What if Jupiter had a moon bigger than Earth? That's not unimaginable; would Earth then not be a "planet"? In fact, would then nothing be a "planet" except Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune?
Just to nitpick and sidestep your point entirely, tthe word "planet" is derived from the Greek word for "wanderer", referring to those stars that appeared to wander between the other stars that stayed fixed. I suppose that under its original definition, Earth was never a planet to begin with because it wasn't understood as one of these wanderers among the stars.
If the only reason to build a defence system is to prevent extinction of the human race by an asteroid, I think it's pointless to bother. The same goes for using the "possibility of asteroid extinction" as an excuse to get off Earth and build a permanent Moon or Mars base.
Yes, asteroids do strike the Earth. Yes, sometimes they create big disasters, tsunamis, huge fires and whatnot. Extinction? Very occasionally, unless you're a cockroach. All of this paranoia about mass extinction is justified in timeframes of millions of years, but certainly not tens of years. All of this paranoia has been brought on by a recent barrage of movies and misconstrued media reports.
The fact is that humans have survived in their current state for tens to hundreds of thousands of years already. We might be wiped out by a nuclear war or some other man-made tragedy resulting from the exponential changes very recently, but the chances that we'll be wiped out by an asteroid in the forseable future are minescule. Cities and countries might get wiped off the map more frequently, but not to the point of extinction of the race... and having a Moon base if that happens won't result in much more of a gain if extinction is what you're concerned about.
Realistically if we don't kill ourselves in some other way, it's very likely that the species still be around 500 or 1000 years from now. At that point, it will likely be much more feasible for people to develop a reasonable asteroid defence system at much less expense and using an existing infrastructure, if it's needed. But throwing away billions or hundreds of billions of dollars on it today because of unjustified paranoia is just silly.
Should we study asteroids and search for them to understand them better? Sure. Should we build a planetary defence system? Perhaps, but not without more information to actually justify the expense. If the human race happens to get wiped out in the next 20 years of research after surviving for the length of time that we have, it's just incredibly bad luck.
I think it's meant around the other way. They're saying that our format is so expressive that it can be used to represent data from any other inferior format. Then they're also saying that because every other format is inferior to our one, converting from ours to something else might cause you to lose some detail that the particular inferior format can't represent.
Here's some more prior art -- "space billboards"
on
Pop Up Ads in Space
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· Score: 1
The article doesn't give much information about the specific technique which is probably what matters in the case of patents, although it does at least say the following:
He said the satellites would be visible in the night sky by employing sunlight reflectors, with multiple satellites linked together to create a message large enough to be seen.
There are some clear similarities, at least, in the form of ideas and business intentions, from over a decade ago. If nowhere else, it's documented in a couple of International Dark Sky Association Information Sheets that are campaigning against a former company's ideas to put giant billboards into orbit in association with, among other things, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. See Space Billboards Threaten Night Sky and Grass Root Opposition to Space Billboards.
Neither article is dated on the site, although references in the text of them dates back to some time around 1993. The IDA would likely have records of the original publication date and the events in question.
As a side note, the idea of putting advertising in Earth orbit like this tends to sicken me. I really hope that nobody goes for it.
I think a lot of this has to do with the continuious copyright extensions. If copyright were left alone and implemented as it was originally, it wouldn't seem like such an oppressive system.
I agree, especially since copyright (at least in the US) was originally implemented with a renewal process. During the final year of a copyright term, the holder would be able to renew the copyright for another X years.
Surely it would have made much more sense for legislators to have tinkered with the copyright renewal process instead of repeatedly increasing the length of copyrights accross-the-board.
Unfortunately the renewal process is now an automatic system, and copyrights get renewed whether the holder cares about it or not. The result is that a lot of work that the copyright holders don't care or have forgotten about is now simply dying, because projects such as Project Gutenberg aren't allowed to save it.
A neverending renewal system doesn't solve all the problems (depending on your point of view), but at least with a renewal process, Disney would be able to keep its precious Mickey Mouse for a bit longer without producing the momentous amounts of collateral damage that neverending copyright does.
Of course, we may see now a lot of crappy fantasy movies just riding the wave...
Hopefully not all of them, though. I'm looking forward to seeing how the CS Lewis films turn out.
For anyone who doesn't know, they're already in pre-production, starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They're being produced in New Zealand again, although this time the production is centred in Auckland rather than Wellington.
Sure others received similar spam awhile back titled "You're Fired". While I realize SMS is different, and more secure...I still wonder about the security...
What's to stop some spoofer/hacker/etc from sending out bogus, legit looking "You're Fired!" SMS - say from a stolen/borrowed/hacked cellphone or computer, etc of the company.
Whatever the security is like, I certainly hope the company involved did not consider this "official notification". SMS messages are relatively unreliable, and under normal circumstances there's no way to verify that they were received or read.
If they'd wanted to press the matter, the union workers could probably get away with refusing to admit that they'd received any notification, and the company would have had a difficult time proving otherwise -- at least on an individual basis.
Every time the Mouse's copyright (Steam Boat Willy for goodness sakes!) almost comes up for expiry, another copyright extention gets past. Disney knows it's in hot water, especially lately because it hasn't had a mega-hit since the Lion King.
What confuses me is the seeming inability for administrations to resort to more rational compromises instead of steamrolling everything.
In the Disney/copyright case, it would have made much more sense to tinker with the copyright renewal process than to extend all copyrights accross the board, including the ones that nobody cares about anymore. There used to be a perfectly good copyright renewal process, described here, that was amended to provide "automatic renewal", probably to cut down on administration costs as much as everything else.
For whatever reason everyone's now decided to focus on simply extending the copyright term for everything instead of requiring those who actually still want to enforce their copyright to actively say so. This means that lots of derelict and abandoned work is simply disappearing because projects such as Project Gutenberg aren't allowed to save them.
Plain text has the big advantage of being easily fixable and editable with a simple editor.
I only wish that apt would take advantage of the plain-text databases by enabling the use of diffs to update the package database instead of requiring complete file downloads to sync up.
Having to download 6 MB of testing and unstable package databases every time I might want to upgrade a package that could be as small as 10 kb by itself is quite frustrating over my dialup. Even for people with faster connections, it surely increases the required bandwidth unnecessarily on the debian servers, too.
If diffs were simply provided for the previous week, it would allow most people to update with minimal effort in a cron job or an ip-up script.
Perhaps an expert on copyright law could confirm things better, but I was under the impression that under the original system (at least in the USA), there actually was a copyright renewal system, by which authors were allowed to renew their copyright exactly once during the year that it would otherwise have run out. More specifically, the Copyright Basics text (that was digitised by PG some time ago states the following:
Works Originally Created and Published or Registered before January 1, 1978
Under the law in effect before 1978, copyright was secured either on the date a work was published with a copyright notice or on the date of registration if the work was registered in unpublished form. In either case, the copyright endured for a first term of 28 years from the date it was secured. During the last (28th) year of the first term, the copyright was eligible for renewal. The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the renewal term from 28 to 47 years for copyrights that were subsisting on January 1, 1978, or for pre-1978 copyrights restored under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), making these works eligible for a total term of protection of 75 years. [..]
It goes on to say:
Public Law 102-307 [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-
bin/bdquery/z?d102:SN00756:|TOM:/bss/d102query.htm l|] enacted on June 26, 1992, amended the 1976 Copyright Act to provide for automatic renewal of the term of copyrights secured between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977. Although the renewal term is automatically provided, the Copyright Office does not issue a renewal certificate for these works unless a renewal application and fee are received and registered in the Copyright Office.
Without really knowing the details behind copyright, I don't see why the renewal was made automatic. You'd think that any entity with enough money to campaign for that type of change would be able to organise itself enough to simply renew its copyrights in the correct year, so it might be that there was some other reasoning besides big money interests... or perhaps the politicians simply thought it was silly that people had to actively renew or that it created too many administrational overheads for the copyright office.
At least from my perspective it doesn't seem to have added much value, though.
I believe the recent Bono Copyright Extension Act ensured those cartoon characters won't go out of copyright for a long, long time. 2019 at the earliest.
Every time I think about this, it occurs to me that it would have made much more sense to have simply allowed owners and authors to request another copyright renewal rather than extend copyright accross the board.
Personally I couldn't care much less about wanting to use Mickey Mouse in the public domain -- Disney can keep it. But because of the ruthlessness of the whole thing, it means that countless amounts of less-well-known media from the past, that nobody is still enforcing ownership for, is just going to be lost into oblivion because efforts like Project Gutenberg aren't allowed to revive them.
In 150AD, Ptolemy of Alexandria published his theory of epicycles--the idea that the moon, the sun and the planets moved in circles which were moving in circles which were moving in circles around the Earth. This theory explained the motion of celestial objects to an astonishing degree of precision. It was, however, what computer programmers call a kludge: a dirty, inelegant solution. Some 1,500 years later, Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, replaced the whole complex edifice with three simple laws. Some people think modern astronomy is based on a kludge similar to Ptolemy's.
I don't think this is a very fair comparison to make. Ptolemy's theories were a kludge. They were accepted as fact by many people, accepted by the church as the "official" version of how God had designed all things, and anyone who contradicted it would be risking execution and ridecule.
Even Galileo, who'd agreed quite strongly with the sun-centered Copernicus theories, had to promote it as merely a method to more effectively predict where planets would be rather than an explanation of how things actually worked.
Of course you could apply Copernican theories and they'd explain where planets moved quite well, but everyone already "knew" that the real system that God had made was of transparent spheres with more spheres attached and glowing lights spinning around on them. Trying to prove or demonstrate anything otherwise was ludicrous, and trying to prove that it was correct was even sillier because it was plainly obvious that "this was how God had created the world".
Modern theories of dark matter aren't nearly the same -- everyone knows that it only takes one contradiction to be found, and a theory will die. (in terms of scientific acceptance, at least). Although dark matter is a theory that's widely accepted as being likely, it's not yet accepted as fact and anyone who does fully accept it as such wouldn't go down well amongst others. This is why, right now, there are people out there that are trying to think of ways to prove that dark matter does exist, designing experiments and observations, and carrying them out.
The fact that millions of dollars get allocated to experiments like this, just to try and prove a theory that's already thought to be likely, should demonstrate how important it's considered to prove theories correct before relying on them too seriously. It should also demonstrate why it's a different environment to that which was dictated, defined and ruled over by the church. Even the thought of such actions would have been silly in during the time that the church so heavily dictated people's beliefs.
In France, tobacco companies have started selling packs of cigarettes containing only 19 cigarettes instead of 20. A "crippled" pack of smokes in a sense. Why? so that those who can't afford full-size packs since the latest price rises (read: kids and teens) can buy the 19 cigarette pack and get hooked.
Perhaps I'm going off on a tangent, but selling a pack that's only 5% smaller doesn't seem like much of an incentive on its own.
How much less do these packs of 19 cigarettes actually cost; and
If they're so much cheaper that it's worth buying them instead of getting one extra cigarette, then why isn't everyone buying them instead of the full pack?
Are there other marketing types of factors involved somehow?
It's ironic in a way -- I'm sure I heard from somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that the net saving for bringing Hubble down earlier, and doing it safely as planned, is a relatively minescule amount of about $40 million.
Personally I think that the development of the JWST will be scuttled before the ISS, which will have to wait until it either can't be justified as a required stepping stone to Mars, or until the Mars programme dies in a year or two.
Yes, you may have a job. But you have to reconcile yourself to a lower quality of life in India. It may cost less to live there, but at the same time, there are a few things that are taken for granted in the West, which aren't as easy to get there.
An economist could explain it better, but to me it seems that cost of living and standard of living aren't directly correlated. (I know it's not exactly what you're saying, but it's worth adding.) Lower quality of living may be true for India, but it isn't true everywhere. If it was, I might be able to travel from New Zealand to the US without paying twice as much for everything once I arrived.
In short, we have a relatively western culture here. There's good employment doing information-sector types of work, good quality education (although there's now a student loan scheme to get people through higher education), relatively good health care (probably better than the US if what I hear is correct), and so on.
It's expensive to travel away from here considering a good starting IT wage might be equivalent to about US$30,000, and IT wages are on the high side. It would have been much less than that a year ago, except US currency is doing so much worse on international markets at the moment. That starting amount will get you a reasonable quality of life here, though.
The lower cost of living and higher quality of education and living is one of the big reasons that, for example, it was so economical for Newline to have the Lord of the Rings films made here, because it's cheap yet there's enough of a technical infrastructure to support it. The other big export industry is tourism, because it's comparitively so cheap for people from high cost-of-living countries to travel here.
If concern about quality of life is more of an issue than saving up money to take back to the US, then there are other options around the world besides India.
Phase 2 will be sending Bruce Willis and the rest of his rigger pals in their awful corduroy space-suits to "kick comet ass" of all the ones found by Rosetta.
I would argue that Windows is a good desktop though. It's easy for people to navigate, do all the basic things they want, install hardware easily, etc.
I can't say I agree. Windows may be more learnable (or perhaps that's the marketing speaking), but I wouldn't personally consider it anywhere near as usable as something like WindowMaker or MacOS. Among other things, Microsoft frequently doesn't even follow basic UI design guidelines that have been clearly established for decades, such as placing menu bars next to borders and important controls in the corners.
Nearly everyone I know who uses Windows hates a lot of things about it. Often it's just general problems, and often it's a result of how Windows tends to fall apart and fragment if you leave it long enough. Consider the neverending war between applications and businesses to steal space and attention from each other on your Windows desktop -- you pay for such a commercial product and you truly get all the worst parts of commercialism.
The vast majority of people don't use Windows because they like it or find it usable. They use it because they perceive a huge barrier to them ever being able to use anything else. It might be the barrier of zapping everything on their HDD and installing an alternative. It might be the barrier of finding non-Windows application support for everything they need. Whatever it is, I certainly think that it's incorrect to consider Windows "usable".
There aren't any replacements
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hubble is a Cracker Jack toy compared to whats on the books right now.
It's also there and it's working right now. Hubble has proven itself to be reliable for longer than a decade, which is one of the best possible guarantees that could be hoped for in space. Throwing it away to invest entirely in something not yet proven is a big gamble. The cost of keeping Hubble working for a few years longer is quite low compared with the overheads of designing, building and launching entirely new projects.
Of course it'd be great to have future projects in due course, but suggesting that Hubble has "generated enough data" is a very shallow viewpoint. There are never a shortage of applications for people to use it -- big telescope time is hard to get. There are also $200 million instruments that were designed and built for the next Hubble mission that will now never be used. The James Webb Space Telescope, for example, which is still in a relatively conceptual design phase, also doesn't obsolete Hubble. They're designed for quite different things.
In any case with George Bush's massive "reallocation" of funding within NASA, this is one of the shakiest times for this type of genuine scientific project. Don't be surprised if the JWST and other similar projects are also scuttled in the near future in favour of the politically popular but scientifically dubious goal of getting more human ballast into local space.
I've done more than my share of teaching total newbies how to use Windows. There's nothing intrinsically logical or sensible about the Windows desktop (95, 2K, XP), Windows' naming schemes, etc. It's extraordinarily difficult for an adult newbie to pick up. -- We tend to think of Windows as "easier-to-use" simply, I think, because of familiarity.
I definitely agree here. Windows is one of the less-usable desktops out there, which is simply popular because of the barrier to learning and using alternatives. Many people I encounter assume that it's easy to use because it's graphical and because it comes from Microsoft. Many others absolutely despise Windows and they hate Microsoft, but they're trapped because they don't know how to switch to alternatives.
Realistically, switching to an alternative is a lot of effort both because of the applications lock-in, and because you can't really use something else until you've absolutely decided to nuke the current OS on your PC, which is freaky for most people.
There seems to be confusion between usability and learnability. Windows is for one reason or another easier to learn, but once learned the usability is awful. A variety of other desktops are at least as "usable" as Windows, and in many cases more usable. The problem is a combination of the learning curve, and the motivation to learn something new. What good does it do someone to learn an alternative desktop when nearly every desktop computer they're likely to encounter currently runs Windows.
Personally I use WindowMaker over linux and I like it much more than MS Windows. I'm more tech-headed than an average person, but that's much more to do with the learnability factor than the usability factor.
One of my favourite differences is that I can make it much less modeless, so applications aren't continuously grabbing the focus at seemingly random times when I'm in the middle of typing or doing other things. That's something that makes Windows truly awful to use, and it's analygous to the whole Windows "me! me! me!" weak-apps-make-less-money philosophy. eg:
Applications grab focus from each other without permission.
Applications grab file associations from each other without permission.
Applications project annoying splash screens when they're starting as if they're the most important thing in the world.
The whole Windows philosophy is about marketing and watching applications you install fight it out with one another for your approval and attention. There's nothing to do with application harmony, and every time they do this, Windows becomes more annoying and frustrating to use.
If Windows is more learnable, that certainly doesn't make it the least bit more usable.
I don't want to detract from your point, but I think there's an inconsistency in your analogy.
Media and fans like explosive, dramatic changes. But that is not how things happen on a large scale. This is more like a river cutting through rock.
Realistically they often do happen on a large scale. Mountain ranges creep up at minescule rates of centimetres per decade, and then once in a hundred years there's an avalanche. Tectonic plate movement is barely detectable until suddenly the pressure releases and there's a massive earthquake. Pressure builds up underground for thousands of years until suddenly there's a volcanic eruption in the South Pacific that's recorded in ancient China. Life develops over millions of years until it's suddenly mostly wiped out from an asteroid strike.
In summmary, the geologic world often changes through events that are quite dramatic. They just don't happen very often so we're rarely used to them.
I watched the announcement about this with interest. Most of the media seems to be claiming that it's likely to cost upwards of $400 billion in total, although that's probably an underestimate if experience is anything to go by.
Assuming it goes beyond the electioneering stage though I've been wondering how much of that will end up back in the US economy anyway, which is often what happens with government spending and one of the reasons that governments sometimes spend large amounts of money on projects like this.
Does anyone know of any estimations or figures of how much of the spending might be paid back to people and businesses in the US (who will in turn pay taxes back to the government) or otherwise end up back in the states, versus money going overseas?
And once again someone (KISS, not parent poster) needs to understand that if the GPL isn't valid, they have absolutely no rights to use code copyrighted by the various authors of the Mplayer code.
Not necessarily. In theory the GPL could be entirely valid, but just say something different from what we all believe it does. Presumably it would come down to what the court interprets the GPL as actually saying. It might be that there's a loophole in the wording that nobody's ever noticed.
If the court were to decide that, through some possible ambiguity of wording, the GPL did allow code to be distributed without source, then he'd be in the right. Personally I think the chances of that actually happening would be very low and anyone trying this are probably grasping at straws, but in theory it's possible.
If this turns out to be true, it would be a disaster for the economy in an area. Would you hang around or invest in a place where there's a big quake known to be coming in the next few months?
Well I do. I've grown up in Wellington, New Zealand, which is on a major fault line and expecting a significant chance of a big earthquake some time in the next 20 years. The city would originally have been built about 20 kms to the north, except in the mid-1800's, another big earthquake majorly changed the shape of the harbour, preventing big ships from getting to the other location and allowing them in here. You can walk down the main streets in the central business district and see plaques marking where the shoreline was in 1840.
You can't prevent an earthquake like this, but you can make a big effort to plan ahead for it. If everything's prepared for and especially if you were to know exactly where and when it's coming (which we currently don't), then why should it be a big problem for the economy?
For example, New Zealand has strict building codes that are designed to largely withstand big earthquakes. Large buildings are designed to be able to shift to a certain degree on their foundations as the ground moves underneath them, and tall buildings are designed to be able to sway in order to relieve stress.
We also know that the movement of the plate that the CBD is on is upwards rather than downwards, so at least it's not going to leave the CBD underwater, although the plate on the other side of the harbour is sliding underneath, so the people on that side of the harbour might not be so lucky with their property. That side of the harbour has significantly less development going on. People are trained to keep emergency kits handy, with canned food and fresh water. For decades now the schools have been training children about what to do in an earthquake and how to locate safe areas and structures. Civil defence is stationed in an area much further north which is a designated safe zone based on geophysical knowledge. The main concern at the moment are the roads in and out of the place, which so far have been expensive to build because of the surrounding hills and terrain... In an emergency, lots of people are going to want to temporarily get in and out, especially out.
Of course, if you think it's unusual living in an area expecting a big earthquake, then consider Auckland (800 kms north of here) where 1.5 million people live mingled around and in-between roughly 50 extinct volcanoes. (I hear the volcanic soil's a very high quality.)
The short story is that it's the nature of living in these places. People aren't going anywhere, so instead they do everything possible to prepare for it. The only difference with investments is that they should also invest in a bit of extra preparation, and experience so far shows that they do.
An even more accurate warning would, I'm sure, be welcome, as long as it were actually accurate. The economy moves with the people, and if it were accurately known that an earthquake were coming, people would either prepare locally or make temporary provisions to have their critical operations moved elsewhere... and then they would eventually come back again for the same reasons they were here before. Surely such preparations could only be good for the economy in general, since it's clearer what preparations are needed and when they're needed.
On the other hand, if it were known for certain that no earthquakes or volcanoes were going to hit in the upcoming years, we could stop wasting effort preparing for them needlessly.
So we're talking about the smallest "independent" country in the world, but they are not quite so independent that they don't take aid from New Zealand. If they stay independent the article indicates the next round of aid would be $16,000 a person.
Firstly with respect to money, I personally think that New Zealand has a large enough community (20,000) of taxpayers with friends and familiy back home. The $8 million that NZ spends could just as easily be presented as $400 from each Niue'an living in New Zealand. (Compare that with what people get for things like child support, for example.) For something with so many interested people, it's hardly a blip on the radar compared with the money churning through the NZ economy. Compared with the relatively unique cultures and traditions that would be being maintained, it's not such a bad thing, IMHO. There's certainly a museum or two in New Zealand that would cost less than that to subsidise. In any case I hope the country doesn't disintegrate from this.
I'm not as sure about the governing situation. I know that a lot of the Pacific Island governments tend to have relatively large amount of corruption, due to low populations causing things to be much more casual. But aside from the annual aid, is there any reason that you think Niue specifically isn't capable of governing itself?
Anyway, hopefully they can just get through the immediate situation for now at least, and worry about this type of thing afterwards. Perhaps the irony here is that it was Niue who offered aid to New Zealand when Cyclone Bowler hit.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to nitpick and sidestep your point entirely, tthe word "planet" is derived from the Greek word for "wanderer", referring to those stars that appeared to wander between the other stars that stayed fixed. I suppose that under its original definition, Earth was never a planet to begin with because it wasn't understood as one of these wanderers among the stars.
If the only reason to build a defence system is to prevent extinction of the human race by an asteroid, I think it's pointless to bother. The same goes for using the "possibility of asteroid extinction" as an excuse to get off Earth and build a permanent Moon or Mars base.
Yes, asteroids do strike the Earth. Yes, sometimes they create big disasters, tsunamis, huge fires and whatnot. Extinction? Very occasionally, unless you're a cockroach. All of this paranoia about mass extinction is justified in timeframes of millions of years, but certainly not tens of years. All of this paranoia has been brought on by a recent barrage of movies and misconstrued media reports.
The fact is that humans have survived in their current state for tens to hundreds of thousands of years already. We might be wiped out by a nuclear war or some other man-made tragedy resulting from the exponential changes very recently, but the chances that we'll be wiped out by an asteroid in the forseable future are minescule. Cities and countries might get wiped off the map more frequently, but not to the point of extinction of the race... and having a Moon base if that happens won't result in much more of a gain if extinction is what you're concerned about.
Realistically if we don't kill ourselves in some other way, it's very likely that the species still be around 500 or 1000 years from now. At that point, it will likely be much more feasible for people to develop a reasonable asteroid defence system at much less expense and using an existing infrastructure, if it's needed. But throwing away billions or hundreds of billions of dollars on it today because of unjustified paranoia is just silly.
Should we study asteroids and search for them to understand them better? Sure. Should we build a planetary defence system? Perhaps, but not without more information to actually justify the expense. If the human race happens to get wiped out in the next 20 years of research after surviving for the length of time that we have, it's just incredibly bad luck.
I think it's meant around the other way. They're saying that our format is so expressive that it can be used to represent data from any other inferior format. Then they're also saying that because every other format is inferior to our one, converting from ours to something else might cause you to lose some detail that the particular inferior format can't represent.
The article doesn't give much information about the specific technique which is probably what matters in the case of patents, although it does at least say the following:
There are some clear similarities, at least, in the form of ideas and business intentions, from over a decade ago. If nowhere else, it's documented in a couple of International Dark Sky Association Information Sheets that are campaigning against a former company's ideas to put giant billboards into orbit in association with, among other things, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. See Space Billboards Threaten Night Sky and Grass Root Opposition to Space Billboards.
Neither article is dated on the site, although references in the text of them dates back to some time around 1993. The IDA would likely have records of the original publication date and the events in question.
As a side note, the idea of putting advertising in Earth orbit like this tends to sicken me. I really hope that nobody goes for it.
I agree, especially since copyright (at least in the US) was originally implemented with a renewal process. During the final year of a copyright term, the holder would be able to renew the copyright for another X years.
Surely it would have made much more sense for legislators to have tinkered with the copyright renewal process instead of repeatedly increasing the length of copyrights accross-the-board.
Unfortunately the renewal process is now an automatic system, and copyrights get renewed whether the holder cares about it or not. The result is that a lot of work that the copyright holders don't care or have forgotten about is now simply dying, because projects such as Project Gutenberg aren't allowed to save it.
A neverending renewal system doesn't solve all the problems (depending on your point of view), but at least with a renewal process, Disney would be able to keep its precious Mickey Mouse for a bit longer without producing the momentous amounts of collateral damage that neverending copyright does.
Hopefully not all of them, though. I'm looking forward to seeing how the CS Lewis films turn out.
For anyone who doesn't know, they're already in pre-production, starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They're being produced in New Zealand again, although this time the production is centred in Auckland rather than Wellington.
Whatever the security is like, I certainly hope the company involved did not consider this "official notification". SMS messages are relatively unreliable, and under normal circumstances there's no way to verify that they were received or read.
If they'd wanted to press the matter, the union workers could probably get away with refusing to admit that they'd received any notification, and the company would have had a difficult time proving otherwise -- at least on an individual basis.
What confuses me is the seeming inability for administrations to resort to more rational compromises instead of steamrolling everything.
In the Disney/copyright case, it would have made much more sense to tinker with the copyright renewal process than to extend all copyrights accross the board, including the ones that nobody cares about anymore. There used to be a perfectly good copyright renewal process, described here, that was amended to provide "automatic renewal", probably to cut down on administration costs as much as everything else.
For whatever reason everyone's now decided to focus on simply extending the copyright term for everything instead of requiring those who actually still want to enforce their copyright to actively say so. This means that lots of derelict and abandoned work is simply disappearing because projects such as Project Gutenberg aren't allowed to save them.
I only wish that apt would take advantage of the plain-text databases by enabling the use of diffs to update the package database instead of requiring complete file downloads to sync up.
Having to download 6 MB of testing and unstable package databases every time I might want to upgrade a package that could be as small as 10 kb by itself is quite frustrating over my dialup. Even for people with faster connections, it surely increases the required bandwidth unnecessarily on the debian servers, too.
If diffs were simply provided for the previous week, it would allow most people to update with minimal effort in a cron job or an ip-up script.
Perhaps an expert on copyright law could confirm things better, but I was under the impression that under the original system (at least in the USA), there actually was a copyright renewal system, by which authors were allowed to renew their copyright exactly once during the year that it would otherwise have run out. More specifically, the Copyright Basics text (that was digitised by PG some time ago states the following:
It goes on to say:
Without really knowing the details behind copyright, I don't see why the renewal was made automatic. You'd think that any entity with enough money to campaign for that type of change would be able to organise itself enough to simply renew its copyrights in the correct year, so it might be that there was some other reasoning besides big money interests... or perhaps the politicians simply thought it was silly that people had to actively renew or that it created too many administrational overheads for the copyright office.
At least from my perspective it doesn't seem to have added much value, though.
Every time I think about this, it occurs to me that it would have made much more sense to have simply allowed owners and authors to request another copyright renewal rather than extend copyright accross the board.
Personally I couldn't care much less about wanting to use Mickey Mouse in the public domain -- Disney can keep it. But because of the ruthlessness of the whole thing, it means that countless amounts of less-well-known media from the past, that nobody is still enforcing ownership for, is just going to be lost into oblivion because efforts like Project Gutenberg aren't allowed to revive them.
I don't think this is a very fair comparison to make. Ptolemy's theories were a kludge. They were accepted as fact by many people, accepted by the church as the "official" version of how God had designed all things, and anyone who contradicted it would be risking execution and ridecule.
Even Galileo, who'd agreed quite strongly with the sun-centered Copernicus theories, had to promote it as merely a method to more effectively predict where planets would be rather than an explanation of how things actually worked.
Of course you could apply Copernican theories and they'd explain where planets moved quite well, but everyone already "knew" that the real system that God had made was of transparent spheres with more spheres attached and glowing lights spinning around on them. Trying to prove or demonstrate anything otherwise was ludicrous, and trying to prove that it was correct was even sillier because it was plainly obvious that "this was how God had created the world".
Modern theories of dark matter aren't nearly the same -- everyone knows that it only takes one contradiction to be found, and a theory will die. (in terms of scientific acceptance, at least). Although dark matter is a theory that's widely accepted as being likely, it's not yet accepted as fact and anyone who does fully accept it as such wouldn't go down well amongst others. This is why, right now, there are people out there that are trying to think of ways to prove that dark matter does exist, designing experiments and observations, and carrying them out.
The fact that millions of dollars get allocated to experiments like this, just to try and prove a theory that's already thought to be likely, should demonstrate how important it's considered to prove theories correct before relying on them too seriously. It should also demonstrate why it's a different environment to that which was dictated, defined and ruled over by the church. Even the thought of such actions would have been silly in during the time that the church so heavily dictated people's beliefs.
Perhaps I'm going off on a tangent, but selling a pack that's only 5% smaller doesn't seem like much of an incentive on its own.
Are there other marketing types of factors involved somehow?
It's ironic in a way -- I'm sure I heard from somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that the net saving for bringing Hubble down earlier, and doing it safely as planned, is a relatively minescule amount of about $40 million.
Personally I think that the development of the JWST will be scuttled before the ISS, which will have to wait until it either can't be justified as a required stepping stone to Mars, or until the Mars programme dies in a year or two.
An economist could explain it better, but to me it seems that cost of living and standard of living aren't directly correlated. (I know it's not exactly what you're saying, but it's worth adding.) Lower quality of living may be true for India, but it isn't true everywhere. If it was, I might be able to travel from New Zealand to the US without paying twice as much for everything once I arrived.
In short, we have a relatively western culture here. There's good employment doing information-sector types of work, good quality education (although there's now a student loan scheme to get people through higher education), relatively good health care (probably better than the US if what I hear is correct), and so on.
It's expensive to travel away from here considering a good starting IT wage might be equivalent to about US$30,000, and IT wages are on the high side. It would have been much less than that a year ago, except US currency is doing so much worse on international markets at the moment. That starting amount will get you a reasonable quality of life here, though.
The lower cost of living and higher quality of education and living is one of the big reasons that, for example, it was so economical for Newline to have the Lord of the Rings films made here, because it's cheap yet there's enough of a technical infrastructure to support it. The other big export industry is tourism, because it's comparitively so cheap for people from high cost-of-living countries to travel here.
If concern about quality of life is more of an issue than saving up money to take back to the US, then there are other options around the world besides India.
I can't say I agree. Windows may be more learnable (or perhaps that's the marketing speaking), but I wouldn't personally consider it anywhere near as usable as something like WindowMaker or MacOS. Among other things, Microsoft frequently doesn't even follow basic UI design guidelines that have been clearly established for decades, such as placing menu bars next to borders and important controls in the corners.
Nearly everyone I know who uses Windows hates a lot of things about it. Often it's just general problems, and often it's a result of how Windows tends to fall apart and fragment if you leave it long enough. Consider the neverending war between applications and businesses to steal space and attention from each other on your Windows desktop -- you pay for such a commercial product and you truly get all the worst parts of commercialism.
The vast majority of people don't use Windows because they like it or find it usable. They use it because they perceive a huge barrier to them ever being able to use anything else. It might be the barrier of zapping everything on their HDD and installing an alternative. It might be the barrier of finding non-Windows application support for everything they need. Whatever it is, I certainly think that it's incorrect to consider Windows "usable".
It's also there and it's working right now. Hubble has proven itself to be reliable for longer than a decade, which is one of the best possible guarantees that could be hoped for in space. Throwing it away to invest entirely in something not yet proven is a big gamble. The cost of keeping Hubble working for a few years longer is quite low compared with the overheads of designing, building and launching entirely new projects.
Of course it'd be great to have future projects in due course, but suggesting that Hubble has "generated enough data" is a very shallow viewpoint. There are never a shortage of applications for people to use it -- big telescope time is hard to get. There are also $200 million instruments that were designed and built for the next Hubble mission that will now never be used. The James Webb Space Telescope, for example, which is still in a relatively conceptual design phase, also doesn't obsolete Hubble. They're designed for quite different things.
In any case with George Bush's massive "reallocation" of funding within NASA, this is one of the shakiest times for this type of genuine scientific project. Don't be surprised if the JWST and other similar projects are also scuttled in the near future in favour of the politically popular but scientifically dubious goal of getting more human ballast into local space.
I definitely agree here. Windows is one of the less-usable desktops out there, which is simply popular because of the barrier to learning and using alternatives. Many people I encounter assume that it's easy to use because it's graphical and because it comes from Microsoft. Many others absolutely despise Windows and they hate Microsoft, but they're trapped because they don't know how to switch to alternatives.
Realistically, switching to an alternative is a lot of effort both because of the applications lock-in, and because you can't really use something else until you've absolutely decided to nuke the current OS on your PC, which is freaky for most people.
There seems to be confusion between usability and learnability. Windows is for one reason or another easier to learn, but once learned the usability is awful. A variety of other desktops are at least as "usable" as Windows, and in many cases more usable. The problem is a combination of the learning curve, and the motivation to learn something new. What good does it do someone to learn an alternative desktop when nearly every desktop computer they're likely to encounter currently runs Windows.
Personally I use WindowMaker over linux and I like it much more than MS Windows. I'm more tech-headed than an average person, but that's much more to do with the learnability factor than the usability factor.
One of my favourite differences is that I can make it much less modeless, so applications aren't continuously grabbing the focus at seemingly random times when I'm in the middle of typing or doing other things. That's something that makes Windows truly awful to use, and it's analygous to the whole Windows "me! me! me!" weak-apps-make-less-money philosophy. eg:
The whole Windows philosophy is about marketing and watching applications you install fight it out with one another for your approval and attention. There's nothing to do with application harmony, and every time they do this, Windows becomes more annoying and frustrating to use.
If Windows is more learnable, that certainly doesn't make it the least bit more usable.
I don't want to detract from your point, but I think there's an inconsistency in your analogy.
Realistically they often do happen on a large scale. Mountain ranges creep up at minescule rates of centimetres per decade, and then once in a hundred years there's an avalanche. Tectonic plate movement is barely detectable until suddenly the pressure releases and there's a massive earthquake. Pressure builds up underground for thousands of years until suddenly there's a volcanic eruption in the South Pacific that's recorded in ancient China. Life develops over millions of years until it's suddenly mostly wiped out from an asteroid strike.
In summmary, the geologic world often changes through events that are quite dramatic. They just don't happen very often so we're rarely used to them.
I watched the announcement about this with interest. Most of the media seems to be claiming that it's likely to cost upwards of $400 billion in total, although that's probably an underestimate if experience is anything to go by.
Assuming it goes beyond the electioneering stage though I've been wondering how much of that will end up back in the US economy anyway, which is often what happens with government spending and one of the reasons that governments sometimes spend large amounts of money on projects like this.
Does anyone know of any estimations or figures of how much of the spending might be paid back to people and businesses in the US (who will in turn pay taxes back to the government) or otherwise end up back in the states, versus money going overseas?
Not necessarily. In theory the GPL could be entirely valid, but just say something different from what we all believe it does. Presumably it would come down to what the court interprets the GPL as actually saying. It might be that there's a loophole in the wording that nobody's ever noticed.
If the court were to decide that, through some possible ambiguity of wording, the GPL did allow code to be distributed without source, then he'd be in the right. Personally I think the chances of that actually happening would be very low and anyone trying this are probably grasping at straws, but in theory it's possible.
Well I do. I've grown up in Wellington, New Zealand, which is on a major fault line and expecting a significant chance of a big earthquake some time in the next 20 years. The city would originally have been built about 20 kms to the north, except in the mid-1800's, another big earthquake majorly changed the shape of the harbour, preventing big ships from getting to the other location and allowing them in here. You can walk down the main streets in the central business district and see plaques marking where the shoreline was in 1840.
You can't prevent an earthquake like this, but you can make a big effort to plan ahead for it. If everything's prepared for and especially if you were to know exactly where and when it's coming (which we currently don't), then why should it be a big problem for the economy?
For example, New Zealand has strict building codes that are designed to largely withstand big earthquakes. Large buildings are designed to be able to shift to a certain degree on their foundations as the ground moves underneath them, and tall buildings are designed to be able to sway in order to relieve stress.
We also know that the movement of the plate that the CBD is on is upwards rather than downwards, so at least it's not going to leave the CBD underwater, although the plate on the other side of the harbour is sliding underneath, so the people on that side of the harbour might not be so lucky with their property. That side of the harbour has significantly less development going on. People are trained to keep emergency kits handy, with canned food and fresh water. For decades now the schools have been training children about what to do in an earthquake and how to locate safe areas and structures. Civil defence is stationed in an area much further north which is a designated safe zone based on geophysical knowledge. The main concern at the moment are the roads in and out of the place, which so far have been expensive to build because of the surrounding hills and terrain... In an emergency, lots of people are going to want to temporarily get in and out, especially out.
Of course, if you think it's unusual living in an area expecting a big earthquake, then consider Auckland (800 kms north of here) where 1.5 million people live mingled around and in-between roughly 50 extinct volcanoes. (I hear the volcanic soil's a very high quality.)
The short story is that it's the nature of living in these places. People aren't going anywhere, so instead they do everything possible to prepare for it. The only difference with investments is that they should also invest in a bit of extra preparation, and experience so far shows that they do.
An even more accurate warning would, I'm sure, be welcome, as long as it were actually accurate. The economy moves with the people, and if it were accurately known that an earthquake were coming, people would either prepare locally or make temporary provisions to have their critical operations moved elsewhere... and then they would eventually come back again for the same reasons they were here before. Surely such preparations could only be good for the economy in general, since it's clearer what preparations are needed and when they're needed.
On the other hand, if it were known for certain that no earthquakes or volcanoes were going to hit in the upcoming years, we could stop wasting effort preparing for them needlessly.
It's still being discovered. There are only just over 1000 people there, probably not including many people with international marketing degrees.
Firstly with respect to money, I personally think that New Zealand has a large enough community (20,000) of taxpayers with friends and familiy back home. The $8 million that NZ spends could just as easily be presented as $400 from each Niue'an living in New Zealand. (Compare that with what people get for things like child support, for example.) For something with so many interested people, it's hardly a blip on the radar compared with the money churning through the NZ economy. Compared with the relatively unique cultures and traditions that would be being maintained, it's not such a bad thing, IMHO. There's certainly a museum or two in New Zealand that would cost less than that to subsidise. In any case I hope the country doesn't disintegrate from this.
I'm not as sure about the governing situation. I know that a lot of the Pacific Island governments tend to have relatively large amount of corruption, due to low populations causing things to be much more casual. But aside from the annual aid, is there any reason that you think Niue specifically isn't capable of governing itself?
Anyway, hopefully they can just get through the immediate situation for now at least, and worry about this type of thing afterwards. Perhaps the irony here is that it was Niue who offered aid to New Zealand when Cyclone Bowler hit.