Bakhrubabad, Afghanistan - Speaking from his hidden mountain stronghold, Osama bin Laden praised the destruction of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector Tuesday. The terrorist leader said neutrinos are "...an abomination on the face of God," and termed the search for neutrinos "...idolatry, which will be smashed beneath the fist of righteousness." Bin Laden, who once called neutrinos "little messengers of Allah" abruptly reversed his stand upon learning that a steady stream of neutrinos was constantly penetrating every cell in his body. He now vows "not to rest until the last neutrino has been obliterated from the face of the earth."
This is about legal technicalities, not principles
on
Are Videogames Art?
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· Score: 2
This discussion isn't really about whether computer games are art, it's about whether the concept of computer games as art could be the basis for legal tactics against other people's equally bogus legal tactics. The concept of art has been applied to so many things that it really doesn't mean anything any more. Art is like religion in that it can be attached to almost anything and nobody is supposed to question the sincerity. Garbage, shit and rotting meat have all been exhibited as art in actual art galleries.
So sure, computer games are art. Campaign spin doctoring is art. Closing a real estate deal is art. Drunk driving is performance art. Suing Napster is art, censorship is art, and this post is art. Why not.
I sure would like to see more discussion about the overall intellectual property system and less moralizing and preaching from one soapbox or another. Pollux touches on it in his comments about the broadcasting business model. Yes, maybe the business model is wrong. Maybe the whole intellectual property model is wrong, and I mean in the sense of brokenness not in the sense of wrongdoing. I'm not trying to be the little voice of socialism or hacker utopia, I am simply saying that technology has opened holes in some of the basic assumptions that underlie economics. Like the holes in airport security, they've always been there waiting for somebody to step through them.
What made the broadcasting industry possible was not the invention of the technology, it was that the expense of operating the technology limited its use to a few people who could afford to invest in it. Same with the recording industry and the publishing industry. The whole copymaking and distribution business is what made intellectual property a meaningful idea in the first place. Go all the way back to the printing press. If Gutenberg's invention had been so cheap and simple that virtually anybody could reel off as many copies of anything they wanted, the whole copyright concept itself probably wouldn't exist today. We never would have had a publishing industry with investments to protect, motivated to turn copyright into a holy word.
We have the concept of IP because technology was developed in a certain order. Expand your mind a little. Instead of the knee-jerk "what about artist's rights?" reaction, try to forget for a moment that you ever heard of intellectual property. A minstrel wanders into your village and sings a song in a tavern. A storyteller tells a story. They leave town. The local minstrels and storytellers repeat the material, then they wander off to other towns, etc. The performers get paid to perform, in fact some of them might make more money than the creators of the material (no ethical problem there -- the copymaking industry does that in the real world). But the songs and the stories themselves are just sort of floating around in the air. They aren't intellectual property, but they also aren't public property, they aren't even property at all. They are just part of your culture.
So in the hypothetical model time passes and someone invents the Internet, and suddenly you can zip this material off to your cousin in the next village effortlessly. Nobody gets majorly bothered because the fact of who created the material is not economically significant in this model. The minstrels and storytellers can keep doing their thing as long as people still value live performance.
When you separate the fundamental ideas from those that are merely customary (or lucrative), the righteous moralizing everybody has been doing on all sides of IP issues starts to sound like arguing over whether Superman could outrun the Flash. Maybe the real truth is that there is no such thing as "Intellectual Property" at all. Or to borrow from Galaxy Quest, "There is no quantum flux, there is no auxiliary, there's no God Damn Ship!"
Intellectual property is not a god-given right, it's not a "given" at all. It's an investment protection mechanism that was invented by investors, not inventors. At some point we have to move on. The economy would be a lot different without IP, but nobody really knows how. On the other hand, cars and trains might not exist if the concept of "wheeled travel" had been treated as the intellectual property of whoever invented the wagon.
IP appears to be breaking, if not broken already. IP isn't an axiom or a law of nature, it's a tradition. The really disappointing thing is that most of the bright people who could be thinking up a different system seem to be spending their time arguing over how the contracts are written.
Last year, when the Microsoft cafeterias decided to remove alfalfa sprouts from their sandwich bar, they CLAIMED it was due to risk of e. coli. At that time I believed them, but now that I am no longer exposed to the Gas Of Obedience pumped through their air conditioning systems I know that it was part of their plan to control the world. Microsoft's social engineering team no doubt recognized that eating alfalfa sprouts instead of good old iceberg lettuce in a sandwich is the first step on the road to being a tree-hugging, tofu-munching, freeware-trafficking Windows hacking, hippie-ass communist faggot.
Having squashed the alfalfa sprout menace, their obvious next step would be to expunge (remove, extract, eliminate, cleanse) words such as "idiot" from the thesaurus.
In this darkly ominous display of Big Brother arrogance, they have apparently granted themselves, the publishers of a reference work, the right to edit it as they see fit, without submitting it for peer review to everybody in the world who speaks English and might have an issue with it. Those bastards.
Companies are suing each other with stupid claims of patent infringement. Ok, ok, ok. Okay! OKAY!!!
I guess it's possible that the people who make patent rulings are going to listen to our opinions about how stupid these claims are. Maybe the word "representative" in the phrase "congressional representative" refers to representing the public interest. Maybe professional wrestling is real too. I'll have to give these possibilities some thought.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the world, other things are happening.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you didn't visit his site. The size and complexity more than justify his claim to being a geek. Lots of other people do their own websites because they want to, why not an actor?
BTW, for a trip WAAAYY farther down memory lane, check out Angela Cartrwright's site (Penny on Lost in Space in the 60's).
One of the things that has always been broken about the world is that undoing a problem created by some asshole ALWAYS takes WAY more trouble than it took the asshole to create the problem in the first place. Even if you succeed in prosecuting somebody who victimized you, you really never end up in the plus column. So what if the guy spends a few years in prison, eating free food and watching cable tv furnished at your expense. No matter how sincerely sorry he is, or how well reformed he is, or how many times he gets butt-fucked while he's in there, it still doesn't get you back the money he took from you, or your stolen computer, power tools, CD collection, etc. They all went up his nose or wherever. They are gone. All you get is the satisfaction that he paid his debt (not to you) to society. Whoopie fuckin doo.
Crime has been a problem throughout the history of civilization, yet we've made far more progress with problems we didn't even know about until the last century. Progress in the criminal justice system is measured in terms of the sophistication of investigative procedures. Things like DNA testing, chemical analysis, arson reconstruction. All brilliant stuff, to be sure. But the process you have to go through when somebody rips you off in some way is like rubbing two sticks together.
I know I am lumping the criminal system and the civil system together, so sue me, I'm not a lawyer. What I'm saying is that although our legal system is a hell of a lot more complicated than it was a hundred years ago, I don't think it has proportionately improved the world. If anything, it is now easier to fuck somebody up and harder to do something about it.
Imagine how much nicer life would be if the legal system had advanced during the 20th century as much as our knowledge of electricity or medicine. The system wouldn't just be more complex, it would work a lot better. AMAZINGLY better. After having all these thousands of years to work on the system, legal procedures should be as trivial as cash machines. Punishment and compensation should be as simple as committing the crime in the first place. Instead of assholes getting away with shit because it's too much trouble to stop them, what if it were the other way around? Now wouldn't that be a nice piece of progress?
I sure wish some legal genius or social scientist would think of something truly revolutionary, as revolutionary as inventing transistors or Stripe toothpaste. Imagine a patent like, "A system by which the effects of being screwed with can be nullified with trivial effort." Whoever comes up with this can have just about any reward they want as far as I'm concerned. Yes, this does sound like a complete fantasy, but no more so than television, artificial hearts or entangled photons. They happened, so what's the deal?
Consider that 2 years ago I was telling my friends that the next Star Trek series should be set in a time before the Captain Kirk era, when warp drive technology was new and they hadn't met very many aliens yet. I said they should use shuttlecraft a lot because the transporter would be new and unreliable, and the ship's doctor would be a Vulcan woman who attended Earth medical school to study humans. Ok, I got the doctor part wrong, and I saw her as an older wise-woman type rather than another petulant, skintight space babe. But not bad for a geek fan.
When Wesley Crusher took off with that dimensional traveller alien, I thought it would be interesting if he eventually returned as a sort of wandering enlightened character, roaming the Star Trek universe like Kane in the old Kung Fu series. Has anything like that ever been discussed by people who matter, and would you do it?
It's nice to see a few people within the structure bowing out of it and giving clear, rant-less reasons why. It will be great if this sort of thing is someday remembered as a step toward the kind of change the Internet was supposed to be about.
In the early days of the web, the publishing industry was supposed to become moribund because anyone could now publish. The web was going to be the great social equalizer. But when the teeming masses got on the web that picture changed. Pioneers may shun established structures, but the general public seeks them out and instinctively supports them. The RIAA and others can write regulations for the electronics industry. No problem. Geeks can go to jail for explaining math to other geeks. No problem.
If the web actually does change the way the publishing system operates, rather than the other way around, it will be a visible piece of evidence that people don't really need their gods. That would be a genuine cultural revolution.
Wow, interesting stuff. Getting drug companies etc. to invest in space might be a good reason for these tax breaks. But the reality is more likely that the companies are buying them from legislators, like always.
I've said it before. Napster was once a great thing, but for the past year it's been little more than a testing platform for the copyright ownership industry. The best thing Napster could do for the world of file sharing would be to give up and shut down.
In my opinion Martin Hellman is no more responsible for the WTC bombings than Rod Serling, who originated the idea of airline hijacking in his 1966 movie, "The Doomsday Flight."
For the rest of his life Serling regretted putting this concept into the public mind. But it was only a matter of time before somebody figured it out. At that time there were no metal detectors. Airports were like high-class bus stations. It wasn't Serling's fault that the security systems we have become accustomed to, as well as those we are going to start seeing now, are installed only after damage has been done rather than after the warnings have been sounded.
Like it or not, we have had the technology tiger by the tail for a long time. Cropdusting planes were grounded nationwide this weekend because of the possibility of biochemical attack. Why now? Cropdusting planes and biochemical weapons have both been around for ages. The possibility of putting them together didn't just pop into existence last week. It's one of many things that the authorities have long known could happen, probably will happen, but hasn't happened yet so no need to alarm people.
I'm sure quite a number of freedoms we have long enjoyed, simply because nobody has figured out how to wreak mayhem with them, will be going away soon. But don't blame it on Martin Hellman or Rod Serling, or the first proto-human who noticed that you could use a stick to hit stuff with. Blame it on the fact that some people are just assholes.
Is there such a thing as corporate morality?
on
Morals and Layoffs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The only "capitalist ethic" is that the terms of a contract must be honored. Corporate loyalty is a recent concept, borrowed from socialism as a kind of advertising theme, like corporate social responsibility in general. In practice, an employer and employee are independent parties with a contract between them that specifies limited cooperation for mutual benefit. Each tries to negotiate the terms of this contract to their own greatest advantage. Your talents, experience and your time are your capital. A job, health benefits, stock plans, etc. are the company's capital. You make a contract, and when it's over it's over.
The idea that a company owes something to former employees has nothing to do with capitalism. It's completely in the realm of social theory, which should apply equally to an individual's behavior. How much do you owe your high school teachers after graduation? What about the guys you used to play basketball with every week? Maybe these folks did a lot for you then, but this is now, and you have new friends. You have kids now. There's only so much time.
People who run companies are responsible for obeying the law and honoring their contracts, and that's all, same as everybody else. Whether people try to influence corporate morality by legislation, or by our behavior as consumers of products, or as consumers of employment, or through any other method, corporations will never be responsible for doing more than they have to.
Launch conditions on Kodiak Island are roughly the same as at Vandenburg, as the Alaska Aerospace site explains. This is because of warm ocean currents from Japan.
Speaking of commitment to education, I sure wish more slashdotters would bother to read the articles, not just the postings, before reeling off comments. But what do I know.
A satellite in a polar orbit makes repeated passes over every part of the world, which is highly useful for photography etc. A satellite in elliptical orbit can swing very close to the Earth at apogee and do high resolution photography, and if the elliptical orbit is inclined slightly from polar (a Molniya orbit), the apogee eventually tracks the whole planet's surface. So geosynchronous orbits, while useful, are not the only ones worth doing. The Kodiak Island spaceport is in a good launch position for these types of orbits.
The machinations around the SSSCA remind me of the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, created through the efforts of big players Andrew Mellon, the DuPont family and William Randolph Hearst to protect their own business interests, which were eing threatened by technological advances in the hemp industry. Lots of history here and here. It's nice to know some things haven't changed since my grandpa was a little boy, like democracy and yankee ingenuity.
Slashdot Mirror
Bakhrubabad, Afghanistan - Speaking from his hidden mountain stronghold, Osama bin Laden praised the destruction of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector Tuesday. The terrorist leader said neutrinos are "...an abomination on the face of God," and termed the search for neutrinos "...idolatry, which will be smashed beneath the fist of righteousness." Bin Laden, who once called neutrinos "little messengers of Allah" abruptly reversed his stand upon learning that a steady stream of neutrinos was constantly penetrating every cell in his body. He now vows "not to rest until the last neutrino has been obliterated from the face of the earth."
This discussion isn't really about whether computer games are art, it's about whether the concept of computer games as art could be the basis for legal tactics against other people's equally bogus legal tactics. The concept of art has been applied to so many things that it really doesn't mean anything any more. Art is like religion in that it can be attached to almost anything and nobody is supposed to question the sincerity. Garbage, shit and rotting meat have all been exhibited as art in actual art galleries.
So sure, computer games are art. Campaign spin doctoring is art. Closing a real estate deal is art. Drunk driving is performance art. Suing Napster is art, censorship is art, and this post is art. Why not.
I sure would like to see more discussion about the overall intellectual property system and less moralizing and preaching from one soapbox or another. Pollux touches on it in his comments about the broadcasting business model. Yes, maybe the business model is wrong. Maybe the whole intellectual property model is wrong, and I mean in the sense of brokenness not in the sense of wrongdoing. I'm not trying to be the little voice of socialism or hacker utopia, I am simply saying that technology has opened holes in some of the basic assumptions that underlie economics. Like the holes in airport security, they've always been there waiting for somebody to step through them.
What made the broadcasting industry possible was not the invention of the technology, it was that the expense of operating the technology limited its use to a few people who could afford to invest in it. Same with the recording industry and the publishing industry. The whole copymaking and distribution business is what made intellectual property a meaningful idea in the first place. Go all the way back to the printing press. If Gutenberg's invention had been so cheap and simple that virtually anybody could reel off as many copies of anything they wanted, the whole copyright concept itself probably wouldn't exist today. We never would have had a publishing industry with investments to protect, motivated to turn copyright into a holy word.
We have the concept of IP because technology was developed in a certain order. Expand your mind a little. Instead of the knee-jerk "what about artist's rights?" reaction, try to forget for a moment that you ever heard of intellectual property. A minstrel wanders into your village and sings a song in a tavern. A storyteller tells a story. They leave town. The local minstrels and storytellers repeat the material, then they wander off to other towns, etc. The performers get paid to perform, in fact some of them might make more money than the creators of the material (no ethical problem there -- the copymaking industry does that in the real world). But the songs and the stories themselves are just sort of floating around in the air. They aren't intellectual property, but they also aren't public property, they aren't even property at all. They are just part of your culture.
So in the hypothetical model time passes and someone invents the Internet, and suddenly you can zip this material off to your cousin in the next village effortlessly. Nobody gets majorly bothered because the fact of who created the material is not economically significant in this model. The minstrels and storytellers can keep doing their thing as long as people still value live performance.
When you separate the fundamental ideas from those that are merely customary (or lucrative), the righteous moralizing everybody has been doing on all sides of IP issues starts to sound like arguing over whether Superman could outrun the Flash. Maybe the real truth is that there is no such thing as "Intellectual Property" at all. Or to borrow from Galaxy Quest, "There is no quantum flux, there is no auxiliary, there's no God Damn Ship!"
Intellectual property is not a god-given right, it's not a "given" at all. It's an investment protection mechanism that was invented by investors, not inventors. At some point we have to move on. The economy would be a lot different without IP, but nobody really knows how. On the other hand, cars and trains might not exist if the concept of "wheeled travel" had been treated as the intellectual property of whoever invented the wagon.
IP appears to be breaking, if not broken already. IP isn't an axiom or a law of nature, it's a tradition. The really disappointing thing is that most of the bright people who could be thinking up a different system seem to be spending their time arguing over how the contracts are written.
Rant completed.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but would even a hard-coded max of 70 actually limit anyone's use of Windows in any meaningful sense?
An example of how this limitation would affect anybody would be interesting.
Last year, when the Microsoft cafeterias decided to remove alfalfa sprouts from their sandwich bar, they CLAIMED it was due to risk of e. coli. At that time I believed them, but now that I am no longer exposed to the Gas Of Obedience pumped through their air conditioning systems I know that it was part of their plan to control the world. Microsoft's social engineering team no doubt recognized that eating alfalfa sprouts instead of good old iceberg lettuce in a sandwich is the first step on the road to being a tree-hugging, tofu-munching, freeware-trafficking Windows hacking, hippie-ass communist faggot.
Having squashed the alfalfa sprout menace, their obvious next step would be to expunge (remove, extract, eliminate, cleanse) words such as "idiot" from the thesaurus.
In this darkly ominous display of Big Brother arrogance, they have apparently granted themselves, the publishers of a reference work, the right to edit it as they see fit, without submitting it for peer review to everybody in the world who speaks English and might have an issue with it. Those bastards.
Yeah right. Like anybody who publishes ANY thesaurus, dictionary or encyclopedia doesn't have the right to edit out whatever they want. Get a brain.
Then most American airports and airlines are guilty of the same thing for the same reasons.
Companies are suing each other with stupid claims of patent infringement. Ok, ok, ok. Okay! OKAY!!! I guess it's possible that the people who make patent rulings are going to listen to our opinions about how stupid these claims are. Maybe the word "representative" in the phrase "congressional representative" refers to representing the public interest. Maybe professional wrestling is real too. I'll have to give these possibilities some thought. Meanwhile, somewhere in the world, other things are happening.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you didn't visit his site. The size and complexity more than justify his claim to being a geek. Lots of other people do their own websites because they want to, why not an actor?
BTW, for a trip WAAAYY farther down memory lane, check out Angela Cartrwright's site (Penny on Lost in Space in the 60's).
One of the things that has always been broken about the world is that undoing a problem created by some asshole ALWAYS takes WAY more trouble than it took the asshole to create the problem in the first place. Even if you succeed in prosecuting somebody who victimized you, you really never end up in the plus column. So what if the guy spends a few years in prison, eating free food and watching cable tv furnished at your expense. No matter how sincerely sorry he is, or how well reformed he is, or how many times he gets butt-fucked while he's in there, it still doesn't get you back the money he took from you, or your stolen computer, power tools, CD collection, etc. They all went up his nose or wherever. They are gone. All you get is the satisfaction that he paid his debt (not to you) to society. Whoopie fuckin doo.
Crime has been a problem throughout the history of civilization, yet we've made far more progress with problems we didn't even know about until the last century. Progress in the criminal justice system is measured in terms of the sophistication of investigative procedures. Things like DNA testing, chemical analysis, arson reconstruction. All brilliant stuff, to be sure. But the process you have to go through when somebody rips you off in some way is like rubbing two sticks together.
I know I am lumping the criminal system and the civil system together, so sue me, I'm not a lawyer. What I'm saying is that although our legal system is a hell of a lot more complicated than it was a hundred years ago, I don't think it has proportionately improved the world. If anything, it is now easier to fuck somebody up and harder to do something about it.
Imagine how much nicer life would be if the legal system had advanced during the 20th century as much as our knowledge of electricity or medicine. The system wouldn't just be more complex, it would work a lot better. AMAZINGLY better. After having all these thousands of years to work on the system, legal procedures should be as trivial as cash machines. Punishment and compensation should be as simple as committing the crime in the first place. Instead of assholes getting away with shit because it's too much trouble to stop them, what if it were the other way around? Now wouldn't that be a nice piece of progress?
I sure wish some legal genius or social scientist would think of something truly revolutionary, as revolutionary as inventing transistors or Stripe toothpaste. Imagine a patent like, "A system by which the effects of being screwed with can be nullified with trivial effort." Whoever comes up with this can have just about any reward they want as far as I'm concerned. Yes, this does sound like a complete fantasy, but no more so than television, artificial hearts or entangled photons. They happened, so what's the deal?
And the answer is, uh...
Ok Beavis, I give up.
If you can still find them. We played as a team and enjoyed figuring things out together.
Even if she had given him a blowjob behind the warp core. Can you say "Wil, Ashley's lawyer on line 2" ??
The geekess, without a doubt, equally attractive or not. The character Jordan in the movie Real Genius.
Consider that 2 years ago I was telling my friends that the next Star Trek series should be set in a time before the Captain Kirk era, when warp drive technology was new and they hadn't met very many aliens yet. I said they should use shuttlecraft a lot because the transporter would be new and unreliable, and the ship's doctor would be a Vulcan woman who attended Earth medical school to study humans. Ok, I got the doctor part wrong, and I saw her as an older wise-woman type rather than another petulant, skintight space babe. But not bad for a geek fan.
When Wesley Crusher took off with that dimensional traveller alien, I thought it would be interesting if he eventually returned as a sort of wandering enlightened character, roaming the Star Trek universe like Kane in the old Kung Fu series. Has anything like that ever been discussed by people who matter, and would you do it?
It's nice to see a few people within the structure bowing out of it and giving clear, rant-less reasons why. It will be great if this sort of thing is someday remembered as a step toward the kind of change the Internet was supposed to be about.
In the early days of the web, the publishing industry was supposed to become moribund because anyone could now publish. The web was going to be the great social equalizer. But when the teeming masses got on the web that picture changed. Pioneers may shun established structures, but the general public seeks them out and instinctively supports them. The RIAA and others can write regulations for the electronics industry. No problem. Geeks can go to jail for explaining math to other geeks. No problem.
If the web actually does change the way the publishing system operates, rather than the other way around, it will be a visible piece of evidence that people don't really need their gods. That would be a genuine cultural revolution.
Wow, just think what this could mean for the personal vibrator industry!
Wow, interesting stuff. Getting drug companies etc. to invest in space might be a good reason for these tax breaks. But the reality is more likely that the companies are buying them from legislators, like always.
I've said it before. Napster was once a great thing, but for the past year it's been little more than a testing platform for the copyright ownership industry. The best thing Napster could do for the world of file sharing would be to give up and shut down.
In my opinion Martin Hellman is no more responsible for the WTC bombings than Rod Serling, who originated the idea of airline hijacking in his 1966 movie, "The Doomsday Flight."
For the rest of his life Serling regretted putting this concept into the public mind. But it was only a matter of time before somebody figured it out. At that time there were no metal detectors. Airports were like high-class bus stations. It wasn't Serling's fault that the security systems we have become accustomed to, as well as those we are going to start seeing now, are installed only after damage has been done rather than after the warnings have been sounded.
Like it or not, we have had the technology tiger by the tail for a long time. Cropdusting planes were grounded nationwide this weekend because of the possibility of biochemical attack. Why now? Cropdusting planes and biochemical weapons have both been around for ages. The possibility of putting them together didn't just pop into existence last week. It's one of many things that the authorities have long known could happen, probably will happen, but hasn't happened yet so no need to alarm people.
I'm sure quite a number of freedoms we have long enjoyed, simply because nobody has figured out how to wreak mayhem with them, will be going away soon. But don't blame it on Martin Hellman or Rod Serling, or the first proto-human who noticed that you could use a stick to hit stuff with. Blame it on the fact that some people are just assholes.
The only "capitalist ethic" is that the terms of a contract must be honored. Corporate loyalty is a recent concept, borrowed from socialism as a kind of advertising theme, like corporate social responsibility in general. In practice, an employer and employee are independent parties with a contract between them that specifies limited cooperation for mutual benefit. Each tries to negotiate the terms of this contract to their own greatest advantage. Your talents, experience and your time are your capital. A job, health benefits, stock plans, etc. are the company's capital. You make a contract, and when it's over it's over.
The idea that a company owes something to former employees has nothing to do with capitalism. It's completely in the realm of social theory, which should apply equally to an individual's behavior. How much do you owe your high school teachers after graduation? What about the guys you used to play basketball with every week? Maybe these folks did a lot for you then, but this is now, and you have new friends. You have kids now. There's only so much time.
People who run companies are responsible for obeying the law and honoring their contracts, and that's all, same as everybody else. Whether people try to influence corporate morality by legislation, or by our behavior as consumers of products, or as consumers of employment, or through any other method, corporations will never be responsible for doing more than they have to.
Speaking of commitment to education, I sure wish more slashdotters would bother to read the articles, not just the postings, before reeling off comments. But what do I know.
The Alaska Aerospace website is really interesting, and nice looking too.
The machinations around the SSSCA remind me of the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, created through the efforts of big players Andrew Mellon, the DuPont family and William Randolph Hearst to protect their own business interests, which were eing threatened by technological advances in the hemp industry. Lots of history here and here. It's nice to know some things haven't changed since my grandpa was a little boy, like democracy and yankee ingenuity.