner. E.g. if the user of the software brings a patent case against its developer, the GPL would attempt to bar that person's use of a product that had already been acquired in a perfectly legal manner. I don't see a court agreeing with that.
4. As sketched above, RMS is trying to tell someone that their continued use of a product is contingent upon their future avoidance of activity to which he is ideologically opposed. That's restrictive in my book.
5. There is no "must" about agreeing with the terms of th GPL before using GPL'd software. it runs just fine if you don't read the license. In my opinion, licenses like the GPL and most commercial EULA's carry no more weight that signs often posted in places like auto repair shops: "Enter at Your Own Risk. No Customers." Hanging signs like that in a wide open repair depot won't protect anyone from a suit if a customer walks in and has a transmission dropped on his foot.
I don't agree with your views of the Constitution and patents, including software patents, but, ignoring that, how is this new GPL to be enforced? I see no chance that courts will uphold a license that attempts to restrict previous and unrelated activity.
This license makes as mch sense as outlawing GPL'd software for people wo wear blue shirts or who eat meat or who otherwise manage to annoy RMS.
RMS is simply trying to advance his own personal partisian political agenda by restricting the rights of others. He has adopted the methods he's been decrying for decades. He has exposed his hypocrisy for all to see.
This is just an attempt to hijack the free software movment to serve the political agenda of RMS and others like him. Fundamentally, there is no diference between RMS telling me I can use his code and Microsoft telling me I can't use their code.
Here in the States, the right to patent is guaranteed by the Constitution. if RMs or the FSF sue a company with software patents to prevent them from using free software, the company will argue -- successfully -- that the GPL illegally attempts to restrict their Constitutionally guaranteed right to patent.
Trying to block the use of something you claim is otherwise free to all because a comoany or an individual holds a patent is morally and legally equivalent to refusing to sell to someone because you don't like their voting record. That's illegal and, soon, so will this repressive GPL.
>> "...he loses the right to use free software..."
How can I lose my right to something that is free?
If proprietary licenses are wrong, how can a GPL that says I can't use free sotfware be right?
This McCarthyite move represents the bastardization of free software to serve the partisan political agenda of some of its adherents.
And, how is this new GPL to be enforced? Will someone create and maintain a blacklist? How will the GPL Police stop blacklisted individuals from using free software?
>> ...we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles...
Ptting aside the fact that coming back deserves to be the highlight of any sapceflight, these spoiled brats don't know what they're talking about.
The Discovery mission objectives were all met, including servicing ISS, fixing its gryro, and collecting the trash. That's what the Shuttle was designed to do. It is a fair to argue that the Shuttle doesn't go anywhere. But it isn't fair to wallow in ignorance and whine that the last mission didn't inpire you.
Checking the tiles and pulling out those little pieces of cloth ought to be seen as simple examples of needed maintenance performed by the crew. We'll need that capability on every future mission. You don't imagine, do you, that 500-day missions to Mars will go perfectly, that nothing unexpected will break? Those crews better damn well fix it, because being 40 millin miles away is a lot diffeerent than being 200 miles away.
Space travel is not a voyeur sport, contrary to the opinions of many. We're not doing it to make to turn 50-7ear-old SF into reality.
People who want to see real space travel ought to busy themselves doing somethig useful, like inventing propulsion systems that can get us to Mars in a few weeks or less.
Complaints like this should be more properly addressed by removing the offending images from the hosting site, not by asking Google to black them out. The images, of course, will still be visible to anyone who comes to the site by some route other than Google. It also reflect a basic misunderstanding of what Google is and how it works.
However, why not alter the content of your site if it was accessed via Google, or any other search engine? Want some content to be seen only by people who actually come directly to your site? Don't let Google see it or index it.
Anyone, not just the government, who controls the network and the hardware can "modify and control content routed" through them, if they want to do that.
The post office can read your mail if it chooses; the phone company can listen in, if it chooses; your neighbors can peek in your windows, if they choose; the guy who delivers your pizza can sprinkle poison on it, if he chooses.
You think a receipt is an invasion of privacy? Why?
Your purcchase of cheezy poofs is a two-way transaction. It is not true that "it's no one's business but mine". It is also the business of the seller.
Do you oppose paper receipts? The paper receipt simply reflects data that is already stored digitally. If you used a credit card, the information is stored in multiple locations.
Changing the location of one instance of that information -- from paper to a chip inside the product - has no effect on anyone's privacy.
Yes, fraud usually is unethical and illegal. Thanks for noticing. You give me confidence that our society is safe in the hands of Slashdot readers.
Embed the receipt in a chip inside the product. Check that receipt on returns. Printed receipts become info only. Crooks might try to alter the data stored on that chip, but that could be curtailed if the chip was programmed to be written to only once and to wipe data if a second attempt took place.
I'm not ignoring your point. I don't agree with you.
The size of the Shuttle, or any other vehicle, has no relation to its reusability. Shuttle's reusability was knowingly compromised by the decision to go with the existing design. (Reusability also pushes the state of the art, even today.) No efffort is made to recover the tank, the solids take a bath in the ocean, and tiles need to be tended after every flight. None of that is a mistake, or had anything to do with size or payload capacity. Competing designs were considered, weighed against perceptions of budget and political realities, and one design was selected.
One of the competing designs was even bigger. The crewed orbiter was ferried aloft by a winged and crewed booster vehicle that was flown back to a runway. Both vehicles would have been prepped for reuse. The configuration would have looked something like a DC-9 sitting on top of a 747. Considerably larger than the existing Shuttle, yet arguably much more reusable.
Nor is the tank "destroyed", as you claim. The tank works just fine. The use of insulating foam is routine in liquid-fueled vehicles. The insulation is needed to keep the volatile fueled and oxidizer from warming up -- remember, we're talking about sustances that are gases in their natural state so must be kept chilled to a few hundred degrees below zero to be stable as liquids. Vehicles like the Shuttle sit on the pad for hours after fueling. Hence, the need for the foam.
Now, the foam is a problem. uniquely, for the Shuttle because it can fall back and hit the Orbiter. That can happen because the Orbiter is along the side of the tank, and that, in tirn, happened because a deliberate decision was made to build it that way. Otherwise, foam and ice have harmlessly been falling off launch vehicles for decades, harmlessly because the payload, rather sensibly, is on top of everything.
What obligation does Eric Schmidt have to talk with anyone in the media if he doesn't wnat to? None.
Can a search engine that index publicly accessible data violated someone's privacy? No. If information is available to the public, it isn't private. Maybe it ought not to be available, but once its is, sorry, you can't claim a search engine violated your privacy.
So, is Schmidt's claim that CNET used Google to violate his privacy lame? Yes, but so is anyone else who's smiling because they think Schmidt ust got a taste of his own medicine.
Google, like other corporations, is "public" only in the sense that it sells stock to the public. Corporations make use of established, legally required, avenues to communicate with their shareholders. Google may or may not be obligated to answer its shareholders, but it no obligation to talk to anyone in the media. Google's officers and employees have no more obligation to talk to reporters than they do to talk with you and me.
As for privacy: Google -- as a search engine -- isn't violating anyone's privacy. Google facilitates access to information that someone else has already made publicly available. Schmidt's charge that CNET violated his privacy may or may not be misdirected. but charges here Schmidt is only getting a does of his own medicine are also misdirected. If anyone has violated Schmidt's privacy, it is the people who made his private info accessible to the public, not the search engine that indexed it.
Of course. Governments are not individuals. That's why I said "No one...".
Very good point. Google woudln't return any search results if it didn't have publicly accessible data to index.
No one has any obligation to talk with any member of the press, period. Press freedom does not encompass compelling people to answer questions.
Linking an alleged breach of privacy to this is, obviously, ironic. But that's not the point.
Thanks. It'd be HF for me. VHF has never gotten me excited.
When my father was a kid, in the American midwest, he was into SWL'ing. He used a Hallicrafters that was about as big as two microwaves; a big, heavy, solid metal box. His antenna was a longwire that ran down the street on the top of telephone poles for three blocks -- about 1000 feet. His interest was MW, and he had QSL's from 10-watt MW stations in the middle-of-nowhere Australia and others in that ballpark. Kinda difficult to repeat now, I suspect.
So, all his stories spoiled me, I guess. That 1000 foot longwire would be nice.
I'm in an apartment and really don't want to hassle with jury-rigged antennas and going to QRP to cut back on annoying the neighbors. If I had room for a decent antenna, I'd have my license.
(I've looked at some of those so-called "invisible" and other antennas marketed at apartment and condo dwellers, but I'm pretty skeptical. There's never any discussion of their abilities on the receive side of an exchange. Just how good at reception can a few feet of wire hidden on a balcony really be?)
Not to pan amateur radio (I wish I had my license) but why the excitement about hearing a signal from a couple hundred miles away? If that guy in Key West had a chat with another amateur in, say, Pensacola, that would be routine.
Another post filled with deliberate bias and deliberate ignorance.
...
Rutan's little ship reached an arbitary altitude by building up a small head of steam and coasting the rest of the way. Aircraft capable of the same trick have been flying for decades.
Rutan's ship is a deadend because it doesn't include any of the avionics and other equipment needed for orbital flight. Most importantly, the re-entry technique it uses does not work from LEO. The craft would burn and disintegrate. LEO re-entry requires a heatshield. Re-entering at more than 17000 mph generates a lot more energy than falling backwards from 60 miles ar a few mach number. Spaceship One is not capable of LEO flight or re-entry, and Rutan has acknowledged that.
>> The first Mercury flights were suborbita
The Mercury was designed for LEO flight. The first missions were suborbital test flights. The basic point that you deliberately ignore is that SpaceShip One is incapable of orbital flight.
>>...the shuttle...going to be retired in failure.
The Shuttle has been flying successfully for almost 30 years. You seem to be defining success as perfection.
>>...You can trash Soyuz and Progress...
What trashing? They are very much smaller, very much less capable vehicles. All I did was spaek the truth: Soyuz and Progress alone cannot adequately support ISS, and in no way can they even pretend to be able to complete the station. You couldn't even staff the ISS at full crew complement because there is no way to attac enough empty Soyuz's to it to effect an escape. And, yes, the Soyuz has suffered safety downtime in its 40-year history. The last time only a few years ago after re-entry failures.
>>...NASA has squandered $100 billion on a half finished space station...
Wrong. You demonstrate your ignorance of how things work. NASA spends money on the Shuttle and ISS because the President and Congress command them to do that. I/m neither a fan of ISS or the Shuttle concept but at least I have smarts enough to know who determines NASA's missions.
>>...Only shuttle mission that had any coolness factor
Figures. A Slashdot loser measuring things by how "cool" he thinks they are. Go away, child.
>> ...observing someone who has been successful at challenging engineering projects recently...
...you might have noticed NASA failed to do that very thing...
I'm not questioning Rutan's engineering skills. I'm questioning the relevancy of what he's engineered. Spaceship One is a dead end. It was a purpose-built vehicle designed to meet the demands of a contest. it is no more a spaceship than the Bell X-1. You can't grow or extend that vehicle into something that can take crew and cargo to and from LEO. If someone makes $100k a pop taking rich people on joyrides, more power to them, but I can't say that it holds my interest.
>>...Other than the current NASA administrator how many people can you actually name in NASA's manned space program...
So what? Noteriety is not an indicator of skill and ability.Besides, Federal employees are prohibited from engaging in the kind of grandstanding and personal PR that Rutan seems to enjoy. Perhaps if they could, and they were as wealthy as Rutan, they might help fund some shows about themselves for PBS.
>>...The astronauts are all good enough people but they are a dime a dozen...
Again, so what? Do you think people on the street know who Rutan is? Or his pilots? Be serious, OK? And, last I knew, becoming an astronaut was a rite of passage through a rather strenuous multi-year program. Hardly a "dime a dozen".
What failure was that? ISS seems to be in orbit. And your dead wrong about the dependence on the Russians. The agreement to let the Russians and other partners build and launch modules was part of a political and diplomatic agenda that was out of NASA hands. ISS contrucctoin was delayed while NASA waited for the Russians to complete their modules, and the Russian space program has received significant financial support from the U.S. since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
>>...It could become a Russian only space station if the shuttle is grounded for another year or more, or if its end of lifed before there is a replacement.
The Russians lack the capability to carry enough cargo to and from the station to support it on their own with anything more than a 2-man caretaker crew, Even then, they have no real means of bringing trash off the station or even bring down anything but the smallest of experiements. Soyuz capsules have about as much room as a Porsche.
when you talk about a Shuttle replacement, you are embracing a misnomer. There will be no replacement for the Shuttle. NASA will build vehicles to support the VSE objectives. The contract for both the CEV and the cargo heavy-lift vehicle will require them to be able to fly to ISS, but that is their primary mission. The ISS plays no role in the VSE, and I'd guess Mike Griffin wouldn't shed many tears if it vanished tomorrow. Nor would I. It is purposeless.
Finally, I have to say that I can't understand your animosity toward NASA. Like many others, you want to damn them while seeing the praises of private sector people like Rutan. You're all forgetting that, excepting Rutan, no one in the private sector has gotten off the ground. And, as I said, Rutan's flights are a dead end. If NASA wants to contract out flights and services to businesses that have already demonstrated their capability, fine. But why should NASA pay billionaires billions of dollars just for promises delivered on PowerPoint slides? Space travel is too important to wait for cowboys, rich geeks and a Brit billionaire to do something real.
LEO has nothing to do with it. If two vehicles have the same payload capacity, they can put identical payloads into identical orbits. Ditto anything that requires escape velocity, like going to the Moon or Mars.