So how does that make it right? That's my issue with all this. Your argument seems to boil down to "If I like them and they want money, I'll give them money and grab their work. If I don't like them and they want money, I'll still grab their work anyway."
Well now you're addressing a different level of the debate. This is where it turns to "Mickey Mouse Perpetual Copyright Laws" vs "The Right to Share the Fruits of Our Common Culture". Your angle on this is premised upon the supposition that copyright law as it stands is reasonable, fair, and proper. When the stated purpose of copyright is to promote the continued expansion of the public domain by granting a limited monopoly on reproduction of works of art, the current state of law is nearly impossible to defend. When the law is so far out of alignment with reasonable behavior, it becomes impossible to define what constitutes acceptable limits. When reasonable act (sharing a 40's Sinatra song*) carries the same punishment an arguably unreasonable act (sharing a track off the new McPopStar CD), there is no incentive for people to act reasonably.
Until we can disabuse the recording industry of the asinine notion that holding a copyright ought to be a perpetual property right, disobedience of the law is going to continue. Suggesting that the best way to change bad law enacted by powerful monied interests is to obey it and politely lobby corrupted** lawmakers to change it is to ignore the history of bad law. These things don't change until public outrage forces the issue, and public outrage generally doesn't arise until punishments for perfectly harmless (but illegal) activities become an issue. Civil disobedience isn't some noble tool to be limited to only lofty goals like desegregation and universal suffrage. It is, in fact, often the only available tool for fighting certain intractable abuses of government.
* To address the two biggest false arguments against short copyrights: 1) Sinatra isn't going to record any more songs, no matter how long after his death the copyright on My Way lasts. Even if he wasn't dead, loss of copyright on a 50+ year old recording would hardly have made him quit the business. 2) If he wanted to pass his legacy on to his descendants, he should have had to put money away in a trust fund, or teach them to fucking sing. Plumbers' kids can inherit the business, but they better know how to lay pipe.
** In this case, "corrupted" runs the gamut from literally taking payments, to simply believing the false notion that "copyright" == "ownership of a work as a property right".
What idiot modded the parent post "Troll"? It's a valid point. Charging these girls with creating child porn of themselves makes as much sense as jailing a failed suicide for attempted murder.
Gee. I thought school teachers and officials acted in loco parentis. Don't parents have the right to examine this sort of thing?
Most notably? Really? Compared to concern about criminalization of the acts performed by these kids? Wow.
Tough call there. The most recent Supreme Court decision re:in loco parentis was New Jersey v. T. L. O., which essentially gave the school greater leeway with regard to the 4th Amd. On the other hand, the case hinged heavily on the student having an ever-incriminating chain of probable-cause-worthy things in her statements and items in her purse. The leap from "had a phone turned on in class" to "search phone for illicit photos" may very exceed the envelope. Only the courts can decide that. I personally think it's a questionable search, but more importantly, it's a completely inappropriate application of child porn law, much like prosecuting one or both parties to consensual sex between two minors for statutory rape. Then again, that happens too. <flamebait> I blame excessive religious indoctrination</flamebait>.
I wonder if the school administrator who turned them in realized the damage that would be done to these kids. Their lives are ruined. They will fight for a long long time to get this off their record.
Probably didn't even think of it. I work for a large school district, and the one thing I've noticed is that it's not just the cream that floats to the top. A depressingly large fraction of school admin people are complete idiots--- and not just the regular street-variety dodo, but the worst kind of idiot, the kind that has a degree and subsequently thinks they're brighter than everyone else. The kind of self-righteous twit that makes a stupid decision and then defends it to the death, even when faced with prima facie evidence that they totally screwed the pooch.
17,000 downloads may not equal 17,000 lost sales, but even the most fanatical people here would agree there are probably some lost sales there, right? 100 sales? 500? Maybe even 1,000?
Or do people only download music that they don't particularly like and would not pay for under any circumstances?
Not really relevant to this discussion. In this case, calculating damages in a civil case has to be based on proven losses. The number may very well be somewhere between 0 and 17000 lost sales, but unless you can substantiate whatever number you decide it is, you cannot collect damages.
Outside of the civil judgment issue, it becomes a debate of "Law" vs "Accepted Social Practice and Original Intent". Then it gets much stickier, as the issue of just how long a monopoly on the fruits of our common culture constitutes a fair return to sufficiently encourage the production of said fruits. The RIAA has long tried to frame the debate and manipulate the law such that this limited monopoly is effectively a perpetual property right, but a simple reading of the US Constitution reveals just how disingenuous this position is.
So really, there is no firm ground anywhere surrounding this issue. The number of lost sales cannot be pinned down, nor can the reasonable right to those sales (whatever they may be) be unequivocally stated. This is the entire problem with copyright law as it stands: It has so long ago departed the "reasonable and prudent" road and driven off into the swamp of corporate interests that the specifics of any given incident are completely insane.
I don't listen to music much, and what I do listen to I have had on CD for close to 20 years. I have purchased only one CD in this century. The only music I have downloaded in violation of copyright has been one song from the aforementioned CD to verify that the live version of the song listed on the back of that CD case was, in fact, the particular version I was looking for. This resulted in a single CD sale that would not have happened otherwise. I have mostly downloaded scads of freely released indy band songs and TV shows like Doctor Who and Torchwood so I wouldn't have to wait for them to come to Sci-Fi. No sales lost there. In my case, the net "some fraction of a lost sale" is a negative number. Subsequently, the rest of your post is invalid as it is based on an assumption that is not true. Anecdotal evidence is of course only anecdotal, but it is still sufficient to disprove your sweeping generalization.
It's ludicrous to take the statement that 17,000 downloads doesn't equal 17,000 lost sales (well, duh!) and then swing to the other extreme and use it as an argument to say that piracy isn't causing lost sales.
Without any evidence to show that the net result is lost sales, you can't say that that's the case. The error in your assertion above is that you assume that the range we're looking at starts at "zero lost sales" and goes to "X number of lost sales, where X == number of MP3's in someone's download directory". Given that all we have to go on is anecdotal evidence, and that a non-zero number of anecdotes demonstrate that some downloads result in a sale that otherwise would not have happened, we are looking at a range of "X number of lost sales" to "X number of additional sales". Any claim that the number is known to be positive or negative must be accompanied by evidence from a controlled study. The true nature of reality is determined by scientific principles, not nebulous claims prefaced by "everybody knows..."
You're working on the assumption all humans have the same psychology and that people in certain jobs don't get into those jobs because they have traits that are rather self-serving as opposed to being charitable and helpful.
Indeed, one study I've read estimated that close to 1 in 20 men are incapable of sufficient empathy for it to be a significant motivator--- yes, 5% of men are sociopaths! Of course, not all such people are murdering freaks as movies and tv news would have you believe. The John Wayne Gacys of the world are merely the few sociopaths with poor impulse control. The vast majority of them are intelligent enough to have figured out that society expects empathy and have learned to fake it well enough to get by. Sociopaths may think we're all just objects to be used, but they can still recognize that we "objects" will throw them in a cage if they don't play the game according to the rules. Think of all the truly awful self-centered jerks you've ever had to deal with in your life--- particularly the ones that seemed charming at first--- and that 1:20 ratio starts to make sense. It's not a comforting thought, but it bears keeping in mind. Being a high functioning sociopath isn't something that would necessarily be evolutionarily selected out.
I firmly believe that an uncomfortably large percentage of people who rise to power positions--- be it political office or CEO's office--- are just such high-functioning sociopaths.
I'm curious how Google's mail folders don't make sense. It was implied in your statement that Yahoo's folders make sense.
Going out on a limb here, as it's been several years since I abandoned my Yahoo email for my own mail server--- in my mother's basement, under my bed, next to my star wars underpants--- but I think it might be a "tags" vs "folders" issue. I've had one of my brother's friends tell me he didn't like Gmail because when you create a new "folder" for mail and a filter to sort it by, mail gets "copied" to two different folders! That's how it's supposed to work, but some folks just can't get over the fact that they have a Gmail tag for Ewok discussions and one for eBay auctions and that the email saying they've won an Ewok TV tray on eBay shows up IN BOTH PLACES!!!!1! Tags are a more flexible sorting system, but they require a certain mental shift to grok, and some people just have that "eighty column mind" thing going.
the study contains no new research - just a rehash of existing studies - therefore the jury's still out until we finally get someone to do a proper and rigourous experiment
Well yeah, that's the entire freakin' point of the article! For years people have been using the dominance of QWERTY over they "superior" Dvorak as proof that "first to market" beats a better product, when no study showing Dvorak is any better beyond the nearly impossible to find Navy one conducted by Dvorak himself even exists.
Theoretically interesting, but doesn't align with the facts.
Barbara Blackburn, until her passing the world's fastest typist, typed Dvorak exclusively. She couldn't stand QWERTY and certainly couldn't achieve the speeds she did with QWERTY.
The previous record holder before her got 198wpm out of QWERTY in 1998. If all the previous record holders going back to the 40's used Dvorak, your point might have had some merit, but given that QWERTY and Dvorak both seem to produce record holders, the layout used by "Fastest Typists" is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
It interesting what comes up when you search for 'fastest typist in the world' on google.
Yeah it is. The fastest typist got 212wpm out of a Dvorak in 2005. The previous record holder got 198wpm out of a QWERTY in 1998. What you see is evidence that maybe Dvorak nets you a whole ONE PERCENT INCREASE. Or really, if you know anything about statistics, you see that there's largely no significant gain in efficiency to be had. Don't base your decision to switch on something as dumb as who won the "Fastest Typist in the World" contest.
Dvorak is one attempt to improve upon qwerty, Colemak is another. Both are *far* more efficient than qwerty.
It doesn't matter though.
This is only true if you consider four to six percentage points enough to classify them as "far more efficient". No one says that QWERTY is the best, only that the alternatives are not demonstrably superior to the degree that retraining is worth the effort.
Most people will have your attitude that "qwerty is good because it's popular", without actually examining anything for themselves. I hope the rest of slashdot is different.
Most people have the attitude that QWERTY is good enough--- and they're right.
Qwerty was, quite literally, designed with the goal of being the slowest layout possible - early typewriters weren't fast enough to keep up with fast typists.
No. It was designed to place common digraphs father apart, resulting in faster typing. You may have repaired them, but you apparently got your history of typewriters via ignorant urban legends.
Really, the practical upshot of the article was that the main reason nothing supplanted QWERTY was not that QWERTY had too large an installed base, but rather that no alternate layout had any measurable speed advantage over QWERTY, even Dvorak.
I love the arguments against other keyboard layouts for this very reason. Qwerty was specifically engineered to put a cap on typing speed to prevent jamming.
Did you not RTFA? Did you not read any of the fifty-odd comments here refuting the old bullshit story you're repeating? The QWERTY layout was to separate common digraphs to allow faster typing, not to slow typists down. Idiot.
No, the actual order was 2QA3ZWS4XED5C...etc. Drag a vertical straightedge from left to right across the keys and you'll see the order they went on Sholes' typewriter as they appear from beneath the straightedge. Numbers started with '2' as '1' was not on the original at all, with 'I' and later 'l' being considered adequate substitutions to reduce the number of keys.
At some point, voice recognition will be accurate enough for daily use, and will supplant QWERTY.
I guarantee this will never happen. Speaking is tiring. Speaking is annoying to others in the same room. Speaking is not a suitable substitute for a keyboard, no matter how good the speech recognition systems get. Te only people who think this will happen are "visionaries" who also see flying cars and free electricity through fusion power.
Did I mention that the Shuttle costs orders of magnitude more money for each passenger killed than Soyuz, even after considering higher body count?
So it's better that Souyuz kills its passengers for less cost? I'm not sure what advantage you're trying to illustrate. Besides, anyone with any sense already knows that the shuttle is way too expensive to operate as a passenger vehicle because it's designed to be a truck.
it's extremely unclear that the geographical location was chosen because of the proximity to the equator. There are US-held territories much further south.
I'd say it's pretty clear. Cape Canaveral had been a missile launch test center since 1949 with the explicit reasoning of a) closer to the equator, and b) the entire Atlantic to fire out over. Other, non-CONUS territories had the blindingly obvious disadvantages of poorer security and less reliable supply and transportation.
Slashdot Mirror
So how does that make it right? That's my issue with all this. Your argument seems to boil down to "If I like them and they want money, I'll give them money and grab their work. If I don't like them and they want money, I'll still grab their work anyway."
Well now you're addressing a different level of the debate. This is where it turns to "Mickey Mouse Perpetual Copyright Laws" vs "The Right to Share the Fruits of Our Common Culture". Your angle on this is premised upon the supposition that copyright law as it stands is reasonable, fair, and proper. When the stated purpose of copyright is to promote the continued expansion of the public domain by granting a limited monopoly on reproduction of works of art, the current state of law is nearly impossible to defend. When the law is so far out of alignment with reasonable behavior, it becomes impossible to define what constitutes acceptable limits. When reasonable act (sharing a 40's Sinatra song*) carries the same punishment an arguably unreasonable act (sharing a track off the new McPopStar CD), there is no incentive for people to act reasonably.
Until we can disabuse the recording industry of the asinine notion that holding a copyright ought to be a perpetual property right, disobedience of the law is going to continue. Suggesting that the best way to change bad law enacted by powerful monied interests is to obey it and politely lobby corrupted** lawmakers to change it is to ignore the history of bad law. These things don't change until public outrage forces the issue, and public outrage generally doesn't arise until punishments for perfectly harmless (but illegal) activities become an issue. Civil disobedience isn't some noble tool to be limited to only lofty goals like desegregation and universal suffrage. It is, in fact, often the only available tool for fighting certain intractable abuses of government.
* To address the two biggest false arguments against short copyrights: 1) Sinatra isn't going to record any more songs, no matter how long after his death the copyright on My Way lasts. Even if he wasn't dead, loss of copyright on a 50+ year old recording would hardly have made him quit the business. 2) If he wanted to pass his legacy on to his descendants, he should have had to put money away in a trust fund, or teach them to fucking sing. Plumbers' kids can inherit the business, but they better know how to lay pipe.
** In this case, "corrupted" runs the gamut from literally taking payments, to simply believing the false notion that "copyright" == "ownership of a work as a property right".
What idiot modded the parent post "Troll"? It's a valid point. Charging these girls with creating child porn of themselves makes as much sense as jailing a failed suicide for attempted murder.
Gee. I thought school teachers and officials acted in loco parentis. Don't parents have the right to examine this sort of thing? Most notably? Really? Compared to concern about criminalization of the acts performed by these kids? Wow.
Tough call there. The most recent Supreme Court decision re:in loco parentis was New Jersey v. T. L. O., which essentially gave the school greater leeway with regard to the 4th Amd. On the other hand, the case hinged heavily on the student having an ever-incriminating chain of probable-cause-worthy things in her statements and items in her purse. The leap from "had a phone turned on in class" to "search phone for illicit photos" may very exceed the envelope. Only the courts can decide that. I personally think it's a questionable search, but more importantly, it's a completely inappropriate application of child porn law, much like prosecuting one or both parties to consensual sex between two minors for statutory rape. Then again, that happens too. <flamebait> I blame excessive religious indoctrination</flamebait>.
I wonder if the school administrator who turned them in realized the damage that would be done to these kids. Their lives are ruined. They will fight for a long long time to get this off their record.
Probably didn't even think of it. I work for a large school district, and the one thing I've noticed is that it's not just the cream that floats to the top. A depressingly large fraction of school admin people are complete idiots--- and not just the regular street-variety dodo, but the worst kind of idiot, the kind that has a degree and subsequently thinks they're brighter than everyone else. The kind of self-righteous twit that makes a stupid decision and then defends it to the death, even when faced with prima facie evidence that they totally screwed the pooch.
s/as the issue of/as it's an issue of
stupid verbosity-inducing college degree!
17,000 downloads may not equal 17,000 lost sales, but even the most fanatical people here would agree there are probably some lost sales there, right? 100 sales? 500? Maybe even 1,000? Or do people only download music that they don't particularly like and would not pay for under any circumstances?
Not really relevant to this discussion. In this case, calculating damages in a civil case has to be based on proven losses. The number may very well be somewhere between 0 and 17000 lost sales, but unless you can substantiate whatever number you decide it is, you cannot collect damages.
Outside of the civil judgment issue, it becomes a debate of "Law" vs "Accepted Social Practice and Original Intent". Then it gets much stickier, as the issue of just how long a monopoly on the fruits of our common culture constitutes a fair return to sufficiently encourage the production of said fruits. The RIAA has long tried to frame the debate and manipulate the law such that this limited monopoly is effectively a perpetual property right, but a simple reading of the US Constitution reveals just how disingenuous this position is.
So really, there is no firm ground anywhere surrounding this issue. The number of lost sales cannot be pinned down, nor can the reasonable right to those sales (whatever they may be) be unequivocally stated. This is the entire problem with copyright law as it stands: It has so long ago departed the "reasonable and prudent" road and driven off into the swamp of corporate interests that the specifics of any given incident are completely insane.
Download == some fraction of a Lost Sale.
I don't listen to music much, and what I do listen to I have had on CD for close to 20 years. I have purchased only one CD in this century. The only music I have downloaded in violation of copyright has been one song from the aforementioned CD to verify that the live version of the song listed on the back of that CD case was, in fact, the particular version I was looking for. This resulted in a single CD sale that would not have happened otherwise. I have mostly downloaded scads of freely released indy band songs and TV shows like Doctor Who and Torchwood so I wouldn't have to wait for them to come to Sci-Fi. No sales lost there. In my case, the net "some fraction of a lost sale" is a negative number. Subsequently, the rest of your post is invalid as it is based on an assumption that is not true. Anecdotal evidence is of course only anecdotal, but it is still sufficient to disprove your sweeping generalization.
It's ludicrous to take the statement that 17,000 downloads doesn't equal 17,000 lost sales (well, duh!) and then swing to the other extreme and use it as an argument to say that piracy isn't causing lost sales.
Without any evidence to show that the net result is lost sales, you can't say that that's the case. The error in your assertion above is that you assume that the range we're looking at starts at "zero lost sales" and goes to "X number of lost sales, where X == number of MP3's in someone's download directory". Given that all we have to go on is anecdotal evidence, and that a non-zero number of anecdotes demonstrate that some downloads result in a sale that otherwise would not have happened, we are looking at a range of "X number of lost sales" to "X number of additional sales". Any claim that the number is known to be positive or negative must be accompanied by evidence from a controlled study. The true nature of reality is determined by scientific principles, not nebulous claims prefaced by "everybody knows..."
You're working on the assumption all humans have the same psychology and that people in certain jobs don't get into those jobs because they have traits that are rather self-serving as opposed to being charitable and helpful.
Indeed, one study I've read estimated that close to 1 in 20 men are incapable of sufficient empathy for it to be a significant motivator--- yes, 5% of men are sociopaths! Of course, not all such people are murdering freaks as movies and tv news would have you believe. The John Wayne Gacys of the world are merely the few sociopaths with poor impulse control. The vast majority of them are intelligent enough to have figured out that society expects empathy and have learned to fake it well enough to get by. Sociopaths may think we're all just objects to be used, but they can still recognize that we "objects" will throw them in a cage if they don't play the game according to the rules. Think of all the truly awful self-centered jerks you've ever had to deal with in your life--- particularly the ones that seemed charming at first--- and that 1:20 ratio starts to make sense. It's not a comforting thought, but it bears keeping in mind. Being a high functioning sociopath isn't something that would necessarily be evolutionarily selected out.
I firmly believe that an uncomfortably large percentage of people who rise to power positions--- be it political office or CEO's office--- are just such high-functioning sociopaths.
I'm curious how Google's mail folders don't make sense. It was implied in your statement that Yahoo's folders make sense.
Going out on a limb here, as it's been several years since I abandoned my Yahoo email for my own mail server--- in my mother's basement, under my bed, next to my star wars underpants--- but I think it might be a "tags" vs "folders" issue. I've had one of my brother's friends tell me he didn't like Gmail because when you create a new "folder" for mail and a filter to sort it by, mail gets "copied" to two different folders! That's how it's supposed to work, but some folks just can't get over the fact that they have a Gmail tag for Ewok discussions and one for eBay auctions and that the email saying they've won an Ewok TV tray on eBay shows up IN BOTH PLACES!!!!1! Tags are a more flexible sorting system, but they require a certain mental shift to grok, and some people just have that "eighty column mind" thing going.
the study contains no new research - just a rehash of existing studies - therefore the jury's still out until we finally get someone to do a proper and rigourous experiment
Well yeah, that's the entire freakin' point of the article! For years people have been using the dominance of QWERTY over they "superior" Dvorak as proof that "first to market" beats a better product, when no study showing Dvorak is any better beyond the nearly impossible to find Navy one conducted by Dvorak himself even exists.
Theoretically interesting, but doesn't align with the facts.
Barbara Blackburn, until her passing the world's fastest typist, typed Dvorak exclusively. She couldn't stand QWERTY and certainly couldn't achieve the speeds she did with QWERTY.
The previous record holder before her got 198wpm out of QWERTY in 1998. If all the previous record holders going back to the 40's used Dvorak, your point might have had some merit, but given that QWERTY and Dvorak both seem to produce record holders, the layout used by "Fastest Typists" is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
Do you pick your commuter car based on who won the formula one last year?
It interesting what comes up when you search for 'fastest typist in the world' on google.
Yeah it is. The fastest typist got 212wpm out of a Dvorak in 2005. The previous record holder got 198wpm out of a QWERTY in 1998. What you see is evidence that maybe Dvorak nets you a whole ONE PERCENT INCREASE. Or really, if you know anything about statistics, you see that there's largely no significant gain in efficiency to be had. Don't base your decision to switch on something as dumb as who won the "Fastest Typist in the World" contest.
Dvorak is one attempt to improve upon qwerty, Colemak is another. Both are *far* more efficient than qwerty.
It doesn't matter though.
This is only true if you consider four to six percentage points enough to classify them as "far more efficient". No one says that QWERTY is the best, only that the alternatives are not demonstrably superior to the degree that retraining is worth the effort.
Most people will have your attitude that "qwerty is good because it's popular", without actually examining anything for themselves. I hope the rest of slashdot is different.
Most people have the attitude that QWERTY is good enough--- and they're right.
Qwerty was, quite literally, designed with the goal of being the slowest layout possible - early typewriters weren't fast enough to keep up with fast typists.
No. It was designed to place common digraphs father apart, resulting in faster typing. You may have repaired them, but you apparently got your history of typewriters via ignorant urban legends.
Really, the practical upshot of the article was that the main reason nothing supplanted QWERTY was not that QWERTY had too large an installed base, but rather that no alternate layout had any measurable speed advantage over QWERTY, even Dvorak.
So, if QWERTY was designed to be worse for typing speed
It wasn't. Go back to your hole, fucktard.
I love the arguments against other keyboard layouts for this very reason. Qwerty was specifically engineered to put a cap on typing speed to prevent jamming.
Did you not RTFA? Did you not read any of the fifty-odd comments here refuting the old bullshit story you're repeating? The QWERTY layout was to separate common digraphs to allow faster typing, not to slow typists down. Idiot.
the actual order was 1QAZ2WSX3EDC4RFV...
No, the actual order was 2QA3ZWS4XED5C...etc. Drag a vertical straightedge from left to right across the keys and you'll see the order they went on Sholes' typewriter as they appear from beneath the straightedge. Numbers started with '2' as '1' was not on the original at all, with 'I' and later 'l' being considered adequate substitutions to reduce the number of keys.
I have never understood how merely rearranging the keys on the same fscking keyboard could make a real difference.
Heh. Try to type "ls -l" on a Dvorak. That damned pinky dance made me abandon the Dvorak. But yeah, there's largely no great improvement.
At some point, voice recognition will be accurate enough for daily use, and will supplant QWERTY.
I guarantee this will never happen. Speaking is tiring. Speaking is annoying to others in the same room. Speaking is not a suitable substitute for a keyboard, no matter how good the speech recognition systems get. Te only people who think this will happen are "visionaries" who also see flying cars and free electricity through fusion power.
in the soviet union there was freedom to roam, similar to the laws in nordic countries.
Yeah, except for that pesky internal passport system. Free to roam, but not too far.
Blah blah blah.
Wow, brilliant counterargument.
Did I mention that the Shuttle costs orders of magnitude more money for each passenger killed than Soyuz, even after considering higher body count?
So it's better that Souyuz kills its passengers for less cost? I'm not sure what advantage you're trying to illustrate. Besides, anyone with any sense already knows that the shuttle is way too expensive to operate as a passenger vehicle because it's designed to be a truck.
Very selective use of facts. Four people have died in flight in Soyuz spacecraft, while fourteen have died in flight on US shuttles.
14>4
Utter nonsense. You somehow equate a larger seating capacity to "more failures".
it's extremely unclear that the geographical location was chosen because of the proximity to the equator. There are US-held territories much further south.
I'd say it's pretty clear. Cape Canaveral had been a missile launch test center since 1949 with the explicit reasoning of a) closer to the equator, and b) the entire Atlantic to fire out over. Other, non-CONUS territories had the blindingly obvious disadvantages of poorer security and less reliable supply and transportation.