Scuse me? Japan is about 125 million people - Germany is about 82. That's 50% more than Germany. Japanese GDP is about $2.95 trillion vs Germany's 1.9 trillion, again about 50% more.
China is currently the number 2 economy GDP wise, at $4 trillion, however, that's spread over 1.25 billion people so the disposable income is pretty low. Not a lot of money in China to buy video games.
You can consider the E.U. as a single economy, but for a product that needs to be localized it's not really a single market.
Count the number of American cars that come in a version with the steering wheel on the right (remember Japan drives on the left just like England).
Jeep started making Cherokees and Grand Cherokees with the steering on the right and you see a boatload of them on the streets here in Tokyo. Not much else in the way of American cars usually but there are lots (and I means lots) of Mercedes, BMW's and Audi's as well.
Japan has a protectionist economy, that's very true, but Detroit has done it's damndest not to compete in this market as well.
Compatibility testing is a major nightmare for an app the size of Oracle. Especially for an app that is not supposed to fail or lose data. Also, Oracle is an app that is supposed to run FAST. There's a lot of tuning that needs to go on to make it work across multiple architectures.
Your idea would be even worse for cars, since you would prohibit all second-hand car sales since they do not give enough money back to the car manufacturer and canibalise their new car sales. In the country where I live, a lot of people buy their cars second-hand, and the price difference would be nasty if they had to get the manufacturers permission. Copyright doesn't apply to cars (except for the "intellectual property" inside of them) and I don't see why "distributionright" would either. I would see "distributionright" as applying to information and meaning the copying and distribution of information. The right of first sale doctrine should be preserved for information (I bought it, I can sell it).
As for "Tesco vs Levis" again, I don't see why copyright or distributionright would be involved. A product was bought and is being resold. The case made by Levi's was based on trademark protection, not protection and thanks to some brain-dead EU law.
Things have gotten really nutty at the intersection of computers and "copyright". Once upon a time, copying a book or movie was a step that was not a normal part of usage. Today, as we've moved to a digital world copying is THE basic mechanism for accessing anything in a digital medium. However, because we are stuck on the word "copyright" we start getting these nutty cases.
I believe that the right answer is to replace "copyright" with "distributionright". Make as many copies of anything as you like for yourself. Control shouldn't be on "copying" but on "distributing". The rules would have to be tweaked appropriately to handle companies but I think that this would be a much more sensible concept.
Well, unsubscribing to Scientific American was the right thing to do but Forward is generally credited as the first person to tie lasers and solar sails together One source that I have ("The Starflight Handbook") credits him with talking about these shortly after the invention of the laser in 1960. As you mentioned, Niven, Pournelle and Forward were friends and Niven credits a number of ideas he used in fiction to Forward.
A large amount of Niven's fiction starts with some scientific theory or fact that he found out. The talent is that he can build a world and wrap a story around that idea that is enjoyable reading and is still fun even if the theory is later discredited (e.g. his story "The Coldest Place"). Forward's forays into fiction were chock-a-block with ideas and facts but the writing itself was downright embarassing at times. I stopped reading Scientific American when they stopped publishing real scientific papers edited into a readable state and instead filled their pages with tripe written by half-educated "journalists".
Disks are getting cheaper faster than tapes. The cost ratio between disks and tapes used to be over 10x even after you added in things like robotics for tape management. Now, just comparing bare IDE drives to bare tape cartridges, it's more like 2x. Add in the infrastructure costs (robotics vs disk arrays) and you'll find that the cost ratio is even less.
For home users and small business, disk is cheaper on a byte-per-byte basis as the amount of backup space they need is small and the cost of a (usable - I don't want to talk about USB attached tape...though at least it's better than parallel port attached tape drives) tape drive system are high.
The problem with the whole airline security mess is that they are trying to secure a very large area with the goal being to keep out less than 1/1000 of 1% of the people - and that group of people is not known. It simply doesn't make any sense. Military bases and other secure areas work by keep out 99% of the population and those who are allowed in are reasonably well checked. Trying to keep out an unknown.001% is impossible.
The old system worked reasonably well. During the 9/11 hijackings no guns, bombs, chemical mace, swords, stun guns or other major weapons were used. The security system worked. The failure wasn't in the security system - it was in how the flying populace was trained to react to a hijacking. Five guys with box cutters will not be able to take over an airplane again.
This new measure will make it easier for frequent flyers to put up with the current nonsense, allowing the TSA to perpetuate itself while offering no real security. There is no way you can keep hijackers off an airplane because YOU DON'T KNOW WHO THEY ARE. We have been successful in keeping them from having any major weapons. That, combined with the new attitude passengers will take towards hijackers are sufficient.
The next terrorist act in the U.S. will not involve airplanes. That barn door doesn't need any more shutting.
How much money have private launch groups wasted? I believe that the SpaceShip One budget is in the range of $2 million. That's with an "m". Dennis Tito paid the Russian $2 million dollars for a RIDE in a Soyuz to get to orbit. A shuttle launch (1 launch) costs between $200 million and $500 million depending on whose accounting you believe.
DC-X (managed by the SDIO - Strategic Defence Initiation Office) ran to about $60 million and at least produced a technology demonstrator that flew (it wasn't full scale but you could at least test the concepts and get some experience with running the thing). NASA managed to get ahold of the program and 1) terminated development and then 2) broke the damn prototype.
After NASA managed to destroy the DC-X program they substituted the X-33 VentureStar pork program. The X-33 Venturestar program cost $900 million. And never even produced a fully assembled vehicle.
NASA does not have a manned, reusable suborbital flight system capable of carrying three people that costs less than $200 million per flight. In fact, there has never been one in the history of the world. (X-15 only carried the pilot)
What blueprints should Rutan and others have followed? A Titan II costs $43 million to launch. And then you don't have a Titan II anymore. Hell, a Pegasus launch costs about $13 million.
Rutan's following an amazing program - he and his team have built SOMETHING THAT FLIES! No, it doesn't go to orbit and no it doesn't do a real re-entry yet. But guess what, it FLIES! And given Rutan's track record I'm quite sure that this infrastructure that he built for SS1 is designed to support an SS2 that does more. My hat's off to him.
In any event, the money wasted by private launch groups has been just that - private. It's didn't come from the government trough. I think you should applaud those people who have been willing to fund the dream in the face of enormous obstacles both technical and political.
As Jerry Pournelle said, reporting on the first flights of the Douglas DCX (a prototype SSTO,{Single Stage to Orbit} spacecraft: "it lands on its tailfins, as God and Robert Heinlein intended."
In the digital world, if it's not an optical viewer then the image is being taken from the sensor, so "SLR" is irrelevant: what you see is what you get on all digital viewers -- they're using the imaging sensor.
That's true and not a problem when everything is still. However if you're either panning the camera around to catch something or the action is fast, how quickly the viewfinder responds become an issue. Also, with an SLR you don't burn any power running the viewfinder.
Well, when the DVD was introduced the support of the computer industry was a must to bring it to market. Why? In order to get to $79 DVD players (or even $300 DVD players) a large market was required to get the economies of scale needed. Without the computer market the DVD would not have gotten there as quickly and may never have gotten there.
Have you ever tried reading a patent? I actually have two that I was lead inventor on when I was working at Apple. When the lawyers got through with the application I couldn't figure out what we had patented and I suspect we didn't actually patent anything. Since all I got was a pat on the back and (I think) $1000 per patent I really didn't care if the patent wasn't good for anything.
In any case, the original poster was talking about a refund of the RE-examination fee. That's the fee you pay when you challenge a patent. I think it's reasonable to have it refunded to the challenger. They can charge it to the parties filing the bogus patent.
Actually I wish this agreement would make us the 51st state, because then we would have some rights coming our way such as a proper constitution and a bill of right Eh, you're too late for that. The Bill of Rights has been trampled on pretty well of late.
You, yeah you, you're an enemy combatant now - no rights for you!
Yah, and there was that time we made a trip to Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Labs to do some stuff. They have guards with guns and barbed wire, and they give you little laminated ID cards. They even weigh you and put that on the card. When you drive in after leaving the check-in area the guards have to feel all of your passes to make sure they're legit. To get the passes, though, they wanted ID's from all of us and one of our group had recently lost his driver's license. But, he had his CostCo card! They took that.
That was back when I was working at General Atomics. We also had nuclear materials in various places on the campus, however cars kept getting stolen from the secure parking lot. And then there was the time one of our visitors (from LLNL) lost his badge and jumped the (5 foot high) fence. We really expected a visit from security after that, but no....
Well, there's a lot of hardware that is supposed to maintain that centralized secret interlock and command authority through a nuclear attack. There's "Looking Glass", the airborne command post, NORAD under Cheyenne Mountain, Air Force 1 and probably a couple of others I can't think of off-hand. These were all designed to ride out a nuclear attack and be able to get orders out to all the nuclear forces.
There's a real difference between looking at a measure and, in the light of day, rejecting it and pretending to put something in place that was mandated by the civilian authorities.
If you really think it only takes one password to launch an american military nuke (even if we were in the 60s), you're totally mislead.
Now wait a minute, who has been misled here? One layer of security was complete and utter bullshit - and the Secretary of Defense who had it installed didn't know. How many other layers were complete and utter bullshit?
Not only that, but this was the moral equivalent of a military coup against the elected government. The PALs were there to prevent the military from launching without authorization from the National Command Authority (i.e. the President or his successor).
Don't be silly. The kernel is not popping up those boxes for you. That's the application asking the user to authenticate. If you can find an exploitable hole that lets a program run as root it's got exactly the same possibilites as a Linux kernel exploit.
The good thing is that the basic kernel is fairly robust, however I wonder how much looking people have really done at the Mach side of it. The BSD layer, being BSD based, is fairly secure but as far as I know the only major user of Mach these days is Apple.
Hmmm...and you're so right you felt the need to post anonymously.
Aliases are a lot more than symlinks. They're kind of a hybrid between hard links and symlinks plus some extra stuff. An alias contains a file ID, plus the path to the file plus info about the volume it's mounted from. If you rename a file or move a file the alias will still point to it. If you delete the file and make a new one with the same name, the path will resolve and it will point to it. If the volume is unmounted it will attempt to remount it.
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Scuse me? Japan is about 125 million people - Germany is about 82. That's 50% more than Germany. Japanese GDP is about $2.95 trillion vs Germany's 1.9 trillion, again about 50% more.
China is currently the number 2 economy GDP wise, at $4 trillion, however, that's spread over 1.25 billion people so the disposable income is pretty low. Not a lot of money in China to buy video games.
You can consider the E.U. as a single economy, but for a product that needs to be localized it's not really a single market.
Count the number of American cars that come in a version with the steering wheel on the right (remember Japan drives on the left just like England).
Jeep started making Cherokees and Grand Cherokees with the steering on the right and you see a boatload of them on the streets here in Tokyo. Not much else in the way of American cars usually but there are lots (and I means lots) of Mercedes, BMW's and Audi's as well.
Japan has a protectionist economy, that's very true, but Detroit has done it's damndest not to compete in this market as well.
Compatibility testing is a major nightmare for an app the size of Oracle. Especially for an app that is not supposed to fail or lose data. Also, Oracle is an app that is supposed to run FAST. There's a lot of tuning that needs to go on to make it work across multiple architectures.
Good article - I'm glad someone else is thinking hard on this too!
Your idea would be even worse for cars, since you would prohibit all second-hand car sales since they do not give enough money back to the car manufacturer and canibalise their new car sales. In the country where I live, a lot of people buy their cars second-hand, and the price difference would be nasty if they had to get the manufacturers permission.
Copyright doesn't apply to cars (except for the "intellectual property" inside of them) and I don't see why "distributionright" would either. I would see "distributionright" as applying to information and meaning the copying and distribution of information. The right of first sale doctrine should be preserved for information (I bought it, I can sell it).
As for "Tesco vs Levis" again, I don't see why copyright or distributionright would be involved. A product was bought and is being resold. The case made by Levi's was based on trademark protection, not protection and thanks to some brain-dead EU law.
Things have gotten really nutty at the intersection of computers and "copyright". Once upon a time, copying a book or movie was a step that was not a normal part of usage. Today, as we've moved to a digital world copying is THE basic mechanism for accessing anything in a digital medium. However, because we are stuck on the word "copyright" we start getting these nutty cases.
I believe that the right answer is to replace "copyright" with "distributionright". Make as many copies of anything as you like for yourself. Control shouldn't be on "copying" but on "distributing". The rules would have to be tweaked appropriately to handle companies but I think that this would be a much more sensible concept.
Well, unsubscribing to Scientific American was the right thing to do but Forward is generally credited as the first person to tie lasers and solar sails together One source that I have ("The Starflight Handbook") credits him with talking about these shortly after the invention of the laser in 1960. As you mentioned, Niven, Pournelle and Forward were friends and Niven credits a number of ideas he used in fiction to Forward.
A large amount of Niven's fiction starts with some scientific theory or fact that he found out. The talent is that he can build a world and wrap a story around that idea that is enjoyable reading and is still fun even if the theory is later discredited (e.g. his story "The Coldest Place"). Forward's forays into fiction were chock-a-block with ideas and facts but the writing itself was downright embarassing at times.
I stopped reading Scientific American when they stopped publishing real scientific papers edited into a readable state and instead filled their pages with tripe written by half-educated "journalists".
Disks are getting cheaper faster than tapes. The cost ratio between disks and tapes used to be over 10x even after you added in things like robotics for tape management. Now, just comparing bare IDE drives to bare tape cartridges, it's more like 2x. Add in the infrastructure costs (robotics vs disk arrays) and you'll find that the cost ratio is even less.
For home users and small business, disk is cheaper on a byte-per-byte basis as the amount of backup space they need is small and the cost of a (usable - I don't want to talk about USB attached tape...though at least it's better than parallel port attached tape drives) tape drive system are high.
Who do you think made all the 8mm tape drives? Those were all Sony internals.
The problem with the whole airline security mess is that they are trying to secure a very large area with the goal being to keep out less than 1/1000 of 1% of the people - and that group of people is not known. It simply doesn't make any sense. Military bases and other secure areas work by keep out 99% of the population and those who are allowed in are reasonably well checked. Trying to keep out an unknown .001% is impossible.
The old system worked reasonably well. During the 9/11 hijackings no guns, bombs, chemical mace, swords, stun guns or other major weapons were used. The security system worked. The failure wasn't in the security system - it was in how the flying populace was trained to react to a hijacking. Five guys with box cutters will not be able to take over an airplane again.
This new measure will make it easier for frequent flyers to put up with the current nonsense, allowing the TSA to perpetuate itself while offering no real security. There is no way you can keep hijackers off an airplane because YOU DON'T KNOW WHO THEY ARE. We have been successful in keeping them from having any major weapons. That, combined with the new attitude passengers will take towards hijackers are sufficient.
The next terrorist act in the U.S. will not involve airplanes. That barn door doesn't need any more shutting.
SS1 _is_ a secondary vehicle. White Knight is the turbojet powered launch aircraft. A whole lot cheaper than a B-52.
SpaceShipOne is a lot closer to a Cessna than it is to a Space Shuttle. Seriously.
This is a good thing. You worry a lot less about breaking a Cessna.
How much money have private launch groups wasted? I believe that the SpaceShip One budget is in the range of $2 million. That's with an "m". Dennis Tito paid the Russian $2 million dollars for a RIDE in a Soyuz to get to orbit. A shuttle launch (1 launch) costs between $200 million and $500 million depending on whose accounting you believe.
DC-X (managed by the SDIO - Strategic Defence Initiation Office) ran to about $60 million and at least produced a technology demonstrator that flew (it wasn't full scale but you could at least test the concepts and get some experience with running the thing). NASA managed to get ahold of the program and 1) terminated development and then 2) broke the damn prototype.
After NASA managed to destroy the DC-X program they substituted the X-33 VentureStar pork program. The X-33 Venturestar program cost $900 million. And never even produced a fully assembled vehicle.
NASA does not have a manned, reusable suborbital flight system capable of carrying three people that costs less than $200 million per flight. In fact, there has never been one in the history of the world. (X-15 only carried the pilot)
What blueprints should Rutan and others have followed? A Titan II costs $43 million to launch. And then you don't have a Titan II anymore. Hell, a Pegasus launch costs about $13 million.
Rutan's following an amazing program - he and his team have built SOMETHING THAT FLIES! No, it doesn't go to orbit and no it doesn't do a real re-entry yet. But guess what, it FLIES! And given Rutan's track record I'm quite sure that this infrastructure that he built for SS1 is designed to support an SS2 that does more. My hat's off to him.
In any event, the money wasted by private launch groups has been just that - private. It's didn't come from the government trough. I think you should applaud those people who have been willing to fund the dream in the face of enormous obstacles both technical and political.
As Jerry Pournelle said, reporting on the first flights of the Douglas DCX (a prototype SSTO,{Single Stage to Orbit} spacecraft: "it lands on its tailfins, as God and Robert Heinlein intended."
handing the guy the nominal 5 quid cover charge
So he can pour them down the drain for you? Not having the chemicals to dispose of does seem just a wee bit easier, yes.
In the digital world, if it's not an optical viewer then the image is being taken from the sensor, so "SLR" is irrelevant: what you see is what you get on all digital viewers -- they're using the imaging sensor.
That's true and not a problem when everything is still. However if you're either panning the camera around to catch something or the action is fast, how quickly the viewfinder responds become an issue. Also, with an SLR you don't burn any power running the viewfinder.
Well, when the DVD was introduced the support of the computer industry was a must to bring it to market. Why? In order to get to $79 DVD players (or even $300 DVD players) a large market was required to get the economies of scale needed. Without the computer market the DVD would not have gotten there as quickly and may never have gotten there.
Have you ever tried reading a patent? I actually have two that I was lead inventor on when I was working at Apple. When the lawyers got through with the application I couldn't figure out what we had patented and I suspect we didn't actually patent anything. Since all I got was a pat on the back and (I think) $1000 per patent I really didn't care if the patent wasn't good for anything.
In any case, the original poster was talking about a refund of the RE-examination fee. That's the fee you pay when you challenge a patent. I think it's reasonable to have it refunded to the challenger. They can charge it to the parties filing the bogus patent.
Actually I wish this agreement would make us the 51st state, because then we would have some rights coming our way such as a proper constitution and a bill of right
Eh, you're too late for that. The Bill of Rights has been trampled on pretty well of late.
You, yeah you, you're an enemy combatant now - no rights for you!
Yah, and there was that time we made a trip to Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Labs to do some stuff. They have guards with guns and barbed wire, and they give you little laminated ID cards. They even weigh you and put that on the card. When you drive in after leaving the check-in area the guards have to feel all of your passes to make sure they're legit. To get the passes, though, they wanted ID's from all of us and one of our group had recently lost his driver's license. But, he had his CostCo card! They took that.
That was back when I was working at General Atomics. We also had nuclear materials in various places on the campus, however cars kept getting stolen from the secure parking lot. And then there was the time one of our visitors (from LLNL) lost his badge and jumped the (5 foot high) fence. We really expected a visit from security after that, but no....
Well, there's a lot of hardware that is supposed to maintain that centralized secret interlock and command authority through a nuclear attack. There's "Looking Glass", the airborne command post, NORAD under Cheyenne Mountain, Air Force 1 and probably a couple of others I can't think of off-hand. These were all designed to ride out a nuclear attack and be able to get orders out to all the nuclear forces.
There's a real difference between looking at a measure and, in the light of day, rejecting it and pretending to put something in place that was mandated by the civilian authorities.
If you really think it only takes one password to launch an american military nuke (even if we were in the 60s), you're totally mislead.
Now wait a minute, who has been misled here? One layer of security was complete and utter bullshit - and the Secretary of Defense who had it installed didn't know. How many other layers were complete and utter bullshit?
Not only that, but this was the moral equivalent of a military coup against the elected government. The PALs were there to prevent the military from launching without authorization from the National Command Authority (i.e. the President or his successor).
And how many of these were REALLY implemented? After all, didn't you believe that the PAL's did something?
Don't be silly. The kernel is not popping up those boxes for you. That's the application asking the user to authenticate. If you can find an exploitable hole that lets a program run as root it's got exactly the same possibilites as a Linux kernel exploit.
The good thing is that the basic kernel is fairly robust, however I wonder how much looking people have really done at the Mach side of it. The BSD layer, being BSD based, is fairly secure but as far as I know the only major user of Mach these days is Apple.
Hmmm...and you're so right you felt the need to post anonymously.
Aliases are a lot more than symlinks. They're kind of a hybrid between hard links and symlinks plus some extra stuff. An alias contains a file ID, plus the path to the file plus info about the volume it's mounted from. If you rename a file or move a file the alias will still point to it. If you delete the file and make a new one with the same name, the path will resolve and it will point to it. If the volume is unmounted it will attempt to remount it.
Dumbass