"Dude, dude, dude......guess where I am? Hehehe, dude, I am in a plane he he whoooooaaaa dude"
One of my air traffic controller co-workers told me a story about when the in-seat phones first appeared in coach. He and one of his buddies were on the way back from vacation and had enjoyed the in-flight refreshments a bit too much. On a whim he picked up the phone and called work. The conversation went something like:
"Hey dude! I'm on XXX123 inbound, and I think we're about 120 miles out, right?"
"Ok then, I was close. Can you do me a favour and give us a turn about 30 degrees to the right?"
"Cool! How about one to the left?"
"Excellent! Do you wanna do 360s for a while?"
At that point the passenger sitting in the row behind tapped him on the shoulder and said "I don't know who you are, but you're scaring the heck out of my wife. Can we go home now?"
If you are using IMAP to read your email then you're at the mercy of your server. Thunderbird should run at the same speed as any other IMAP client.
BTW, the best solution to the "database is confusing but mbox is slow and both get corrupted during a crash" problem is Maildir. In the Maildir system each email "folder" is a set of nested directories. New messages go to the "new" subdirectory and are transferred to the "cur" subdirectory the first time they are read by a client. The status of the message (draft, replied, trashed, etc.) is encoded in the filename. Best of all, no file locking is ever required and a crash can't corrupt more than one message.
Often times a motorcyclist must wait until a car appears behind them to activate the sensor.
Even if the bike was made of plastic and bubblegum you can always trigger the detector if you kill your ignition and then re-start the bike. The windings in the starter motor create a significant electromagnetic disturbance when cranking the engine.
Actually, we did have international inspectors for this last election. And they found no real problems.
It should be remembered, however, that several states have laws that prevent non-voters (including U.N. observers) from entering or in some cases even approaching the polling area. One state
found a way around it but Florida and Ohio, the two most contested states, were for the most part not observed.
Looking back from where you are today, Mr. Wheaton, what would you consider your greatest achievement that you take the most pride in? Your work as an actor? Your widely-acclaimed blog? Or maybe your published memoirs?
How about "surviving Hollyweird"?
Considering how many other young actors ruined their lives (Adam Rich, Todd Bridges) or lost them entirely (Jonathan Brandis, River Phoenix), it seems that it must take something special just to survive to adulthood in "the business". Do you attribute your moral grounding and sanity to good parenting, good genetics, good management, or just dumb luck?
Will you be expected to work certain hours or do you get to sit in front of your computer at home and work during commercials?
What will happen the first time you tell them you can't come to their meeting because you have already made an appointment to help another one of your customers?
Will they even let you have other customers, or will the contract lock you into a single customer arrangement?
Many companies dangle the word "contractor" simply to avoid paying basic benefits. Most "contractors" aren't aware how much those benefits are worth and sell themselves short.
I wonder about one political question with respect to lunar elevators. Are the Lagrange points really the only areas where one could build a space elevator on the moon?
The mechanics of a space elevator require that it pass through (and be balanced slightly beyond) a geosynchronous orbit point. In the case of Earth synchronous orbits, the rotational velocity is fairly high and the effects of lunar gravity are minimal. Since the moon doesn't rotate with respect to the Earth, every synchronous orbit is Lagrangian in nature. Without doing the supporting math, I would intuit that the synchronous altitude varies in such a way as to trace a path through the four nearest Lagrange points (L1->L5->L2->L4->L1). L1 and L2 are roughly the same distance from the moon, and would use the least amount of material. Other elevator locations would be possible, but require much more investment.
In any case, the cost of construction of a lunar elevator would be so high that any two entities interested in constructing one would prefer to cooperate rather than fight over territory.
The cable would be 58,000 km long. This is the distance from the Moon to the L1 point, which is the balance point of gravity between the Earth and Moon.
The cable would have to be much longer than that. As the cable is extended toward the surface of the moon, a counter-weight would have to be extended toward the earth so that the elevator's center of gravity would stay at L1 (or else the whole structure would fall to the moon's surface). Once the elevator reached the curface of the moon, the counter-weight would have to be extended yet further in order to offset the weight of the objects traversing the cable. The total length would have to be more than 120,000km.
The concept also doesn't mention coriolis force. The shortest cable would be one that anchors to the lunar surface direcly below L1, however objects travelling on the cable will impart a force onto the cable at 90 degrees to their direction of travel. The base would therefore be best located east or west of the ideal point depending on whether the net traffic on the cable is upward or downward.
The temperature at 110,000 feet would be substantially above -100C because the lapse rate reverses direction at the tropopause (-57C) and the air gets warmer with altitude up to the stratopause (approximately -3C at 150,000').
The X-43 would never get above the stratopause, so the temperature would be somewhere toward the warm end of a scale from -3C and -57C.
I guess when an article says 10 times the speed of sound it means the speed of sound at sea level right?
Mach "speed" is expressed as a ratio and is usually relative to the local environment. You can increase your Mach ratio either by climbing at a constant absolute speed or by accelerating at a constant altitude (although climbing at an increasing absolute speed works best:-P).
The problem with using altitude to improve your Mach ratio is that it decreases your indicated airspeed (the air felt by the wings). There comes a certain point with some high-performance aircraft where the indicated airspeed is just above stall and the Mach ratio is just below the aircraft's design limit. This is called the "coffin corner" because once you reach that speed/altitude it's virtually impossible to descend or slow down without losing control of (or destroying) the aircraft.
Rutan's Space Ship One solved this problem by intentionally stalling the aircraft in a stable high-drag attitude and staying in that configuration until safely back into the flight envelope.
They also have one feature that *I* for one occasionally use -- I.E. can render Slashdot correctly even when FireFox 1.0 does not. (I thought that problem was supposed to be fixed in 1.0?) This, for me, is the only serious problem with Firefox. I hate having to reload Slashdot pages over and over again until they render correctly.
The comments *do* come up, but sometimes the body renders in such a way that the comments are all off the right side of the window in the black border area. When that happens, the only things you can see are links and friend/foe icons.
There will always be a segment of the population that directly associates price and quality. I know a man who runs a collection of clothing stores. He charges higher prices in the more affluent neighborhoods not because he's bringing in better products (the stores carry the same inventory), but because his wealthier customers won't buy "cheap garbage". In any "normal" store you would expect a graph of sales volume vs price to look like an inverse-square curve but with snobbish customers it's definitely a bell curve.
Indeed, I do miss the days when computers did very little. They created an environment where anyone with a little skill and imagination could get a sense of real accomplishment at having done something "hackish" (in the good sense of the word).
My favorite hack involved the TRS-80 Model 1000 "laptop". It had CMOS RAM with a battery backup, and would partition the memory so that part was used for program storage and part for run-time use. Programs actually ran from where they were "saved", so the only memory used when running was the dynamic variable storage. In order to conserve memory, BASIC would treat variable assigments within the program as const until they were modified, at which time the value would be copied from the program text area into the variable storage area and updated. The hack was to recognize that if you used VARPTR to get the address of the string and POKE to update the string contents directly, BASIC would never know that the string was changed and would never move it into temporary memory. It was therefore possible to store a persistent high-score list by changing the contents of the program listing in memory -- self-modifying code!
Best Buy used to do commissioned sales, and they dropped that in a hurry.
Didn't they buy the Future Shop chain a year or two ago? I wish they would drop the commissions. It's particularly bad around Christmas when you can't find anyone to answer a simple question, but as soon as you pick up an item over $100 you're surrounded by people who want to pre-enter your sale at a kiosk. I usually walk straight over to the cash lineup, and more than once I've had salespeople hassle me all the way to the register because they think I'm going to reward their ignorance by leaving the line so they can claim a commission.
Now... If the "IBM Store" (also in MetroTown, Vancouver) would be a bit more popular, _that'd_ be cool.
Popular? They're all dead and gone. Vancouver/Richmond/Burnaby used to have at least three IBM retail stores but they all closed up a long time ago (I don't remember exactly when, but it was about two months after 802.11a was added to their product line). The Richmond location became a Tommy Hilfiger brand-name outlet and the Metrotown location is now a SportMart discounter. I think the Pacific Center location is now a cell-phone store.
Other than the Sony store (which still has a location in just about every enclosed mall in British Columbia), big-brand computer retailing doesn't seem to be working here. Gateway tried it for a while in 2000/2001. They had a store with the dairy-cow paint-job in Richmond for about a year. Now it's a restaurant.
The interesting thing about Gateway is that they were willing to sell laptops with Linux pre-installed. The sad part was that the cost was the same as if it was sold with Windows. They refused to sell a laptop without an O/S on the assumption that if you didn't pay for an O/S you were probably going to pirate Windows. I offered to bring in a Debian CD and they said no.
Remember, this is non-directional, so they have to go to a few different places, measure the direction and approx. strength of the signal, and then they will know about where it is.
The initial search is usually done by Air Traffic Controllers, mainly because passing aircraft listening on 121.5 will often be the first to detect a new ELT signal. We get other aircraft to tune up 121.5 and tell us when they start receiving the signal, when it seems to have peaked, when they lose the signal, and whether it ended gradually (the aircraft flew out of range) or abruptly (the transmitter stopped transmitting. We pass the results on to the rescue people. I don't know much about CAP, but in Canada the search aircraft have on-board ADF (automatic direction finding) receivers that can provide an accurate bearing to the signal and allow them to home in quite quickly if the transmitter is still on the air.
Most false alarms end up being traced to hangars or electronic repair shops, although there are also problems with over-sensitive impact switches on training aircraft that trigger an alarm every time the student flares too high and stalls it on from 4 feet up....
For those who don't know, everything our Prime Minister puts to the house to vote on, if its not passed by the majority, that is the end of our gov't. It's considered a vote of non-confidence, and we have another round of national elections.
That's incorrect on several fronts:
1) Every vote is not a confidence vote. Traditionally only major policy issues such as the annual budget and Throne Speech (legislative agenda) are subject to a confidence motion. It is possible for the Prime Minister to declare an issue as a confidence vote, but that's generally disliked as it then becomes a whip to force dissenting back-benchers to vote with the party or face unemployment (not to mention the risk that the dissenters could choose to torpedo their own government).
2) Neither the Prime Minister nor the house (by way of a non-confidence motion) can end a government. The power to disolve Parliament rests with the Sovereign as represented by the Governor General ("GG"). Procedurally, when a governing party decides it wants to step down (whether having reached the end of its term or having received a vote of non-confidence), the Prime Minister visits the GG to ask permission to end parliament and request that the GG issue a "Writ of Election".
3) Following a vote of non-confidence, the GG is not required to authorize an election. (In fact, we don't actually elect a governing party in Canada -- we elect representatives to the House, and the GG selects a party to run the country. The GG traditionally selects the party that elected the most members, and risks creating a "Constitutional Crisis" if a party holding a majority of seats is not selected.) Since the GG has the discretion to select which party will run the country, in the event a minority government falls the GG can ask the other parties to form a coalition government without any intervening election.
4) On a somewhat-less-related note, the GG also appoints "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" to counter the government. That is traditionally the party holding the second largest number of seats, but is ultimately at the GG's discretion.
These rules avoid problems inherent in a multi-party system. For one thing, if two parties are tied for first or second place there is no need to hold a run-off election for the roles of government and opposition -- the GG simply chooses.
Although the GG is supposed to remain non-partisan, the rise of the BQ (separtist) party in Quebec has lead to a supposition that, if they ever managed to win the 2nd place in an election, the GG would refuse to appoint them to the opposition role.
The cost of carrying 60,000 cds instead of just five is tremendous assuming you don't want to be constantly stocked out.
If ever there was a company with the power to get away with just-in-time CD manufacturing, Wal*Mart is it. For 10 years we've been hearing about how it would be soooo easy to set up a company that uses a computer with a large hard drive to burn music CDs on demand. The main reason it never caught on is because the labels don't want to do business that way and it's illegal to do it without their consent. Something tells me that Wal*Mart could gain their consent one way or another. That would give them the ability to "stock" all 60,000 CDs without adding any more floor space. Their marginal cost would be less than $1 per disk (including materials and depreciation) plus whatever fee they can convince the labels to accept.
Step 1: Be Wal*Mart
Step 2: Squeeze the labels
Step 3: burn disks on demand
Step 4: PROFIT!!! (For once the list is complete...)
Let me tell you of this new place where you can move Microsoft HQ to... oh wait:)
Back in 1999/2000 (when it looked like the DOJ might break up the company) the BBC reported that MS was planning to move to Canada and had been offered significant incentives by the British Columbia provincial government to relocate to Vancouver. Both the province and the company denied the whole thing, but there was a lot of suspicion that the story was fabricated in order to put pressure on the Bush White House to muzzle the DOJ.
Frankly, I'm not certain that Novell's help with patents will be as important to Free software as the simple problem that most open source developers simply aren't worth suing.
SCO showed that when you can't find a software author worth suing you can have the same (or better) effect by suing customers who benefit from that author's product.
Normally large software companies accumulate patents in order to offer cross-licensing deals when one of their products is challenged. For example, until Burst came along there weren't really any potential challenges to Microsoft patent violations because Microsoft could always find some opposing infringement in the challenger's products. In this case, Novell is recognizing that Joe Programmer seldom has a patent portfolio with which to defend himself against infringement charges, and appears to be offering up their own portfolio for the defence of Joe Programmer and the users of his software (as long as his product is Open Source).
The difference is that a company like Microsoft says "we don't like you and will sue you for patent infringement" whereas Novell is saying "if you sue us we'll sue you back". Big difference.
Space tourourism (sp) is not a feasible buisness for many years to come imo.
Business is feasible whenever you can sell a product/service for more than it costs to provide that product/service. After that threshold is crossed it's just a question of how much of a margin the customers will bear and how many sales are required to cover the start-up and inventory/overhead costs and provide a ROI to the capitalists. YOU may not be willing to drop $20,000 on a 1-hour hop but that doesn't mean there aren't thousands of other people wondering where to send their cheque. Just look at how fast the last Concorde flights sold out (at ~US$6000 one-way).
The only way Rutan can be guaranteed to lose money is to stop now before generating any revenue.
(1) The web site is often down on the weekends. I don't know what that's all about. They are still adding new data all the time, so maybe they shut down on the weekends to integrate new information into their indexes. Try it from Monday to Friday and everything is there for the (free) taking.
(2) The site is run by the Dept. of Natural Resources. They have a mandate to release *ALL* of their data for free. It's part of a campaign to make Canadian businesses more competitive by giving them all equal access to data that at one time was sold only to major corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my air traffic controller co-workers told me a story about when the in-seat phones first appeared in coach. He and one of his buddies were on the way back from vacation and had enjoyed the in-flight refreshments a bit too much. On a whim he picked up the phone and called work. The conversation went something like:
"Hey dude! I'm on XXX123 inbound, and I think we're about 120 miles out, right?"
"Ok then, I was close. Can you do me a favour and give us a turn about 30 degrees to the right?"
"Cool! How about one to the left?"
"Excellent! Do you wanna do 360s for a while?"
At that point the passenger sitting in the row behind tapped him on the shoulder and said "I don't know who you are, but you're scaring the heck out of my wife. Can we go home now?"
BTW, the best solution to the "database is confusing but mbox is slow and both get corrupted during a crash" problem is Maildir. In the Maildir system each email "folder" is a set of nested directories. New messages go to the "new" subdirectory and are transferred to the "cur" subdirectory the first time they are read by a client. The status of the message (draft, replied, trashed, etc.) is encoded in the filename. Best of all, no file locking is ever required and a crash can't corrupt more than one message.
Even if the bike was made of plastic and bubblegum you can always trigger the detector if you kill your ignition and then re-start the bike. The windings in the starter motor create a significant electromagnetic disturbance when cranking the engine.
It should be remembered, however, that several states have laws that prevent non-voters (including U.N. observers) from entering or in some cases even approaching the polling area. One state found a way around it but Florida and Ohio, the two most contested states, were for the most part not observed.
How about "surviving Hollyweird"?
Considering how many other young actors ruined their lives (Adam Rich, Todd Bridges) or lost them entirely (Jonathan Brandis, River Phoenix), it seems that it must take something special just to survive to adulthood in "the business". Do you attribute your moral grounding and sanity to good parenting, good genetics, good management, or just dumb luck?
What will happen the first time you tell them you can't come to their meeting because you have already made an appointment to help another one of your customers?
Will they even let you have other customers, or will the contract lock you into a single customer arrangement?
Many companies dangle the word "contractor" simply to avoid paying basic benefits. Most "contractors" aren't aware how much those benefits are worth and sell themselves short.
The mechanics of a space elevator require that it pass through (and be balanced slightly beyond) a geosynchronous orbit point. In the case of Earth synchronous orbits, the rotational velocity is fairly high and the effects of lunar gravity are minimal. Since the moon doesn't rotate with respect to the Earth, every synchronous orbit is Lagrangian in nature. Without doing the supporting math, I would intuit that the synchronous altitude varies in such a way as to trace a path through the four nearest Lagrange points (L1->L5->L2->L4->L1). L1 and L2 are roughly the same distance from the moon, and would use the least amount of material. Other elevator locations would be possible, but require much more investment.
In any case, the cost of construction of a lunar elevator would be so high that any two entities interested in constructing one would prefer to cooperate rather than fight over territory.
The cable would have to be much longer than that. As the cable is extended toward the surface of the moon, a counter-weight would have to be extended toward the earth so that the elevator's center of gravity would stay at L1 (or else the whole structure would fall to the moon's surface). Once the elevator reached the curface of the moon, the counter-weight would have to be extended yet further in order to offset the weight of the objects traversing the cable. The total length would have to be more than 120,000km.
The concept also doesn't mention coriolis force. The shortest cable would be one that anchors to the lunar surface direcly below L1, however objects travelling on the cable will impart a force onto the cable at 90 degrees to their direction of travel. The base would therefore be best located east or west of the ideal point depending on whether the net traffic on the cable is upward or downward.
The X-43 would never get above the stratopause, so the temperature would be somewhere toward the warm end of a scale from -3C and -57C.
Mach "speed" is expressed as a ratio and is usually relative to the local environment. You can increase your Mach ratio either by climbing at a constant absolute speed or by accelerating at a constant altitude (although climbing at an increasing absolute speed works best :-P).
The problem with using altitude to improve your Mach ratio is that it decreases your indicated airspeed (the air felt by the wings). There comes a certain point with some high-performance aircraft where the indicated airspeed is just above stall and the Mach ratio is just below the aircraft's design limit. This is called the "coffin corner" because once you reach that speed/altitude it's virtually impossible to descend or slow down without losing control of (or destroying) the aircraft.
Rutan's Space Ship One solved this problem by intentionally stalling the aircraft in a stable high-drag attitude and staying in that configuration until safely back into the flight envelope.
They also have one feature that *I* for one occasionally use -- I.E. can render Slashdot correctly even when FireFox 1.0 does not. (I thought that problem was supposed to be fixed in 1.0?) This, for me, is the only serious problem with Firefox. I hate having to reload Slashdot pages over and over again until they render correctly.
smoking.hohle.net
The comments *do* come up, but sometimes the body renders in such a way that the comments are all off the right side of the window in the black border area. When that happens, the only things you can see are links and friend/foe icons.
There will always be a segment of the population that directly associates price and quality. I know a man who runs a collection of clothing stores. He charges higher prices in the more affluent neighborhoods not because he's bringing in better products (the stores carry the same inventory), but because his wealthier customers won't buy "cheap garbage". In any "normal" store you would expect a graph of sales volume vs price to look like an inverse-square curve but with snobbish customers it's definitely a bell curve.
My favorite hack involved the TRS-80 Model 1000 "laptop". It had CMOS RAM with a battery backup, and would partition the memory so that part was used for program storage and part for run-time use. Programs actually ran from where they were "saved", so the only memory used when running was the dynamic variable storage. In order to conserve memory, BASIC would treat variable assigments within the program as const until they were modified, at which time the value would be copied from the program text area into the variable storage area and updated. The hack was to recognize that if you used VARPTR to get the address of the string and POKE to update the string contents directly, BASIC would never know that the string was changed and would never move it into temporary memory. It was therefore possible to store a persistent high-score list by changing the contents of the program listing in memory -- self-modifying code!
BTW, you didn't miss much with CP/M.
Didn't they buy the Future Shop chain a year or two ago? I wish they would drop the commissions. It's particularly bad around Christmas when you can't find anyone to answer a simple question, but as soon as you pick up an item over $100 you're surrounded by people who want to pre-enter your sale at a kiosk. I usually walk straight over to the cash lineup, and more than once I've had salespeople hassle me all the way to the register because they think I'm going to reward their ignorance by leaving the line so they can claim a commission.
Popular? They're all dead and gone. Vancouver/Richmond/Burnaby used to have at least three IBM retail stores but they all closed up a long time ago (I don't remember exactly when, but it was about two months after 802.11a was added to their product line). The Richmond location became a Tommy Hilfiger brand-name outlet and the Metrotown location is now a SportMart discounter. I think the Pacific Center location is now a cell-phone store.
Other than the Sony store (which still has a location in just about every enclosed mall in British Columbia), big-brand computer retailing doesn't seem to be working here. Gateway tried it for a while in 2000/2001. They had a store with the dairy-cow paint-job in Richmond for about a year. Now it's a restaurant.
The interesting thing about Gateway is that they were willing to sell laptops with Linux pre-installed. The sad part was that the cost was the same as if it was sold with Windows. They refused to sell a laptop without an O/S on the assumption that if you didn't pay for an O/S you were probably going to pirate Windows. I offered to bring in a Debian CD and they said no.
The initial search is usually done by Air Traffic Controllers, mainly because passing aircraft listening on 121.5 will often be the first to detect a new ELT signal. We get other aircraft to tune up 121.5 and tell us when they start receiving the signal, when it seems to have peaked, when they lose the signal, and whether it ended gradually (the aircraft flew out of range) or abruptly (the transmitter stopped transmitting. We pass the results on to the rescue people. I don't know much about CAP, but in Canada the search aircraft have on-board ADF (automatic direction finding) receivers that can provide an accurate bearing to the signal and allow them to home in quite quickly if the transmitter is still on the air.
Most false alarms end up being traced to hangars or electronic repair shops, although there are also problems with over-sensitive impact switches on training aircraft that trigger an alarm every time the student flares too high and stalls it on from 4 feet up....
That's incorrect on several fronts:
1) Every vote is not a confidence vote. Traditionally only major policy issues such as the annual budget and Throne Speech (legislative agenda) are subject to a confidence motion. It is possible for the Prime Minister to declare an issue as a confidence vote, but that's generally disliked as it then becomes a whip to force dissenting back-benchers to vote with the party or face unemployment (not to mention the risk that the dissenters could choose to torpedo their own government).
2) Neither the Prime Minister nor the house (by way of a non-confidence motion) can end a government. The power to disolve Parliament rests with the Sovereign as represented by the Governor General ("GG"). Procedurally, when a governing party decides it wants to step down (whether having reached the end of its term or having received a vote of non-confidence), the Prime Minister visits the GG to ask permission to end parliament and request that the GG issue a "Writ of Election".
3) Following a vote of non-confidence, the GG is not required to authorize an election. (In fact, we don't actually elect a governing party in Canada -- we elect representatives to the House, and the GG selects a party to run the country. The GG traditionally selects the party that elected the most members, and risks creating a "Constitutional Crisis" if a party holding a majority of seats is not selected.) Since the GG has the discretion to select which party will run the country, in the event a minority government falls the GG can ask the other parties to form a coalition government without any intervening election.
4) On a somewhat-less-related note, the GG also appoints "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition" to counter the government. That is traditionally the party holding the second largest number of seats, but is ultimately at the GG's discretion.
These rules avoid problems inherent in a multi-party system. For one thing, if two parties are tied for first or second place there is no need to hold a run-off election for the roles of government and opposition -- the GG simply chooses.
Although the GG is supposed to remain non-partisan, the rise of the BQ (separtist) party in Quebec has lead to a supposition that, if they ever managed to win the 2nd place in an election, the GG would refuse to appoint them to the opposition role.
If ever there was a company with the power to get away with just-in-time CD manufacturing, Wal*Mart is it. For 10 years we've been hearing about how it would be soooo easy to set up a company that uses a computer with a large hard drive to burn music CDs on demand. The main reason it never caught on is because the labels don't want to do business that way and it's illegal to do it without their consent. Something tells me that Wal*Mart could gain their consent one way or another. That would give them the ability to "stock" all 60,000 CDs without adding any more floor space. Their marginal cost would be less than $1 per disk (including materials and depreciation) plus whatever fee they can convince the labels to accept.
Step 1: Be Wal*Mart
Step 2: Squeeze the labels
Step 3: burn disks on demand
Step 4: PROFIT!!! (For once the list is complete...)
Back in 1999/2000 (when it looked like the DOJ might break up the company) the BBC reported that MS was planning to move to Canada and had been offered significant incentives by the British Columbia provincial government to relocate to Vancouver. Both the province and the company denied the whole thing, but there was a lot of suspicion that the story was fabricated in order to put pressure on the Bush White House to muzzle the DOJ.
SCO showed that when you can't find a software author worth suing you can have the same (or better) effect by suing customers who benefit from that author's product.
Normally large software companies accumulate patents in order to offer cross-licensing deals when one of their products is challenged. For example, until Burst came along there weren't really any potential challenges to Microsoft patent violations because Microsoft could always find some opposing infringement in the challenger's products. In this case, Novell is recognizing that Joe Programmer seldom has a patent portfolio with which to defend himself against infringement charges, and appears to be offering up their own portfolio for the defence of Joe Programmer and the users of his software (as long as his product is Open Source).
The difference is that a company like Microsoft says "we don't like you and will sue you for patent infringement" whereas Novell is saying "if you sue us we'll sue you back". Big difference.
Business is feasible whenever you can sell a product/service for more than it costs to provide that product/service. After that threshold is crossed it's just a question of how much of a margin the customers will bear and how many sales are required to cover the start-up and inventory/overhead costs and provide a ROI to the capitalists. YOU may not be willing to drop $20,000 on a 1-hour hop but that doesn't mean there aren't thousands of other people wondering where to send their cheque. Just look at how fast the last Concorde flights sold out (at ~US$6000 one-way).
The only way Rutan can be guaranteed to lose money is to stop now before generating any revenue.
(1) The web site is often down on the weekends. I don't know what that's all about. They are still adding new data all the time, so maybe they shut down on the weekends to integrate new information into their indexes. Try it from Monday to Friday and everything is there for the (free) taking.
(2) The site is run by the Dept. of Natural Resources. They have a mandate to release *ALL* of their data for free. It's part of a campaign to make Canadian businesses more competitive by giving them all equal access to data that at one time was sold only to major corporations.