Aha, but a market with the DMCA is not a "free market". A truly free market is one in which government only steps in to ensure its free-ness. In the case of the DMCA, the government has stepped in to protect a special interest from competition and elasticity of demand. That is BAD.
My point is that the market can make itself non-free just as easily without government intervention. This is regularly overlooked by so-called "free market" types, whose ideology begins and ends with taking the gov't out of the equation.
In many cases, bad government regulations like the DMCA are just icing.
It went away when the "customers" became "consumers" and stopped caring about the quality of product and service that they received.
It went away when customers stopped getting a choice in the matter. Present a nation full of so-called uncaring customers with a convenient system for downloading music off of the internet (Napster), you'll find that millions will start to pay attention.
Take that sort of choice away and put them back in a world where the content industry determines the parameters of the deal and the electronics industry dances along, you get a populace of helpless, unconcerned idiots.
That's the problem with the "free market". Choices are bad for business, and the average consumer can't build his own CD player (and if he could, there'd be a DMCA to stop him.)
My comment got mangled because I used a "less than" bracket in it. What I said in the missing part was (more or less):
I don't know if reimplementation counts as "innovation". Microsoft has a long history of reimplementing other people's ideas in their own code and selling them with innovative business techniques. But I'm not terribly impressed with their technical innovation.
I also pointed out that their implementation was very tiny (less than 4k), which is both a good thing and an indication that it wasn't a massive accomplishment (they did it with two people in a relatively short period of time.)
Everything Microsoft ever sold (with the possible exception of that first BASIC interpreter) they either bought or stole
BASIC was invented by John Kemmeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College. They implemented it as a compiler, and it was later adopted as an interpreter on a number of minicomputers and microcomputers.
Microsoft's contribution was to reimplement a very tiny (
But they have yet to impress me with any actual technical innovation.
I don't see why people expect companies to donate information that costs them to find.
Your obligation is to protect your customers. Allowing a worm to spread free on the Internet potentially endangers your customers, even if you do give them the relevant info. Even if a company protects its own servers, it's still vulnerable to DDoS and bandwidth floods from other infected machines, and it might be infected due to some administrator's failure to heed the warning.
I see no reason why restricting this information to corporate clients and letting everyone else go to hell does any party a service. It seems like a really backwards way to do business-- let an infection run wild just to make your own research team look a little more valuable. I sure wouldn't want to do business with such a company.
PS It's possible that Symantec might not have been able to prevent the spread of the worm, but why not at least try?
I don't think it should count as a derivitave work, but you shouldn't be able to copy it.
Ok, here I don't understand you. In this case, what I meant by "derivative work" is one that contains new copyrighted material in addition to material from a previous document. So if the changes you've made are copyrightable, you've got a derivative work. If they're non-copyrightable, you can't prevent people from copying it.
This of course would be impossible to prove, but if you imagine a large work (say the complete LoTR trilogy). Between editions, they changed the spellings of elves, to elfs (because JRR invented the word elves) and then back to elves when someone figured out he spelled it that way intentionally.
Lexis/Nexis, etc, do introduce minor spelling changes that they then use to screen for unauthorized redistributions. The spelling changes themselves aren't necessarily enough to qualify for copyright protection, but page numbers and simple pagination is.
A more serious example in my my would be real formatting and pagination.
I think you're right when it comes to extreme examples; for instance, I shouldn't be able to redistribute image files of a formatted work. And in the rare case where massive pagination has been undertaken, I suppose I could support your case.
Adding a few page numbers and slight reformatting should not be enough.
Yes, I know the law. If you read my post, you'd see I'm arguing that it should be changed. Let me repeat the last paragraph of my previous post:
I propose a small modification to modern copyright laws that requires individuals to make more than minor changes to qualify their derivative gov't work for copyrights. Adding page numbers, minor formatting and spelling should all be discounted. Copyrights on such material should be granted only where substantial original material has been offered and that offering advances progress. Essentially, we would roll back the copyright laws to the original level specified by the first Congress, but only wrt gov't documents.
What I'm saying here is that the current situation is less than ideal. The bar required to create a valid "derivative work" has come down too far, and it should be raised-- at least in the case of gov't-produced works. Minor formatting and page numbers should not be considered "original" enough to constitute a valid copyright, especially where the material is probably designed simply to prevent redistribution for purposes of financial gain-- rather than to actually advance the progress of arts and sciences.
It's like saying the water company shouldn't be allowed to charge for a natural resource which is rightfully everyone's. Again, you're paying for the service of bringing it to you.
However, imagine that the water company makes it illegal for you to buy their water and redistribute it to your friends and neighbors (not because you signed a service agreement, mind you, but because they can abuse Federal legislation to bring about that result.)
In this case I'm talking about copyright, which these companies regularly misuse to taint public domain documents so as to make them un-redistributable. Where new, substantially original material (case summaries, analysis) is added, this is reasonable. Where the changes are not substantial (page numbers, for instance) and entirely aimed at preventing redistribution for financial gain, it's abusive.
PS Your example is lousy, of course, because water is a limited resource owned by the public, and water companies are traditionally heavily regulated as a result. But I'll let it slide.
It is beyond dispute that Lexis, Westlaw, et al. do not own any copyright to public records-- i.e. the actual text of the case decisions... The public is not deprived of access to the actual law
Haven't there been several cases where laws were actually purchased from private organizations (building codes, etc.) and then publishers were sued for redistributing copies w/o a copyright? This isn't a rant against Lexis/Nexis, but it is possible for private orgs to own copyright to public laws, AFAIK.
What they do own-- and rightly charge for-- are enhancements they provide: case summaries, research aids, and, yes, the text in a searchable electronic database.
How about page numbers? Minor formatting changes? Rephrases? Two-word summaries at the begginings of major sections? All intended not to "enhance" the material, but to increase profitability by making it non-distributable. All of the above have been used as justification for new copyrights on public domain material.
their versions were copyrighted, just like a map maker can copyright a map. Following with that analogy, their versions (I believed) even contained intentional, hopefully harmless typographical errors to prove up theft.
And that, right there, is the one valid complaint about Lexis/Nexis. They should be perfectly free to offer this text, categorize it and provide it with a nice search engine for any amount of money they want to charge. They should not be free to introduce insignificant changes (like adding page numbers) and then misuse copyright to prevent others from redistributing those texts. That, in my opinion, constitutes an abuse of the copyright laws, which are supposed to promote progress and not simply secure a business model. It's entirely different if they're offering real, substantive commentary, but anything less is ridiculous.
I propose a small modification to modern copyright laws that requires individuals to make more than minor changes to qualify their derivative gov't work for copyrights. Adding page numbers, minor formatting and spelling should all be discounted. Copyrights on such material should be granted only where substantial original material has been offered and that offering advances progress. Essentially, we would roll back the copyright laws to the original level specified by the first Congress, but only wrt gov't documents.
Or, alternatively, when phone/telecommunications systems go down. Anyone who was in Manhattan on September 11th and the days immediately following will probably recall that many stores had either ceased accepting cards at all, or had set up special lines because only a few of their readers were working. This was due to the incredible call volumes that were jamming up the city's relatively limited numbers of long-distance circuits.
Fortunately, most of the ATMs were up and running (though a few had run out of cash, because so many people were using them where previously they'd just relied on their check/credit cards.)
I love my check card, but I'm pretty sure it won't be there for me on that occasion when I most desperately need it.
I'm not sure about the US cable companies - UK cable companies carry all telco signals via the fiber to the mux - IIRC only at the DAs and the DPs 10 yards from the home is the signal properly split into copper pair and coax.
US Cable companies do all of those things, too, though perhaps a little farther away in most neighborhoods. However, the system still operates via a shared bus-type network. Think of connecting a large number of houses via a simple Ethernet hub, rather than using a switch. It works fine, but the bandwidth is relatively low (good enough for telephony and cable-modems on the uplink, ok even some limited video on-demand on the down-link, but not enough for much more.)
This is a physical problem with shared networks that isn't true of switched networks. It doesn't really matter too much whether the shared medium is fiber or copper, the real inefficiency is in the sharing.
Granted, the tech behind the network may be lame, but could do the job as being the first step to *proper* fiber lines.
Running fiber to the home is not, in and of itself, a useful thing. If the network behind that fiber can only provide coax-level bandwidth to each home, you might as well wait and save yourself a lot of money and transition headaches-- just think, to make that partial upgrade you'd have to replace every cable box and modem with a version that connected to fiber, only to replace them all when a real, switched fiber network came along. It won't be worth hooking up fiber to individual homes until the companies commit to a real, switched network to support it.
Right now, ntl [ntlhome.com] in the UK offer telephone, catv, and broadband. Their system is all completely fiber up until around 100-200 yards from the customers' houses.
I don't know about ntl's cable service, or British cable in general. However, one thing I should point out from my experience with US cable: a lot of that fiber is actually transmitting an analog signal, rather than a packet-switched digital one.
Experts will no doubt correct me on this, but what I believe happens is that the cable company's head-end (main office) generates a block of RF-frequencies, that we know as analog channels 1-n. Nowadays, many of those channels actually contain digitally-encoded data, but that's neither here nor there.
What then happens is that the entire 1Ghz (or so) block of spectrum is shifted up into the visible light frequencies and pumped out through a simple fiber network. Thus, there's no digital switching or anything complex on these nets; they simply shift the RF spectrum up into light at one end, get it out to the various neighborhoods, and then shift it back down into RF and pump that over Coax.
To extend most American cable companies to "real" fiber-to-the-home would ideally involve building out a real digital packet-switched network (no point in half-measures.) It might be ATM-based, to insure quality-of-service.
This is a big deal for US cable companies, who don't like to think about complex digital switches sitting far out in places where they can break down, be struck by lightning, etc. Plus, many cable companies are perversely experiencing a shortage of back-haul fiber as it is, so they might have to lay a lot more in order to upgrade the system.
Seriously, why would we want fiber in the home? I have a cable modem and I'm perfectly happy with it. I think what would drive something like that is an application that requires it.
Video. Unlimited on-demand video (at HDTV quality, not dinky 3mbps MPEG-II). Telephony. Video telephony. Really Neat Games (that won't be invented 'til lots of people have high-bandwidth connections.)
All on one wire instead of three or four. Ultimately we will go to fiber, even if it's only because the cable and phone companies will want to be the first ones there. The question is whether we'll drag out the old technology for another five/ten years.
Also, DSL cannot run over fiber, so the most common low-cost
solution is eliminated by fiber to the home.
Why in the heck would you run DSL over fiber? DSL is an attempt to take an old-fashioned voice technology and jury-rig it for high-speed data transmission. Fiber-to-the-home is specifically designed for high-speed data transmission.
Is sticking with the old-fashioned solution cheaper in the short term? Absolutely. But I just don't understand your particular comment.
Your unit still has the advertised number of recording hours on it, right? You bought a 14/30/etc. hour unit, and now you have 14/30/etc. hours. Bitch much?
Sure, which means they reduced the recording quality levels. Thanks Tivo.
If you bought your Tivo prior to system 2.5.5, it's absolutely true. The upgrade to 2.5.5 "reserved" a portion of what was general space, and set it aside for advertising.
Here's one entry:
http://www.garysargent.co.uk/tivo/faq/faqentry.php ?faqid=47
So is this the end of the world? Not really, but I don't see any reason to defend Tivo for reducing the available space on the hard-drive I purchased (which either means less recording time or lower recording quality.)
Oh yeah, but I get those great Counting Crows videos...
What a bunch of crap. TiVo units have a certain amount of memory set aside for "enhanced content" (that means infomercials)
Yeah, I especially loved it when they "set that memory aside"-- out of my perfectly good, usable recording space-- when they kindly released their new OS... (by automatically dumping it onto my system in the dead of night.)
there was never a surplus in the 90's. It was a "projected" surplus based on "estimates" from the Congressional Budget Orifice
There was a surplus in the 90s. In fact, there were several. Over multiple fiscal years, the government took in more in tax revenue than it spent (technically a lot of this was payroll tax, but politicians rarely draw a distinction.)
What you're referring to was the projected continuation of those surpluses, an outcome that never actually came to pass. If I recall, the projected total of those surpluses was used as the political justification for a massive Federal tax-cut package. I mention this only because it's at least partly responsible for the bleak financial situation most states find themselves in: many states set their taxe-rates relative to Federal tax rates, and a drop in one means a drop in the other.
So does this mean that the only time I won't be paying tax on my online purchases will be when I'm shopping at stores in my home state?
Nope. If you live in NH, the retailers will tax you at NH's rate (0.00%).
NH residents will continue to enjoy good, cheap liquor-funded living, and the state government will continue to pretend that it offers social services.
(The above spoken by a born-and-bred Vermonter:)
From the second article:
The tax rate applied to your order will generally be the combined state and local rate for the address where your order was shipped.
PS The other poster who answered your question is quite an asshole.
This fellow doesn't seem to be committed to manned space exploration
...
I don't think that going over and over to LEO accomplishes anything. If I thought it would be possible to say "OK, we're not going to fly any people for five years, but then by God we'll start flight testing our Mars hardware!" I'd be a happy guy.
Prior to reading his articles (there's an older one from the early 80s that makes a lot of the same points), I would have agreed that manned exploration is a worthwhile endeavor simply to keep momentum. However, I'm becoming concerned that the constant fiscal drag of the shuttle program, combined with the utter pointlessness of much of the work, is ultimately more damaging to our long-term goals.
We need to devote more funds to unmanned planetary exploration, because there's so much out to learn out there that we'll never learn by bouncing up and down from LEO. We need to develop more economical ways to get into space. We might also want to encourage private space ventures; though they may not be a replacement for NASA, such ventures have a much greater incentive to seek out economical solutions than pork-driven government projects.
Easterbrook also makes a good point that we need a larger goal; simply operating the Shuttle for its own purposes is so expensive that it prevents us from coming up with a long-term plan.
From what I understand, our older rockets could deliver larger payloads at much lower costs. I suppose we've gotten rid of those, but doesn't Russia have something similar?
The spaceplane idea goes back to the USAF's Dyna-Soar in the 1960s, but still hasn't worked.
We either have to go to nuclear propulsion or give it up. Those are the options.
So, er, um, based on the fact that the spaceplane hasn't been worked out yet, you're willing to throw the idea out. And yet you place no similar requirements on the technically (not to mention politically) nightmarish task of building viable nuclear powered rockets?
Without the physiology data coming from shuttle experiments, we can't make it to Mars with functioning humans.
Why can't this data come from the ISS, which has a long-term crew? Is the Shuttle critical to operating ISS, or can it be done via less expensive disposable rockets?
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that the market can make itself non-free just as easily without government intervention. This is regularly overlooked by so-called "free market" types, whose ideology begins and ends with taking the gov't out of the equation.
In many cases, bad government regulations like the DMCA are just icing.
It went away when customers stopped getting a choice in the matter. Present a nation full of so-called uncaring customers with a convenient system for downloading music off of the internet (Napster), you'll find that millions will start to pay attention.
Take that sort of choice away and put them back in a world where the content industry determines the parameters of the deal and the electronics industry dances along, you get a populace of helpless, unconcerned idiots.
That's the problem with the "free market". Choices are bad for business, and the average consumer can't build his own CD player (and if he could, there'd be a DMCA to stop him.)
I don't know if reimplementation counts as "innovation". Microsoft has a long history of reimplementing other people's ideas in their own code and selling them with innovative business techniques. But I'm not terribly impressed with their technical innovation.
I also pointed out that their implementation was very tiny (less than 4k), which is both a good thing and an indication that it wasn't a massive accomplishment (they did it with two people in a relatively short period of time.)
BASIC was invented by John Kemmeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College. They implemented it as a compiler, and it was later adopted as an interpreter on a number of minicomputers and microcomputers.
Microsoft's contribution was to reimplement a very tiny ( But they have yet to impress me with any actual technical innovation.
Your obligation is to protect your customers. Allowing a worm to spread free on the Internet potentially endangers your customers, even if you do give them the relevant info. Even if a company protects its own servers, it's still vulnerable to DDoS and bandwidth floods from other infected machines, and it might be infected due to some administrator's failure to heed the warning.
I see no reason why restricting this information to corporate clients and letting everyone else go to hell does any party a service. It seems like a really backwards way to do business-- let an infection run wild just to make your own research team look a little more valuable. I sure wouldn't want to do business with such a company.
PS It's possible that Symantec might not have been able to prevent the spread of the worm, but why not at least try?
Ok, here I don't understand you. In this case, what I meant by "derivative work" is one that contains new copyrighted material in addition to material from a previous document. So if the changes you've made are copyrightable, you've got a derivative work. If they're non-copyrightable, you can't prevent people from copying it.
This of course would be impossible to prove, but if you imagine a large work (say the complete LoTR trilogy). Between editions, they changed the spellings of elves, to elfs (because JRR invented the word elves) and then back to elves when someone figured out he spelled it that way intentionally.
Lexis/Nexis, etc, do introduce minor spelling changes that they then use to screen for unauthorized redistributions. The spelling changes themselves aren't necessarily enough to qualify for copyright protection, but page numbers and simple pagination is.
A more serious example in my my would be real formatting and pagination.
I think you're right when it comes to extreme examples; for instance, I shouldn't be able to redistribute image files of a formatted work. And in the rare case where massive pagination has been undertaken, I suppose I could support your case.
Adding a few page numbers and slight reformatting should not be enough.
What I'm saying here is that the current situation is less than ideal. The bar required to create a valid "derivative work" has come down too far, and it should be raised-- at least in the case of gov't-produced works. Minor formatting and page numbers should not be considered "original" enough to constitute a valid copyright, especially where the material is probably designed simply to prevent redistribution for purposes of financial gain-- rather than to actually advance the progress of arts and sciences.
Are you saying that this is unreasonable?
However, imagine that the water company makes it illegal for you to buy their water and redistribute it to your friends and neighbors (not because you signed a service agreement, mind you, but because they can abuse Federal legislation to bring about that result.)
In this case I'm talking about copyright, which these companies regularly misuse to taint public domain documents so as to make them un-redistributable. Where new, substantially original material (case summaries, analysis) is added, this is reasonable. Where the changes are not substantial (page numbers, for instance) and entirely aimed at preventing redistribution for financial gain, it's abusive.
PS Your example is lousy, of course, because water is a limited resource owned by the public, and water companies are traditionally heavily regulated as a result. But I'll let it slide.
Haven't there been several cases where laws were actually purchased from private organizations (building codes, etc.) and then publishers were sued for redistributing copies w/o a copyright? This isn't a rant against Lexis/Nexis, but it is possible for private orgs to own copyright to public laws, AFAIK.
What they do own-- and rightly charge for-- are enhancements they provide: case summaries, research aids, and, yes, the text in a searchable electronic database.
How about page numbers? Minor formatting changes? Rephrases? Two-word summaries at the begginings of major sections? All intended not to "enhance" the material, but to increase profitability by making it non-distributable. All of the above have been used as justification for new copyrights on public domain material.
And that, right there, is the one valid complaint about Lexis/Nexis. They should be perfectly free to offer this text, categorize it and provide it with a nice search engine for any amount of money they want to charge. They should not be free to introduce insignificant changes (like adding page numbers) and then misuse copyright to prevent others from redistributing those texts. That, in my opinion, constitutes an abuse of the copyright laws, which are supposed to promote progress and not simply secure a business model. It's entirely different if they're offering real, substantive commentary, but anything less is ridiculous.
I propose a small modification to modern copyright laws that requires individuals to make more than minor changes to qualify their derivative gov't work for copyrights. Adding page numbers, minor formatting and spelling should all be discounted. Copyrights on such material should be granted only where substantial original material has been offered and that offering advances progress. Essentially, we would roll back the copyright laws to the original level specified by the first Congress, but only wrt gov't documents.
Or, alternatively, when phone/telecommunications systems go down. Anyone who was in Manhattan on September 11th and the days immediately following will probably recall that many stores had either ceased accepting cards at all, or had set up special lines because only a few of their readers were working. This was due to the incredible call volumes that were jamming up the city's relatively limited numbers of long-distance circuits.
Fortunately, most of the ATMs were up and running (though a few had run out of cash, because so many people were using them where previously they'd just relied on their check/credit cards.)
I love my check card, but I'm pretty sure it won't be there for me on that occasion when I most desperately need it.
US Cable companies do all of those things, too, though perhaps a little farther away in most neighborhoods. However, the system still operates via a shared bus-type network. Think of connecting a large number of houses via a simple Ethernet hub, rather than using a switch. It works fine, but the bandwidth is relatively low (good enough for telephony and cable-modems on the uplink, ok even some limited video on-demand on the down-link, but not enough for much more.)
This is a physical problem with shared networks that isn't true of switched networks. It doesn't really matter too much whether the shared medium is fiber or copper, the real inefficiency is in the sharing.
Granted, the tech behind the network may be lame, but could do the job as being the first step to *proper* fiber lines.
Running fiber to the home is not, in and of itself, a useful thing. If the network behind that fiber can only provide coax-level bandwidth to each home, you might as well wait and save yourself a lot of money and transition headaches-- just think, to make that partial upgrade you'd have to replace every cable box and modem with a version that connected to fiber, only to replace them all when a real, switched fiber network came along. It won't be worth hooking up fiber to individual homes until the companies commit to a real, switched network to support it.
I don't know about ntl's cable service, or British cable in general. However, one thing I should point out from my experience with US cable: a lot of that fiber is actually transmitting an analog signal, rather than a packet-switched digital one.
Experts will no doubt correct me on this, but what I believe happens is that the cable company's head-end (main office) generates a block of RF-frequencies, that we know as analog channels 1-n. Nowadays, many of those channels actually contain digitally-encoded data, but that's neither here nor there.
What then happens is that the entire 1Ghz (or so) block of spectrum is shifted up into the visible light frequencies and pumped out through a simple fiber network. Thus, there's no digital switching or anything complex on these nets; they simply shift the RF spectrum up into light at one end, get it out to the various neighborhoods, and then shift it back down into RF and pump that over Coax.
To extend most American cable companies to "real" fiber-to-the-home would ideally involve building out a real digital packet-switched network (no point in half-measures.) It might be ATM-based, to insure quality-of-service.
This is a big deal for US cable companies, who don't like to think about complex digital switches sitting far out in places where they can break down, be struck by lightning, etc. Plus, many cable companies are perversely experiencing a shortage of back-haul fiber as it is, so they might have to lay a lot more in order to upgrade the system.
Video. Unlimited on-demand video (at HDTV quality, not dinky 3mbps MPEG-II). Telephony. Video telephony. Really Neat Games (that won't be invented 'til lots of people have high-bandwidth connections.)
All on one wire instead of three or four. Ultimately we will go to fiber, even if it's only because the cable and phone companies will want to be the first ones there. The question is whether we'll drag out the old technology for another five/ten years.
Why in the heck would you run DSL over fiber? DSL is an attempt to take an old-fashioned voice technology and jury-rig it for high-speed data transmission. Fiber-to-the-home is specifically designed for high-speed data transmission.
Is sticking with the old-fashioned solution cheaper in the short term? Absolutely. But I just don't understand your particular comment.
Sure, which means they reduced the recording quality levels. Thanks Tivo.
Here's one entry: http://www.garysargent.co.uk/tivo/faq/faqentry.php ?faqid=47
So is this the end of the world? Not really, but I don't see any reason to defend Tivo for reducing the available space on the hard-drive I purchased (which either means less recording time or lower recording quality.)
Oh yeah, but I get those great Counting Crows videos...
Yeah, I especially loved it when they "set that memory aside"-- out of my perfectly good, usable recording space-- when they kindly released their new OS... (by automatically dumping it onto my system in the dead of night.)
There was a surplus in the 90s. In fact, there were several. Over multiple fiscal years, the government took in more in tax revenue than it spent (technically a lot of this was payroll tax, but politicians rarely draw a distinction.)
What you're referring to was the projected continuation of those surpluses, an outcome that never actually came to pass. If I recall, the projected total of those surpluses was used as the political justification for a massive Federal tax-cut package. I mention this only because it's at least partly responsible for the bleak financial situation most states find themselves in: many states set their taxe-rates relative to Federal tax rates, and a drop in one means a drop in the other.
Nope. If you live in NH, the retailers will tax you at NH's rate (0.00%).
NH residents will continue to enjoy good, cheap liquor-funded living, and the state government will continue to pretend that it offers social services.
(The above spoken by a born-and-bred Vermonter :)
From the second article:
PS The other poster who answered your question is quite an asshole.I don't think that going over and over to LEO accomplishes anything. If I thought it would be possible to say "OK, we're not going to fly any people for five years, but then by God we'll start flight testing our Mars hardware!" I'd be a happy guy.
Prior to reading his articles (there's an older one from the early 80s that makes a lot of the same points), I would have agreed that manned exploration is a worthwhile endeavor simply to keep momentum. However, I'm becoming concerned that the constant fiscal drag of the shuttle program, combined with the utter pointlessness of much of the work, is ultimately more damaging to our long-term goals.
We need to devote more funds to unmanned planetary exploration, because there's so much out to learn out there that we'll never learn by bouncing up and down from LEO. We need to develop more economical ways to get into space. We might also want to encourage private space ventures; though they may not be a replacement for NASA, such ventures have a much greater incentive to seek out economical solutions than pork-driven government projects.
Easterbrook also makes a good point that we need a larger goal; simply operating the Shuttle for its own purposes is so expensive that it prevents us from coming up with a long-term plan.
From what I understand, our older rockets could deliver larger payloads at much lower costs. I suppose we've gotten rid of those, but doesn't Russia have something similar?
So, er, um, based on the fact that the spaceplane hasn't been worked out yet, you're willing to throw the idea out. And yet you place no similar requirements on the technically (not to mention politically) nightmarish task of building viable nuclear powered rockets?
Why can't this data come from the ISS, which has a long-term crew? Is the Shuttle critical to operating ISS, or can it be done via less expensive disposable rockets?