The problem is that NASA doesn't have the same backing as it did back in the 60's. We went to the moon because it was a priority, and a lot of money and effort was thrown at it. Now NASA is constantly struggling to make as much as they can out of a diminishing budget. I believe that this, more than anything else caused the accident.
If you are an administrator at NASA and you are told that their might be a problem with the age of the fleet and you know the odds of getting funding for a new project are near zero, do you keep that fleet flying? Of course. That's hardly the safest thing to do, but it's either that or close up shop and go work the chinese space program.
NASA puts safety as first as it can afford to. You can argue that NASA is an inefficent bureaucracy, but we seem to have no trouble financing the inefficent military bureaucracy. It's the nature of government, cope.
My office uses VM Ware right now as a testing environment so we can try multiple versions of windows with our software. Still, there's obvious demand for a product that runs Linux and windows side by side, so it is clear here that Linux support is being removed because it's Microsoft.
Expect MS to bundle this into their dev studio to try to lock out VMWare and further reduce the ways to run Linux.
In reality, the rules that we have set out are not always obeyed, and the rules accomodate for this concept. Speeding is illegal, but most people do it, and only the egregious violators get ticketed. When you change how a rule is encforced, you fundamentally change the nature of the rule.
The only motivation to track students is to enforce rules governing their movement through the school. I'm sure it's not just for the purposes of statistical study. These rules of movement are now enforced in spirit, but ultimately they cannot be enforced strictly to the letter because too much can go untracked. Now, that is no longer true.
I've heard more than one story of a student who was a good student arranging some special priveleges with teachers under the table. Taking an occasional morning off to go have breakfast with friends. Skipping a class to go wait in line for good concert tickets. These did not hurt the student's academic performance, and rewarded their maturity with a degree of freedom. With the ability to track their every movement, these students would be punished instead.
This sort of system encourages students to follow rules strictly, and that is not healthy for society. People need to be able to occasionally bend or break rules, otherwise society stagnates.
Joe consumer doesn't care about how CCS is handled as long as the sites look right. Since 90+% of the market is using IE as their browser, all sites are designed to look best in IE. Therefore it's not much of a selling point. Sure, techies think it's good, but techies already use it:)
This is not what patents are for. Patents, much like copyrights were created to provide a cost justification for innovating. If I'm going to spend a million dollars to research a new drug therapy, and somebody else can duplicate my work for free, why would I spend the million dollars?
Now the theory I'm espousing here is not a matter of written law, but I think it was presumed in the original concept of patents that it took a certain amount of effort and resource to invent something that could be patented. If it takes near zero effort, then you lose nothing when everybody else duplicates your work.
Patents were created as a way to encourage innovation and that is precisely the opposite of what it is accomplishing in situations like this. Do you think, for one moment, that the pop under ad would never have been invented if it wasn't for patent protection?
Personally I'd be content to never see another pop-up or pop-under ad ever again, but this is just an abuse of the system.
As far as controlling the license, they obviously wrote the GPL, and they also encourage people to assign copyrights for GPL software to them. This allows them to have standing in court to fight a legal battle over the code and it insures that your code will strictly be released under the GPL.
As far as the article goes I think this is the standard tendancy by for-profit news providers to post news that's dramatic. I do seriously object to the tone of the article that seems to suggest companies like Cisco are the victim here. They paid NOTHING for this software, and the only limitation is that they share alike. If they didn't want to conform to those rules they should have paid somebody for some other embedded OS.
I've long been a supporter of emusic, but it's got a major flaw in that it's only got smaller artists and then only their back catalogs for the most part. There's little reason for somebody to do anything other than go there the first month of their subscription, grab all the old stuff, and then cancel.
I've said this repeatedly, but I would pay more per month for a service like this, if I could get the latest releases and I could have a larger selection. The thing that was nice was that they did have Metropolis, one of my favorite labels, but didn't have some of their best artists (VNV Nation) or latest releases of what they do have.
So, this seemed as good an excuse as any and I've canceled my subscription. Haven't really used it in a few months anyhow.
The problem with all of this information collection isn't the immediate positive use of it, but rather the long term potential for abuse once the information is out there. What happens if you piss off a bartender at one of these bars because you were hitting on his girlfriend or tipped him badly? He could put a black mark in the system and you'd not be able to get into a number of bars.
Also, what if somebody just has one bad night where things got a little out of hand and they get a black mark in the system? Like most bars, regardless of who starts a fight will kick out everybody involved. So what if you just get caught up in something accidentally?
The problem with these systems isn't that they'll help a bar to stop the most egregious offenders, but rather the possibility that the system will, either through mistake or intention, ban the innocent for no good reason.
If SCO can take out SGI in court, that would establish a precedent which may then be applicable in the IBM case. That would be very bad for IBM's battle. Regardless, IBM doesn't need a court to wipe out SGI.
Also, it occurrs to me, that having SGI go away in one quick shot would be bad for IBM in the long term. As soon as SGI dies, all other Unix flavors would see a sharp influx of ex-SGI customers. It would be much better, stock wise, if they can show growth over the long term as they slowly devour SGI, rather than getting it all in a one time spike. That way it looks more like a trend than a freak occurrence.
Most of the technology that makes the Segway work is patented. So sure you can likely build yourself one without pissing anybody off, but don't plan to start a business making them for another decade or two.
Where this goes is that with the large volume of bands out there that can be so readily distributed, the value of critics and editors will increase. You find somebody who seems to agree with your tastes and follow their recommendations. Right now, the opinions of certain power brokers determines the fate of bands.
The adventurous listeners can go out there and try all kinds of new things and then bring back what they like to the masses. Word of mouth will become a far more powerful engine for generating popularit than RIAA marketing. This is already true for many who've grown sick of pop radio.
To speak from personal experience, I don't listen to the radio (except for NPR). But I listen to lots of music that never gets played on the radio. I've got a friend who's in a really good local band, and I've got some friends who are really into music that always point me towards new things. So I get their recommendations, and I find that I like a large portion of what they recommend. Finally I experiment a little, usually finding crap, but occasionally discovering something new that I like.
I'm currently charged a tax per phone line, not per minute, and I would apply the same theory to this. The government decides they need X dollars to provide for universal service or what have you. They count the number of internet connections, divide, and blammo, your budget is covered.
This is a total troll, but I feel like a legit response for it. The thing is, open source isn't the best at making new things, agreed. However, it is wonderful for commoditizing of something. Operating systems, word processors, etc, are all things that have been around for decades and aren't evolving at a fast pace. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for these things to be open source.
There will always be room at the bleeding edge for proprietary solutions.
Offtopic? Hardly. Having general pupose motherboards in this form factor makes them ideal for dropping into a laptop size case. It was exactly what I thought of when I saw this article.
It would be awesome to have a laptop that's as cheaply and readily upgradeable as a desktop PC. It would be awesome if I could drop in a new video card or processor into my laptop.
As long as that provider of the line can forward their costs onto the service provider, then it works. Right now I pay for a phone line, and I get taxed on that. I also get taxed on my DSL service. So I'm already being double taxed. So seems that the tax man is not suffering on my behalf.
I'm okay with the RIAA teaching kids the reality of the music business, not their limited vision of it. In addition to teaching them how the major labels will screw them, we could teach them other important lessons like:
1) How distrubting your music for free can lead to people buying CD's, swag and concert tickets.
2) How most artists will fail to make any money under the old system and thus stand to lose very little to the file swappers.
See what really frustrates the hell out of me is that I want artists to succeed. I don't want them to be slaves to the RIAA, and I don't want them getting screwed over by pirates. The problem is that in the RIAA's efforts to protect their profits (they don't give a hoot about artists), they are making it much harder for me to listen to music the way most people want to.
But anyhow, a couple comments:
Read the news: the labels are scrambling to offer legitimate alternatives.
And all of the alternatives I've seen so far, put substantial limitations on what I can do with the music compared to now. Itunes is probably the most lenient, but when I downloaded an album, I was less than pleased to realize that I couldn't play it on my linux desktop. I paid the same price as I'd pay for a physical CD and got an inferior product.
As for their legal tactics, I don't see why age or sex should matter when pursuing someone who has violated copyright law - breaking the law is breaking the law.
The age is important because in our legal system, minors are not considered to be wholly responsible for their actions. Leighway is granted because children don't entirely understand consequences, etc.
They have never tried to pass a law allowing them to attack computers. Do not confuse them with misguided legistlators.
This is a technicality. The RIAA isn't in the legislature, therefore, they cannot pass laws. I guarantee you that the RIAA was happy with that law, and that the people who sponsored it were getting money from various media companies.
They are under no obligation, that is correct, and they will learn, though their tactics that, by not giving people what they want, they will lose money.
Making it difficult to rip mp3's may actually violate two legal principles. The first is that my right to make backup copies of the disc are protected under fair use. They are preventing that capability.
The second is that a tax is added to blank digital media that is to offset the potential piracy. If they can prevet the piracy byu making unduplicatable disks, why should they still get that money.
Personally, I only buy CD's I can turn into MP3. If a band I like makes the mistake of doing otherwise, then they are the ones who suffer for it, not me. I'll just find somebody else who's willing to offer me what I want.
Or an even better way to work around it is to not buy the CD, and just download a copy somebody else went through the hassle to rip.
Not that I'm condoning this behavior, but that's exactly what the record industry is encouraging. I don't listen to CD's, I listen to MP3's, and if I can't rip them from the CD, then I have to ask myself why I bothered to buy it. It would probably be better for the musician if I didn't buy the CD, downloaded the MP3's and then bought a bunch of swag from them.
I doubt their worth is even a fraction of what people pay Actually they are exactly worth what people pay. What other measure of an item's monetary value is there than what somebody will pay for it?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that NASA doesn't have the same backing as it did back in the 60's. We went to the moon because it was a priority, and a lot of money and effort was thrown at it. Now NASA is constantly struggling to make as much as they can out of a diminishing budget. I believe that this, more than anything else caused the accident.
If you are an administrator at NASA and you are told that their might be a problem with the age of the fleet and you know the odds of getting funding for a new project are near zero, do you keep that fleet flying? Of course. That's hardly the safest thing to do, but it's either that or close up shop and go work the chinese space program.
NASA puts safety as first as it can afford to. You can argue that NASA is an inefficent bureaucracy, but we seem to have no trouble financing the inefficent military bureaucracy. It's the nature of government, cope.
My office uses VM Ware right now as a testing environment so we can try multiple versions of windows with our software. Still, there's obvious demand for a product that runs Linux and windows side by side, so it is clear here that Linux support is being removed because it's Microsoft.
Expect MS to bundle this into their dev studio to try to lock out VMWare and further reduce the ways to run Linux.
In reality, the rules that we have set out are not always obeyed, and the rules accomodate for this concept. Speeding is illegal, but most people do it, and only the egregious violators get ticketed. When you change how a rule is encforced, you fundamentally change the nature of the rule.
The only motivation to track students is to enforce rules governing their movement through the school. I'm sure it's not just for the purposes of statistical study. These rules of movement are now enforced in spirit, but ultimately they cannot be enforced strictly to the letter because too much can go untracked. Now, that is no longer true.
I've heard more than one story of a student who was a good student arranging some special priveleges with teachers under the table. Taking an occasional morning off to go have breakfast with friends. Skipping a class to go wait in line for good concert tickets. These did not hurt the student's academic performance, and rewarded their maturity with a degree of freedom. With the ability to track their every movement, these students would be punished instead.
This sort of system encourages students to follow rules strictly, and that is not healthy for society. People need to be able to occasionally bend or break rules, otherwise society stagnates.
Joe consumer doesn't care about how CCS is handled as long as the sites look right. Since 90+% of the market is using IE as their browser, all sites are designed to look best in IE. Therefore it's not much of a selling point. Sure, techies think it's good, but techies already use it :)
-Blocks popups
-Built in spam filtering with the mail client
I don't know about you, but whenever I do happen to use IE to surf, I am quickly reminded why I use mozilla the reset of the time.
I guess the question that needs to be answered in my mind is this:
If it weren't for patents would the zipper have never been invented?
I tend to think that it would have been invented, or something similar to it, given the need for such a device, regardless of its patentability.
This is not what patents are for. Patents, much like copyrights were created to provide a cost justification for innovating. If I'm going to spend a million dollars to research a new drug therapy, and somebody else can duplicate my work for free, why would I spend the million dollars?
Now the theory I'm espousing here is not a matter of written law, but I think it was presumed in the original concept of patents that it took a certain amount of effort and resource to invent something that could be patented. If it takes near zero effort, then you lose nothing when everybody else duplicates your work.
Patents were created as a way to encourage innovation and that is precisely the opposite of what it is accomplishing in situations like this. Do you think, for one moment, that the pop under ad would never have been invented if it wasn't for patent protection?
Personally I'd be content to never see another pop-up or pop-under ad ever again, but this is just an abuse of the system.
As far as controlling the license, they obviously wrote the GPL, and they also encourage people to assign copyrights for GPL software to them. This allows them to have standing in court to fight a legal battle over the code and it insures that your code will strictly be released under the GPL.
As far as the article goes I think this is the standard tendancy by for-profit news providers to post news that's dramatic. I do seriously object to the tone of the article that seems to suggest companies like Cisco are the victim here. They paid NOTHING for this software, and the only limitation is that they share alike. If they didn't want to conform to those rules they should have paid somebody for some other embedded OS.
I've long been a supporter of emusic, but it's got a major flaw in that it's only got smaller artists and then only their back catalogs for the most part. There's little reason for somebody to do anything other than go there the first month of their subscription, grab all the old stuff, and then cancel.
I've said this repeatedly, but I would pay more per month for a service like this, if I could get the latest releases and I could have a larger selection. The thing that was nice was that they did have Metropolis, one of my favorite labels, but didn't have some of their best artists (VNV Nation) or latest releases of what they do have.
So, this seemed as good an excuse as any and I've canceled my subscription. Haven't really used it in a few months anyhow.
Monopolies stifle innovation.
:)
The sky is blue.
Tell me something I didn't know
The problem with all of this information collection isn't the immediate positive use of it, but rather the long term potential for abuse once the information is out there. What happens if you piss off a bartender at one of these bars because you were hitting on his girlfriend or tipped him badly? He could put a black mark in the system and you'd not be able to get into a number of bars.
Also, what if somebody just has one bad night where things got a little out of hand and they get a black mark in the system? Like most bars, regardless of who starts a fight will kick out everybody involved. So what if you just get caught up in something accidentally?
The problem with these systems isn't that they'll help a bar to stop the most egregious offenders, but rather the possibility that the system will, either through mistake or intention, ban the innocent for no good reason.
If SCO can take out SGI in court, that would establish a precedent which may then be applicable in the IBM case. That would be very bad for IBM's battle. Regardless, IBM doesn't need a court to wipe out SGI.
Also, it occurrs to me, that having SGI go away in one quick shot would be bad for IBM in the long term. As soon as SGI dies, all other Unix flavors would see a sharp influx of ex-SGI customers. It would be much better, stock wise, if they can show growth over the long term as they slowly devour SGI, rather than getting it all in a one time spike. That way it looks more like a trend than a freak occurrence.
Most of the technology that makes the Segway work is patented. So sure you can likely build yourself one without pissing anybody off, but don't plan to start a business making them for another decade or two.
Where this goes is that with the large volume of bands out there that can be so readily distributed, the value of critics and editors will increase. You find somebody who seems to agree with your tastes and follow their recommendations. Right now, the opinions of certain power brokers determines the fate of bands.
The adventurous listeners can go out there and try all kinds of new things and then bring back what they like to the masses. Word of mouth will become a far more powerful engine for generating popularit than RIAA marketing. This is already true for many who've grown sick of pop radio.
To speak from personal experience, I don't listen to the radio (except for NPR). But I listen to lots of music that never gets played on the radio. I've got a friend who's in a really good local band, and I've got some friends who are really into music that always point me towards new things. So I get their recommendations, and I find that I like a large portion of what they recommend. Finally I experiment a little, usually finding crap, but occasionally discovering something new that I like.
That's the future of music. The RIAA is screwed.
This should be legal for two reasons:
1) none of the copyright holders for any of the material used in this film or that this film is based on are losing ANYTHING because of it
2) they aren't making money. In fact, they are losing money on it.
I'm currently charged a tax per phone line, not per minute, and I would apply the same theory to this. The government decides they need X dollars to provide for universal service or what have you. They count the number of internet connections, divide, and blammo, your budget is covered.
It's not that hard really.
This is a total troll, but I feel like a legit response for it. The thing is, open source isn't the best at making new things, agreed. However, it is wonderful for commoditizing of something. Operating systems, word processors, etc, are all things that have been around for decades and aren't evolving at a fast pace. Therefore, it makes perfect sense for these things to be open source.
There will always be room at the bleeding edge for proprietary solutions.
Offtopic? Hardly. Having general pupose motherboards in this form factor makes them ideal for dropping into a laptop size case. It was exactly what I thought of when I saw this article.
It would be awesome to have a laptop that's as cheaply and readily upgradeable as a desktop PC. It would be awesome if I could drop in a new video card or processor into my laptop.
As long as that provider of the line can forward their costs onto the service provider, then it works. Right now I pay for a phone line, and I get taxed on that. I also get taxed on my DSL service. So I'm already being double taxed. So seems that the tax man is not suffering on my behalf.
I'm okay with the RIAA teaching kids the reality of the music business, not their limited vision of it. In addition to teaching them how the major labels will screw them, we could teach them other important lessons like:
1) How distrubting your music for free can lead to people buying CD's, swag and concert tickets.
2) How most artists will fail to make any money under the old system and thus stand to lose very little to the file swappers.
See what really frustrates the hell out of me is that I want artists to succeed. I don't want them to be slaves to the RIAA, and I don't want them getting screwed over by pirates. The problem is that in the RIAA's efforts to protect their profits (they don't give a hoot about artists), they are making it much harder for me to listen to music the way most people want to.
But anyhow, a couple comments:
Read the news: the labels are scrambling to offer legitimate alternatives.
And all of the alternatives I've seen so far, put substantial limitations on what I can do with the music compared to now. Itunes is probably the most lenient, but when I downloaded an album, I was less than pleased to realize that I couldn't play it on my linux desktop. I paid the same price as I'd pay for a physical CD and got an inferior product.
As for their legal tactics, I don't see why age or sex should matter when pursuing someone who has violated copyright law - breaking the law is breaking the law.
The age is important because in our legal system, minors are not considered to be wholly responsible for their actions. Leighway is granted because children don't entirely understand consequences, etc.
They have never tried to pass a law allowing them to attack computers. Do not confuse them with misguided legistlators.
This is a technicality. The RIAA isn't in the legislature, therefore, they cannot pass laws. I guarantee you that the RIAA was happy with that law, and that the people who sponsored it were getting money from various media companies.
Music is a necessity. RIAA music is not.
They are under no obligation, that is correct, and they will learn, though their tactics that, by not giving people what they want, they will lose money.
Making it difficult to rip mp3's may actually violate two legal principles. The first is that my right to make backup copies of the disc are protected under fair use. They are preventing that capability.
The second is that a tax is added to blank digital media that is to offset the potential piracy. If they can prevet the piracy byu making unduplicatable disks, why should they still get that money.
Personally, I only buy CD's I can turn into MP3. If a band I like makes the mistake of doing otherwise, then they are the ones who suffer for it, not me. I'll just find somebody else who's willing to offer me what I want.
Or an even better way to work around it is to not buy the CD, and just download a copy somebody else went through the hassle to rip.
Not that I'm condoning this behavior, but that's exactly what the record industry is encouraging. I don't listen to CD's, I listen to MP3's, and if I can't rip them from the CD, then I have to ask myself why I bothered to buy it. It would probably be better for the musician if I didn't buy the CD, downloaded the MP3's and then bought a bunch of swag from them.
I doubt their worth is even a fraction of what people pay
Actually they are exactly worth what people pay. What other measure of an item's monetary value is there than what somebody will pay for it?
So what's the copyright date for this? It was started in 1946, but finished in 2003. So, is the copyright date based on then or now?