Sorry removal of the offending code usually suffices. You are repeating a false premise that MS and others try to spread to create fear, uncertainty and doubt (about GPL'ed software), i.e. a.k.a.: FUD.
It is a bit more complex than that.
In the ordinary course of things you can probably convince a court that inadvertent infringement on a small scale should not result in a major damages award. This is after all what most people on the pro-Linux side have been maintaining all along. The minute that SCO actually state with specificity the code they claim is stolen in Linux the code will be gone in a New York Miniute.
But the whole SCO case amply demonstrates that Microsoft has a point. The GPL is certainly good for creating a SCO like FUD lawsuit that can be used to obtain discovery powers and burn huge quantities of legal fees. The best corporate lawyers I have worked with are the ones who avoid the lawsuits in the first place. From that point of view the GPL is a real tar baby and RMS has told me personally that this was essentially his intention all along.
I don't think that things are quite as simple for SCO in this particular circumstance. The problem is that they are going to the court arguing that IBM has damaged SCO by allegedly stealling copyright material from them. If IBM can establish that SCO has been stealling copyright material from others then there are some major consequences.
The first of these is that SCO has presumably had to execute an affidavit in which they claim that they have good title to the code in question. If IBM can prove that title is questionable they score important points. If IBM can prove that SCO acted in bad faith with respect to the title then there is a sizable chance that the whole suit gets thrown out.
At this point of course we are still waiting for SCO to actually state with specificity what parts of the code infringes. And I strongly suspect that SCO will never tell.
"The professors at my school are certainly not afraid to fail people; only 4 CS students in my class (of about 200 incoming) will be graduating next year"
That is a demonstration of utterly incompetent teaching. If more than 30% of your class fails it is a sign that either the selection criteria for the course are wrong or the teaching was incompetent.
There are a few countries where there is guaranteed university admission and so the first year of university is essentially a selection process. But even there a 2% graduation rate would be considered unacceptable.
Same with telephone calls. My girlfriend thought I was mad when I just hung up on someone trying to sell me double glazing.
Salesdroid: I'm calling from crappy replacement windows
Me: Not interested
Salesdroid: But (starts reading sales sheet)
Me: Not for here
Salesdroid: But (continues reading sales sheet)
Me: Not for here
Salesdroid: Do you have double glasing
Me: No, and I don't want to
Salesdroid: Why not?
Me: This is a public pay phone at a camping site. Do you have any models that fit a tent?
The way I read it, he's not taking the bullet, he's taking up the fight - he's not being subpoenad, he's subpoenaing (is that even a word?) them, to challenge their patent on prior art grounds.
No, I will be subpoened. I was a member of the CERN Web team and my name is all over the threads on that particular topic. Plus the lawyers know who I am after the previous cases.
They might subpoena Tim but I doubt it. Tim was much more engaged on the big picture stuff at that time. He does not have an idetic memory for chapter and verse on the articles.
Doesn't matter, because you are still making pilots coffee and sending THEM to do the diry work
There appears to be something of a disconnect between your expectations of what a modern war is and the type of wars that NATO has been involved in of late.
Wars are not over when someone decides to hold a victory parade. Wars are only over when the loosing side accepts they have lost. That means boots on the ground.
If you join up expect to be doing your share of the dirty work regardless of what role you are in.
This looks like its going to be my third stupid patent subpoena this year.
I have prior art from 1992.
MIT has prior art from 1994, the open meeting.
Re:Straight up career advice for this field
on
Infosec Career Hacking
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
3. Leave military after 4 years
What about the part where this does not happen because the 'stop loss' order prevents you from leaving the service until after the Vietnam^d^d^d^d^d^d^dIraq war is over?
I haven't heard much of flawed data in highly esteemed printed encyclopedia (though I'm quite sure there must be some mistakes in such media as well).
There are plenty of historical examples of ridiculous content, especially in Britannica which was originally written to glorify the British monarch and all his dominons...
The main problem with wiki is that there are contentious issues where the system does break down. But even there the content tends to be rather more useful than you would get in Britannica where articles are much more likely to only give one side of the argument.
I don't like the idea of freezing contentious content. Earlier today I was reading the Robert Novak page and found that someone had already updated it to describe the hissy-fit walkout he threw. That is good and something you cannot get from any other source. Some pages are locked for obviously partisan reasons.
I think that what they need to do is to introduce time delays for pages that are mega-contenious. So graffiti can be removed before it makes it to the main display page.
No, that would be the FAA, an entirely different kettle of fish.
Nope, the restriction on using cell phones on planes has nothing to do with the FAA, never has. The restriction on using electronic devices is an FAA issue but the cell phone restriction has always been FCC.
The reason the cell phone restriction was introduced was the early cell systems had not been designed to cope with people moving from one cell to another at 600 mph. So to avoid the cost of fixing their systems the carriers got the FCC to pass the regulation prohibiting use of cell phones on planes. Then they pursaded the airlines to install the GTE Airphone systems charging $5/min.
Many airlines attribute the rule to the FAA in their pre-flight announcements but that just shows they didn't check the real source. I found out about all this talking to the lawyers for a large airplane company working on putting Internet service in planes. i think they are more likely to be right than the stewardess reading from a card.
I'm sorry, how is the Welfare system *Walmart's* fault!!?? And who is forcing these people to work at Walmart?
Walmart was recently found to be illegally hiring foreign workers without visas to clean its stores. The contract prices were set well below minimum wage.
Using illegal imigrants as cheap labor is unfair competition. Of course the Bush 'Justice' department agreed to drop the charges for a token sum and to provide advance notice of any future investigation.
Similar to how those automotive worker unions get fair wages at the expense of bankrupting their employer who cannot afford to compete in the market due having to inflate prices in order to cover their bloated employee overhead?
Actually the US car industry has most recently been losing jobs to Canada. It turns out that Toyota finds it more profitable to operate in places that have a decent education system than low wage, low investment Alabama.
Meanwhile high wage Costco has been rather more successful than its rival BJ.
The real crisis facing the US auto industry is the cumulative result of under investment. For the past decade they have made huge profits churning out expensively priced 'SUVs' on assembly lines designed to build cheap lightweight trucks. Now they are being forced to compete against imported SUVs that are purpose designed buyers are asking why they should pay more for a US vehicle that drives like a truck rather than a vehicle with decent handling.
People are so obsessed with the numbers that show on their paycheck that they forget that their work habbits are creeping into their personal lives and causing serious issues.
You appear to misunderstand what the NRLB is chartered to do. Its purpose is to protect the rights of employees to organize and form unions. It does not have a charter that allows it to rule on employment contracts in general.
The real issue here is that the Bush administration has a history of attempting to make it easier for employers like WalMart to prevent attempts by employees to unionize and demand a fair wage for their work. This in turn hurts taxpayers like you and me who are forced to subsidize corporations like WalMart that pay so little that most of their staff are on welfare. I don't shop at Walmart but I still have to pay their employees, how screwed up is that?
What happened in this case was that a security firm tried to stop their employees from organizing by prohibiting them from meeting outside work. It has nothing at all to do with professionalism or the image of the company. The only reason for the rules was to stop workers from organizing.
The Bush administration appointees on the NRLB supported a rulling that would allow the security firm to effectively prevent employees from organizing outside work through the pretext of prohibiting dating.
I don't think it is at all likely that this type of rule would ever come to IT. The industry does not have a history of organizing and if people were to decide they needed to organize they could do so through the Internet if there were attempts to prohibit meeting in bars. Trying this type of stunt would be the type of thing that would be likely to start people organizing.
Liberty cannot exist without security. Therefore, this statement makes no sense. Threat of physical harm while performing an activity that one should be free to do, dissuades someone from performing that activity. Therefore, liberty is lost.
The key words in the phrase are essential liberty.
It does not appear to me that CAFTA deals with any issue that Franklin would have considered an essential liberty. Franklin was talking about freedom of speech and due process of law.
On the other hand Franklin would no doubt be saying that imprisonment without trial, military tribunals and the use of torture were exactly the type of abuses that the constitution was drafted to prevent.
There is a big difference between national security and a pretext for a power grab by the executive. The administration does not seem to have much interest in Osama Bin Forgotten, except when it comes to getting the vote out for elections.
Without the explanation in TFA, I would have interpreted "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run" as the motto of people still hanging onto their pre-pentium machines, unwilling to upgrade to any GUI until they couldn't run their old DOS apps anymore. There were quite a number in the '90s who wouldn't upgrade to Windows 3.10 or 95 because, heck, they didn't see a need.
I thought the claim was Windows era rather than DOS, but the fact that no Lotus people can remember a problem is significant. It really never made any sense for Microsoft to sabotage the killer app for the IBM PC, which 1-2-3 was.
Lotus themselves sabotaged 1-2-3, they refused to invest in development of a GUI version for either Windows or OS/2. They were waiting to see which camp won. Microsoft was openly critical of this policy and did all they could to get Lotus to join their camp. Microsoft made money off Excel for Mac at the time but it was not a serious contender on the IBM PC platform.
There was something of a resource issue running Windows 3.1 on pre-pentium class machines. There was also a serious reliability issue, the machines would just lock up all of a sudden. But at that time pre OS-X the problem was much worse on the Mac.
Slashdot isn't a multi-hundred-billion-dollar corporation with a stranglehold monopoly on the desktop operating system market.
No, its a bunch of whiny people who spend 85% of their time bitching about how evil hundred billion dollar corporations with a stranglehold monopoly do not respect standards. 10% of their time whining about them for other reasons and 5% of their time whining about the fact that everyone they know seems to be kind of whiny.
I seem to remember something written somewhere about motes, beams and optical interfaces...
Panera have a solution to the crowding problem, they turn off the WiFi at lunch time. We go there every Monday while the cleaners are doing the house. We do not spend any longer now they have WiFi than before but I do go at other times during the week and I frequently hold business meetings at Paneras.
If a coffee shop has a problem with people who stay too long they need to look at what they do at peep shows. They should have a Faraday cage around each seat with a little flap that stays open while you feed coins into the meter. As soon as your time runs out you get shut off.
Cisco seems to suffer from the same stupidity that most other large corporations do. They'll take a report, and sit on it for weeks, and sometimes months. Full Disclosure is usually the only way to get them to actually fix the issues in a timely manner.
Ten years ago this was an issue. Sun was still shipping a copy of Sendmail with three year old known vulnerabilities. That was par for the course. Today the situation is very different, most manufacturers do take security seriously. 'Full Disclosure' is more about people massaging their own egos.
The vast majority of bugs fixed in Microsoft patches are bugs Microsoft themselves have found and fixed. In fact the patches themselves are the main source of exploits. As soon as the patches are released there are hackers reverse engineering them. We see the hackers preparing for patch Tuesday: they probe looking for machines that might be running software that has been announced as a subject of a patch. The minute the exploit is ready they attack everything.
Set dates for bringing out patches appears to improve security. It means that every sysop knows when the patches are due to come out and can plan for them.
Full disclosure is a crock. This does not however excuse Cisco's actions which are idiotic.
Just because you're mostly deaf, don't assume everyone else is. My 2year old would say "Dad, play the good sounding music". She didn't know anything about tech, just what sounded right.
BTW, I have a PhD in Electrical Engineering. When I first heard people say that vinyl could be (emphasis COULD BE) better than CD, I too thought they were full of it. Then, fully convinced to the contrary, I listened. I had been wrong.
Vinyl was a fetish medium. The records were essentially good for one or two plays after which any high fidelity was lost.
If you read the description of the laser turntable you will see how even with a laser dirt and dust dominate the sound reproduction. Whiuzz! Crackle! Pop! Pop!
Of course the answer is to buy a record cleaner. Only that pretty much negates the advantage of your zero contact laser pickup.
I don't think it is the death of US space travel at all, but the russians may have a point with using capsules ala' Saturn V.
The big advantage with the 'disposable' route is that the amount of mass that has to be got to the final orbit is much much less than the amount necessary with the space station.
Also the heat shield can be much much smaller and more importantly protected during lift off.
The space shuttle costs more to launch than a fully disposable rocket would be. It is vastly more complex and complexity means opportunities for failure.
The future of space flight is either going to return to the disposable rocket or make use of the hybrid 'piggyback' type system where an air plane is used for the initial launch and then a rocket is used to kick up to final orbit.
Actually Stodartt was not the first person to think about reading a vinyl recod using a laser, or even the first to succeed. Philips did this for VIDEO with Laservision.
While working on the Laservision scheme the Philips engineers realized that what they should do instead is completely redesign the system from scratch. They joined up with a group of Sony engineers working on a similar project and the result is known as Compact Disc.
What this guy has done is to turn his floppy drive into (part of) a gramophone. In other words he has turned a recently obsolete technology into an even more obsolete technology.
Vinyl records were a dreadful technology. They scratched, they wore out and the sound from them was distorted in all sorts of ways by the production process. Worst of all they allowed 'audiophiles' an excuse to spend $15,000 plus on equipment and then brag about it at tedious length.
The high end market for audio equipment is essentially a high tech version of the fortune teller industry. The service is essentially a fraud; if there is a difference in sound it is negligible. People pay for it because of the flummery thaqt surrounds it.
This guy has just discovered that you can get a high quality motor for about a buck.
Why not fight fire with fire? These scum have placed themselves outside of the "law" (such as it is when applied to the 'net), and so should not be protected by it. I say do whatever works
The reason that these schemes always fail is that they have no way to determine the real source of the spam. So what they amount to is a denial of service attack that can be targetted at will.
The Lycos spam vigilante scheme was blackholed after a bunch of hackers took over the command node and started to target entirely innocent sites. Lycos has denied this was the case but the people who put the block in place have told me that the opposite.
Even the targetting is exact there will be a lot of innocent people affected. The spammers use hijacked machines.
Bill Gates scooped up the VMS team. My bet is that BG is already on site and trying hard to pick up these folks.
Folk like Kay get an open invitation to join Microsoft research and do pretty much anything they want. A handful of other companies routinely make similar offers - IBM, Disney for example.
Having been in a company without enough resources to put my own ideas into action I basically had two choices, leave for a 'Trophy' job or try and build my company into something that was capable of realizing my ideas.
If you are someone like Kay and the company does not have the ability to promote your ideas its much better to walk than to stay. Kay can in any case charge $35-$50K for keynote addresses and at least $10K per appearence for smaller gigs.
Kay is not the only person to be laid off. There are other people I would go after first.
What is much more interesting is the comments about the IETF, which I agree, has been/is being turned into a facilitator for corporate agendas.
The only corporation happy with the IETF is Cisco. Pretty much every other major company is much more engaged in other forums. There are far more IBM, Sun and Microsoft people in OASIS and W3C WGs than in IETF.
The problem with the IETF is that it is not delivering the goods for any constituency. The IPR policy is the least OSS friendly of all the major forums. The real cause of the IPR issues in MARID was that the IPR policy was being set at too low a level. The Microsoft lawyers might well have been able to accept an IETF wide IPR policy that was negotiated in the same manner as the OASIS and W3C policies. The problem with the MARID approach was that there was no incentive for a Microsoft lawyer to enter negotiations that would only set precedents that disadvantage Microsoft in the future. Microsoft would be required to give terms at least as generous in every future standard group but they could not rely on being offered the same terms.
DNSSEC has languished for a decade. IPSEC has seen only limited deployment as a second rate VPN protocol - SSH tunnelling works much better. There is no coherent deployment strategy for IPv6 and no sign of one being developed. BGP security is hopeless and none of the solutions on offer are workable.
The real problem is that the whole system was set up without any accountability. All the appointments to the IESG and IAB are made by NOMCON which is chosen by lot. The idea is to make sure that the IESG and IAB are not held accountable to the membership. It has also ensured a very high rate of incumbency until very recently.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a bit more complex than that.
In the ordinary course of things you can probably convince a court that inadvertent infringement on a small scale should not result in a major damages award. This is after all what most people on the pro-Linux side have been maintaining all along. The minute that SCO actually state with specificity the code they claim is stolen in Linux the code will be gone in a New York Miniute.
But the whole SCO case amply demonstrates that Microsoft has a point. The GPL is certainly good for creating a SCO like FUD lawsuit that can be used to obtain discovery powers and burn huge quantities of legal fees. The best corporate lawyers I have worked with are the ones who avoid the lawsuits in the first place. From that point of view the GPL is a real tar baby and RMS has told me personally that this was essentially his intention all along.
I don't think that things are quite as simple for SCO in this particular circumstance. The problem is that they are going to the court arguing that IBM has damaged SCO by allegedly stealling copyright material from them. If IBM can establish that SCO has been stealling copyright material from others then there are some major consequences.
The first of these is that SCO has presumably had to execute an affidavit in which they claim that they have good title to the code in question. If IBM can prove that title is questionable they score important points. If IBM can prove that SCO acted in bad faith with respect to the title then there is a sizable chance that the whole suit gets thrown out.
At this point of course we are still waiting for SCO to actually state with specificity what parts of the code infringes. And I strongly suspect that SCO will never tell.
That is a demonstration of utterly incompetent teaching. If more than 30% of your class fails it is a sign that either the selection criteria for the course are wrong or the teaching was incompetent.
There are a few countries where there is guaranteed university admission and so the first year of university is essentially a selection process. But even there a 2% graduation rate would be considered unacceptable.
Salesdroid: I'm calling from crappy replacement windows
Me: Not interested
Salesdroid: But (starts reading sales sheet)
Me: Not for here
Salesdroid: But (continues reading sales sheet)
Me: Not for here
Salesdroid: Do you have double glasing
Me: No, and I don't want to
Salesdroid: Why not?
Me: This is a public pay phone at a camping site. Do you have any models that fit a tent?
Nah
CERN Online Phone Directory 1991
CERN VMS Help Mechanism 1991
CERN Web Interactive Talk 1993
CERN Email interface for VMS 1993
CERN CVS Interface 1993
MIT Open Meeting 1994
Etc. Ad nauseam.
No, I will be subpoened. I was a member of the CERN Web team and my name is all over the threads on that particular topic. Plus the lawyers know who I am after the previous cases.
They might subpoena Tim but I doubt it. Tim was much more engaged on the big picture stuff at that time. He does not have an idetic memory for chapter and verse on the articles.
There appears to be something of a disconnect between your expectations of what a modern war is and the type of wars that NATO has been involved in of late.
Wars are not over when someone decides to hold a victory parade. Wars are only over when the loosing side accepts they have lost. That means boots on the ground.
If you join up expect to be doing your share of the dirty work regardless of what role you are in.
I know of plenty of prior art from that period. Like several hundred items.
I have prior art from 1992.
MIT has prior art from 1994, the open meeting.
What about the part where this does not happen because the 'stop loss' order prevents you from leaving the service until after the Vietnam^d^d^d^d^d^d^dIraq war is over?
There are plenty of historical examples of ridiculous content, especially in Britannica which was originally written to glorify the British monarch and all his dominons...
The main problem with wiki is that there are contentious issues where the system does break down. But even there the content tends to be rather more useful than you would get in Britannica where articles are much more likely to only give one side of the argument.
I don't like the idea of freezing contentious content. Earlier today I was reading the Robert Novak page and found that someone had already updated it to describe the hissy-fit walkout he threw. That is good and something you cannot get from any other source. Some pages are locked for obviously partisan reasons.
I think that what they need to do is to introduce time delays for pages that are mega-contenious. So graffiti can be removed before it makes it to the main display page.
Nope, the restriction on using cell phones on planes has nothing to do with the FAA, never has. The restriction on using electronic devices is an FAA issue but the cell phone restriction has always been FCC.
The reason the cell phone restriction was introduced was the early cell systems had not been designed to cope with people moving from one cell to another at 600 mph. So to avoid the cost of fixing their systems the carriers got the FCC to pass the regulation prohibiting use of cell phones on planes. Then they pursaded the airlines to install the GTE Airphone systems charging $5/min.
Many airlines attribute the rule to the FAA in their pre-flight announcements but that just shows they didn't check the real source. I found out about all this talking to the lawyers for a large airplane company working on putting Internet service in planes. i think they are more likely to be right than the stewardess reading from a card.
Walmart was recently found to be illegally hiring foreign workers without visas to clean its stores. The contract prices were set well below minimum wage.
Using illegal imigrants as cheap labor is unfair competition. Of course the Bush 'Justice' department agreed to drop the charges for a token sum and to provide advance notice of any future investigation.
Actually the US car industry has most recently been losing jobs to Canada. It turns out that Toyota finds it more profitable to operate in places that have a decent education system than low wage, low investment Alabama.
Meanwhile high wage Costco has been rather more successful than its rival BJ.
The real crisis facing the US auto industry is the cumulative result of under investment. For the past decade they have made huge profits churning out expensively priced 'SUVs' on assembly lines designed to build cheap lightweight trucks. Now they are being forced to compete against imported SUVs that are purpose designed buyers are asking why they should pay more for a US vehicle that drives like a truck rather than a vehicle with decent handling.
You appear to misunderstand what the NRLB is chartered to do. Its purpose is to protect the rights of employees to organize and form unions. It does not have a charter that allows it to rule on employment contracts in general.
The real issue here is that the Bush administration has a history of attempting to make it easier for employers like WalMart to prevent attempts by employees to unionize and demand a fair wage for their work. This in turn hurts taxpayers like you and me who are forced to subsidize corporations like WalMart that pay so little that most of their staff are on welfare. I don't shop at Walmart but I still have to pay their employees, how screwed up is that?
What happened in this case was that a security firm tried to stop their employees from organizing by prohibiting them from meeting outside work. It has nothing at all to do with professionalism or the image of the company. The only reason for the rules was to stop workers from organizing.
The Bush administration appointees on the NRLB supported a rulling that would allow the security firm to effectively prevent employees from organizing outside work through the pretext of prohibiting dating.
I don't think it is at all likely that this type of rule would ever come to IT. The industry does not have a history of organizing and if people were to decide they needed to organize they could do so through the Internet if there were attempts to prohibit meeting in bars. Trying this type of stunt would be the type of thing that would be likely to start people organizing.
The key words in the phrase are essential liberty.
It does not appear to me that CAFTA deals with any issue that Franklin would have considered an essential liberty. Franklin was talking about freedom of speech and due process of law.
On the other hand Franklin would no doubt be saying that imprisonment without trial, military tribunals and the use of torture were exactly the type of abuses that the constitution was drafted to prevent.
There is a big difference between national security and a pretext for a power grab by the executive. The administration does not seem to have much interest in Osama Bin Forgotten, except when it comes to getting the vote out for elections.
I thought the claim was Windows era rather than DOS, but the fact that no Lotus people can remember a problem is significant. It really never made any sense for Microsoft to sabotage the killer app for the IBM PC, which 1-2-3 was.
Lotus themselves sabotaged 1-2-3, they refused to invest in development of a GUI version for either Windows or OS/2. They were waiting to see which camp won. Microsoft was openly critical of this policy and did all they could to get Lotus to join their camp. Microsoft made money off Excel for Mac at the time but it was not a serious contender on the IBM PC platform.
There was something of a resource issue running Windows 3.1 on pre-pentium class machines. There was also a serious reliability issue, the machines would just lock up all of a sudden. But at that time pre OS-X the problem was much worse on the Mac.
No, its a bunch of whiny people who spend 85% of their time bitching about how evil hundred billion dollar corporations with a stranglehold monopoly do not respect standards. 10% of their time whining about them for other reasons and 5% of their time whining about the fact that everyone they know seems to be kind of whiny.
I seem to remember something written somewhere about motes, beams and optical interfaces...
If a coffee shop has a problem with people who stay too long they need to look at what they do at peep shows. They should have a Faraday cage around each seat with a little flap that stays open while you feed coins into the meter. As soon as your time runs out you get shut off.
Ten years ago this was an issue. Sun was still shipping a copy of Sendmail with three year old known vulnerabilities. That was par for the course. Today the situation is very different, most manufacturers do take security seriously. 'Full Disclosure' is more about people massaging their own egos.
The vast majority of bugs fixed in Microsoft patches are bugs Microsoft themselves have found and fixed. In fact the patches themselves are the main source of exploits. As soon as the patches are released there are hackers reverse engineering them. We see the hackers preparing for patch Tuesday: they probe looking for machines that might be running software that has been announced as a subject of a patch. The minute the exploit is ready they attack everything.
Set dates for bringing out patches appears to improve security. It means that every sysop knows when the patches are due to come out and can plan for them.
Full disclosure is a crock. This does not however excuse Cisco's actions which are idiotic.
Vinyl was a fetish medium. The records were essentially good for one or two plays after which any high fidelity was lost.
If you read the description of the laser turntable you will see how even with a laser dirt and dust dominate the sound reproduction. Whiuzz! Crackle! Pop! Pop!
Of course the answer is to buy a record cleaner. Only that pretty much negates the advantage of your zero contact laser pickup.
The big advantage with the 'disposable' route is that the amount of mass that has to be got to the final orbit is much much less than the amount necessary with the space station.
Also the heat shield can be much much smaller and more importantly protected during lift off.
The space shuttle costs more to launch than a fully disposable rocket would be. It is vastly more complex and complexity means opportunities for failure.
The future of space flight is either going to return to the disposable rocket or make use of the hybrid 'piggyback' type system where an air plane is used for the initial launch and then a rocket is used to kick up to final orbit.
While working on the Laservision scheme the Philips engineers realized that what they should do instead is completely redesign the system from scratch. They joined up with a group of Sony engineers working on a similar project and the result is known as Compact Disc.
What this guy has done is to turn his floppy drive into (part of) a gramophone. In other words he has turned a recently obsolete technology into an even more obsolete technology.
Vinyl records were a dreadful technology. They scratched, they wore out and the sound from them was distorted in all sorts of ways by the production process. Worst of all they allowed 'audiophiles' an excuse to spend $15,000 plus on equipment and then brag about it at tedious length.
The high end market for audio equipment is essentially a high tech version of the fortune teller industry. The service is essentially a fraud; if there is a difference in sound it is negligible. People pay for it because of the flummery thaqt surrounds it.
This guy has just discovered that you can get a high quality motor for about a buck.
The reason that these schemes always fail is that they have no way to determine the real source of the spam. So what they amount to is a denial of service attack that can be targetted at will.
The Lycos spam vigilante scheme was blackholed after a bunch of hackers took over the command node and started to target entirely innocent sites. Lycos has denied this was the case but the people who put the block in place have told me that the opposite.
Even the targetting is exact there will be a lot of innocent people affected. The spammers use hijacked machines.
Folk like Kay get an open invitation to join Microsoft research and do pretty much anything they want. A handful of other companies routinely make similar offers - IBM, Disney for example.
Having been in a company without enough resources to put my own ideas into action I basically had two choices, leave for a 'Trophy' job or try and build my company into something that was capable of realizing my ideas.
If you are someone like Kay and the company does not have the ability to promote your ideas its much better to walk than to stay. Kay can in any case charge $35-$50K for keynote addresses and at least $10K per appearence for smaller gigs.
Kay is not the only person to be laid off. There are other people I would go after first.
The only corporation happy with the IETF is Cisco. Pretty much every other major company is much more engaged in other forums. There are far more IBM, Sun and Microsoft people in OASIS and W3C WGs than in IETF.
The problem with the IETF is that it is not delivering the goods for any constituency. The IPR policy is the least OSS friendly of all the major forums. The real cause of the IPR issues in MARID was that the IPR policy was being set at too low a level. The Microsoft lawyers might well have been able to accept an IETF wide IPR policy that was negotiated in the same manner as the OASIS and W3C policies. The problem with the MARID approach was that there was no incentive for a Microsoft lawyer to enter negotiations that would only set precedents that disadvantage Microsoft in the future. Microsoft would be required to give terms at least as generous in every future standard group but they could not rely on being offered the same terms.
DNSSEC has languished for a decade. IPSEC has seen only limited deployment as a second rate VPN protocol - SSH tunnelling works much better. There is no coherent deployment strategy for IPv6 and no sign of one being developed. BGP security is hopeless and none of the solutions on offer are workable.
The real problem is that the whole system was set up without any accountability. All the appointments to the IESG and IAB are made by NOMCON which is chosen by lot. The idea is to make sure that the IESG and IAB are not held accountable to the membership. It has also ensured a very high rate of incumbency until very recently.