Re:Why not put a wheel on the back?
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This is IT?
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But why not just put a simple wheel on the back? Because they were trying to take up no more ground space than a human being. Put the wheels close together with the rider standing, and you either need the micros and gyros, or you need an alert and well-coordinated rider to keep in balance -- no old folks.
If you go to a conventional trike design (seated rider, wheels far enough apart for little chance of tipping over), you can't find a place to park it, can't bring it into your office cube, and chances are it will be banned from the sidewalks as a motorized vehicle and also banned from the roads fornot meeting auto safety standards... (See the posts about the Sinclair C5, for a electric trike that bombed on the market.)
Re:THE BRAKES! THE BRAKES!
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You lean back and it senses that and brakes the wheels enough to put you back upright. This is pretty much what you do when you are walking and need to stop. I do wonder how well a panic stop would work, though...
Re:Jesus Fucking Christ
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The gyroscopes let people with lousy balance reflexes ride it without falling off and breaking bones. Since steering, braking, and throttle are all controlled by balance, do you really want people with lousy balance riding it on a crowded sidewalk? Instead of the incompetent riders getting hospitalized (as with bikes and scooters), it's everyone else that's in danger.
Give it radar and the capability of stopping without the rider's cooperation (requires at least one more wheel), and it would be OK for my grandmother to scoot around on.
Maybe then I could get Kamen's stair climbing wheelchair invention and hack that too so that it'll purposely spin me around and dump me unceremoniously down the stairs it had just climbed. Sounds good. Help evolution along a little...
Re:Of course that's what "Ginger" is
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This is IT?
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Yes, it's controlled by sensing when you lean and running the wheels that way. So to top or slow down, you'd lean back and it would slow the wheels enough to bring you back to vertical. At a stop, it would be creeping back and forth a little. You'd have to be careful when talking to someone not to lean towards them, or the thing would ram them...
It doesn't sound like it would be too good at fast stops.
Much of the cost of a PC is in the monitor ($200 - 500 and up), the hard drive ($150), the case and power supply ($100), and the OS (around $200 list price, but real price to OEM's may be a lot lower). A 3-Pentium embedded controller board would probably cost $500 in mass production. Not sure about the gyros; I don't know any intrinsic reason they have to cost more than $20 each, but good quality ones have never before been a mass production item. That's still pretty expensive in comparison to a bike or small motor scooter, but these don't balance themselves...
Re:and then the question becomes:
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This is IT?
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The Sedgway/Ginger/"IT" is better when it gets crowded. Bicycles take up much more room, and below a minimum speed (depending on the rider) you have to get off the bike until things open up. Apparently the Sedgway stabilizes itself right down to 0 speed. On an open bike path, the advantage may be to the bikes. Reports conflict about the Sedgway top speed, either it's 8mph or 17mph -- not many people can keep a bike above 17mph for long, but 12mph is easy.
As for exercise -- most Americans would drive their car to go to the gym 3 blocks away. For many years I did ride a bicycle or walked to work, but this was when I was in the Air Force (physical fitness was mandatory), I was never going more than 3 miles, and I was on bases in the southwest where the weather is almost always good. And I still saw guys driving to the base gym... Now I'm 48, living where it snows 6 months a year, and my right knee won't take any more bicycling, anyhow. (I doubt it would take standing on that gismo more than 15 minutes, either.)
It certainly needs some more engineering though -- a luggage rack, a good way to chain it down, and cost reductions. Or if you wanted to put my grandmother on a city sidewalk with it, you'd better add radar so she isn't running over people. 8-)
Re:Innovation? Yes. Better than a scooter? No.
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This is IT?
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its pretty clear that you could adjust the thing for a person with limited mobility by tweaking some of the control parameters. It does make more sense in that role. It's gyroscopic system prevents falling -- this is a very big deal for many elderly people, who could operate an electric bicycle quite well but wouldn't survive a fall. And it would work much better than a bike on a crowded sidewalk. However, if it's controlled by shifting weight, would a cerebral palsy patient be able to control it well enough to stay on the sidewalk, let alone be safe in a crowd?
Re:Totally insulting price!!
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if you rode your motorcycle on the sidewalk at 17 mph or slower, I bet it'd be pretty safe.:p Except for the pedestrians you ran over. If you are too clumsy to ride a bicycle, the "Ginger's" gyroscope will keep you from falling over, but since it steers according to how you balance, you'll be all over the sidewalk. Yes, I can see my grandmother whizzing along at 17mph on this. Bump. "Sorry" Bump. "Sorry"...
SLAPP = Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. In other words, corporations threatening or even starting lawsuits that they know they can't actually win at trial, in order to scare people away from talk that the corps don't like. I think the RIAA's letter to Felten fits. But it's a new concept, only a few states (maybe only California?) have passed legislation about SLAPP, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the best Congress money can buy to take up this issue at the federal level... So Felten can't use this in Federal court. But maybe now that he has a federal court's declaration that he never was in danger under the DMCA, he can file suit in California or another SLAPP state, if there is some reason that state's courts could have jurisdiction.
Re:Can't a judge strike down a bad law?
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Felten vs. RIAA Hearing
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· Score: 4, Informative
In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court heard arguments and ruled although the original case was moot (Roe wasn't pregnant anymore) long before it reached the SC. But there were several special circumstances. A three-judge District Court, which consolidated the actions, held that Roe and Hallford, and members of their classes, had standing to sue and presented justiciable controversies. The SC understood that since it takes more than 9 months to get through the various lower courts, any particular woman's case was bound to be moot before they heard it. So they considered Roe as a representative of a class -- there was always _someone_ seeking an abortion. In addition, they consolidated Roe's case with that of Hallford, a doctor who would do more abortions if they were legal and hence didn't lose his standing in 9 months...
The SC doesn't want to decide hypothetical cases for two very good reasons. One is that most of the time the peculiar circumstances of a real case matter more than the abstract principles, so there is a likelyhood that a decision issued on a hypothetical case is likely to be too disconnected from reality. And the other thing is that historically many of the SC's worst rulings came from spewing about abstract principles that went far beyond the facts of the case at hand -- Dred Scott for instance.
On the other hand, the lack of a way to verify in advance that publishing a certain item is protected by the 1st amendment certainly does have a chilling effect on free speech... So is the prospect of having to pay lawyers a few $100K to defend you even when there is little doubt you'll win. Or maybe the problem isn't that asserting your constitutional rights is expensive and risky, but that writing and voting for unconstitutional laws poses no risk or expense for the legislators. Now, if we could have the sponsors of unconstitutional laws liable to pay the defense and other costs, and maybe behead any congressman who wrote 3 unconstitutional bills for treason against the constitution... But I think it would be a little hard to get that amendment through congress or state legislatures.
Magic Lantern is a program that installs itself on your system without your knowledge or consent. A virus is a program that installs itself on your system without your knowledge or consent, then uses your system to spread itself.
If Magic Lantern can get in, then viruses can enter through the same security hole.
Viruses weren't a big concern in those days. Maybe the trojanned computer could punch multiple copies of the program onto cards, but tricking the staffers into mailing them to other computer centers was difficult... 8-)
Re:Things are only getting worse.
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DMCA 2, Freedom 0
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The great-grandchildren of the author don't make any money. The great-grandchildren of the executives of the publishing company who extorted the rights from the author make the money. IIRC, the rights do have to eventually revert back to the author, so if there is still any money to be made the author's great-granchildren will get their share. Unfortunately, the creator's share has generally be 10% or less, and there is no sign that this share is increasing at all as technology drives the physical cost of publication to essentially zero (for music and software).
The exception to the rule that rights revert to the creator is "work for hire". That's fair enough when the work is essentially a corporate creation. There was one underhanded attempt to change this; a Congressional staffer, at the end of a session when nobody was reading what they were voting for, snuck in an amendment that made all musical recordings work for hire. (You get one guess as to what industry that guy is now working for.) When the musicians noticed it, they went to Congress and got it overturned. At the hearing, no one at all dared show up and try to defend this change, and certainly no Congressman wants to have 100 rock stars campaigning against him. But it took time, and so the record companies own outright most of the recordings made that year...
established punch card routine
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Electronic Abacus
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· Score: 5, Informative
Where this article talks about "scrapping the greater part of the established punch card calculating routine", it isn't about scrapping the punch card keyboarding machines, but about using the cards as input instead of as the databases themselves. From the 1880 census until the 1950's large databases consisted of boxes (and sometimes cabinets or rooms) full of punch cards. To process the data, there were a number of specialized machines:
Keypunches: a keyboard that punched holes into cards. Good ones also typed the data along the top of the card so it was human-readable, and could copy part or all of a card. The ones I worked with could be programmed by typing control codes onto a card and wrapping it around a spool inside the machine -- this gave you tab stops and let you set it to automatically copy headers from each card to the next one, until you hit an escape key to let you change the headers...
Sorters & mergers: Sorting and grouping was accomplished by machines that would physically shuffle the cards into order. The operation was counter-intuitive; to alphabetize a 20 letter name field, you'd start by sorting into 26 bins on the _last_ (rightmost) letter, stack them up and sort on the next letter (which left cards differing only in the last letter in order), and repeat for 20 times through. Searches were done by setting the sorter to set aside cards matching the criteria and running the whole set through. And after doing a search or other operation that split the deck into two categories, it was nice to have a machine to merge the two decks back together into order without requiring a full-scale sort.
Tabulators: Would read the sorted, grouped, cards and add up the columns. Also could perform calculations on a card (like hoursworked * payrate = grosspay) and punch the answer into the card, or onto a new card. Tabulators generally did not type human-readable text on the cards, so...
Printers: One kind would read cards and type text along the top. Some of these were still in use in the 1980's, because mainframes still could output to card punches, and those punches did not type text... The other kind read cards and printed the report on paper.
When I started hanging out at the college computer center (1971), the databases were kept on removable hard disk packs, and punch cards were mainly for data input. However, even though they'd keep 3 copies of each database on different disks, the reliability was low enough that for really important stuff they'd also store the punch cards as a backup, or sometimes have the computer punch a backup into cards. The machine that printed on those cards was kept running, just in case. At least a half-dozen keypunches were in continuous use (and the card reader on the computer had to be overhauled once a week so it could continue reading all those cards). The tabulator was just gathering dust, but the sorter was used frequently -- batch database updates run faster if the input is in the same order as the disk file.
IANAL, and I haven't taken the time to find the forums or the offending posts themselves, but it really sounds like the court was just going back to common sense. That is, to be libelous or slanderous, a statement must assert facts, be in such a form and forum that it will be taken seriously, and the facts must be untrue. "X sucks" doesn't assert a fact. Both of your examples do assert facts, not just opinions.
"Exorbitant spending" is pretty much opinion -- my Scottish ancestors would think my own budget quite exorbitant, but Californian dotcommers with two beamers in the driveway would think I'm a miser. Your statement about pandas asserts a fact, but unless you also claim to be in a particular position to know, it's doubtful that a reasonable person would take it seriously. And if a forum consists mostly of statements like these, only an idiot would take anything posted on it to be a statement of fact.
"Person X embezzles money from his company" on anything but a humor site is indeed libellous if you don't have a good reason to think it's true. However, the whole example becomes less and less believable as it goes on. On slashdot I wouldn't believe any of it, but in the NY Times I'd figure either there was a reliable source for everything or the editors were about to pay out some big bucks.
Slashdot gets some well thought out posts by people who actually do know the facts, so don't count on it being taken as opinions only. If you are saying something that sounds at all like a fact, but you don't actually know or have a reliable source, start with "IMO" or something so it is clear that it's an opinion. (And I really, really would appreciate it if certain people would start their posts "I just made up some statistics...")
A SSTO rocket needs a mass ratio of at least 20:1. That's fueled weight:dry weight. Engines, fuel tanks, payload, and control system all come out of the short end of that ratio. One thing this means is that very tiny weight savings help quite a lot. It doesn't help the shuttle all that much weight-wise to ditch it's rebuildable boosters and disposable external fuel tank, but at anywhere near full payload it wouldn't make it to orbit otherwise. (Not that I think this was a great design decision, but apparently given the military's specification of a 60,000 pound payload, and the decision to not launch from a custom made carrier airplane, that was the best the engineers could do.)
Another effect of this is that engines that are barely big enough to lift the rocket off the launch pad become ridiculously oversized as fuel is burned off. If you kept a single set of engines running at full power for the whole takeoff, and takeoff was at merely 2g, the rocket structure would have to be built to stand up to 40g when the tanks were almost empty. And it's weakest with empty tanks, so you definitely cannot push it at 40g when the only heavy parts left are engines in the tail and the payload in the nose. (Liquid rocket fuel/lox tanks are essentially aluminum balloons. So are beer cans. Fun science experiment: find one of those idiots that likes to crush empty beer cans with his forehead and switch the empty with a full one without him noticing. It's a good idea to move and change your name before he comes out of the coma. 8-) If you are throttling engines back or turning them off later in the flight, you might as well toss them out and save the extra weight. It's different for re-usable shuttles where ditched engines add cost to the next launch, but most space shots are still single-use rockets.
If it's explicitly a lease, then the customers can decide whether that is the way they want to buy software or not. I don't think that software leases will sell very well. The problem is that the software vendors are trying to take away rights one would normally have in a sale, without making it clear that it's not a sale. At the worst, individual copies of XP will apparently sold with activation code that means that each time you have to re-install it, or change your computer too much, or the "antipiracy" code just fsckin malfunctions, you have to get microsoft to give you a new code # to restart it. And no guarantees as to how long MS will keep that service working.
So, for all practical purposes XP is a leased product with an indefinite expiration date. If Microsoft was honest about this, the box would say in large letters "This product is not sold, it is only leased until such time as we decide we want you to buy a newer version and stop supporting the activation codes." But that might sharply cut into their market...
To me, it looks like the RIAA attempted to use the threat of a lawsuit to attempt to deter Dr. Felten from presenting his results, even though they knew there was no basis for such a lawsuit. This attempt was only temporarily successful. I have heard many other instances of threats of unfounded lawsuits being used "tactically".
My question is for Dr. Felten's legal team, not himself: Is there any precedent in American law for collecting damages for legal threats made without actual intention to sue or any good reason to think a suit could be successful? Would you recommend legislation to make it possible or easier to collect such damages, e.g. for the cost of a lawyer to check out the threat and delays incurred in planned activities while studying the matter?
An airship (blimp, zeppelin, etc.) or balloon can start the rocket above most of the atmosphere. A big cargo jet also gives it 550 knots initial velocity, which saves a significant amount of fuel. And there is better infrastructure available for handling jets. The only thing I'm not sure about is how available jets are with a tail cargo door that can be opened fully in flight.
I'm dubious about airships having higher lift capacity than the big jets. The C5A lifts well over 100 tons. It takes an awfully big gas bag to displace 100+ tons of air. Airships do have a definite advantage when the load is some big odd-shaped thing that has to hang below instead of riding inside: a jet can't fly with a Victorian mansion (for example) hanging from the belly, but an airship is less sensitive to messy aerodynamics in the first place, and can go as slow as necessary so aerodynamic forces on the load aren't an issue. Nor are you limited by undercarriage height when picking something up with an airship -- if you want to pick up a house, you just anchor it well, come in with gasbags half deflated or lots of ballast, tie to the house, then add gas or dump ballast until you get sufficient lift and release the anchors. (Winds have to be low so the airship isn't getting bashed around during this, but in most cases you can wait for a calm day.) That makes an airship perfect for moving something that really wasn't built to fly, but rockets tend to be long, skinny, and streamlined, a decent fit for an airplane cargo bay if the fins are folded.
There isn't a major effect, because with the instrumentation we have, all we can see is planets as big as Jupiter or bigger, and usually in orbits closer to the sun than Venus. So we're only able to see uninhabitable planets in solar systems rather unlike ours, and this doesn't say much about the prevalence of solar systems like ours.
It does finally settle one 300-year old astronomical debate: whether planet formation happens in freak accidents such as near-collisions between stars, or as a normal part of star formation. Astronomers strongly leaned towards the latter hypothesis, because calculations and computer simulations don't show the near-collision scenario as leaving planets in stable orbits, while it is fairly easy to get a star with planets to condense from a simulated gas & dust cloud. Now that we know lots of stars do have some sort of planet, freak accident theories are definitely ruled out.
There's a better article in nytimes.com (registration required). The Hubble's spectrograph is detecting tiny traces of sodium in the planet's atmosphere as it transits between the star (its sun) and us. They set it to look for sodium, because that has the strongest spectrum lines of any element. The article didn't say, but I think these must be absorption lines where the starlight shines through the atmosphere of the planet, around the edges as it transits. I would assume it is ionic sodium -- you just plain don't find sodium in any other form.
The planet is Jupiter-sized, and close to it's sun, so the atmosphere is hot enough to melt copper. Not a good place to visit... But with the present methods for detecting extra-solar planets, any we can spot will be too big and too hot.
Mostly, planets are detected because their mass as they orbit makes the star jiggle just a little (the star and the planet orbit the common center of gravity -- which is still somewhere inside the star, but not the exact middle). The stars motion doppler shifts it's light, and so there is a periodic shift in the star's spectrogram. The bigger the planet is and the closer to the star, the more jiggle -- someone in another solar system looking at ours with instruments of similar capability wouldn't detect Earth because it's too small, and might miss Jupiter because it's orbit is too wide and slow.
This particular planet was detected by a different method; it happens that the planet's orbit causes it to transit between the star and Earth, blocking a small part of the star's light. If the planet is big enough, this drop in the star's intensity is detectable. But such an orbital alignment must be something like a one in a million shot...
On a personal note, it amazes me that anyone who has simply read the Constitution could come to a conclusion like this. Many devout "Christians" have truly amazing capabilities of rationalizing lying in what they consider a good cause. For a fairly recent example, see the "she said yes" stories about Columbine -- complete fabrication, but repeated as fact in churches all across the USA within a few days. So, no surprise to me that some preacher who darn well knew better made up that story about a "Christian nation", and even less surprise that it has been repeated infinitely without even the most basic fact checking. (The good news is, very few Christians will any longer commit mass murder, no matter how Christian the cause. However, dropping bombs from high altitude tends not to be seen as murder...)
Of course, the most hypocritical lie of all in American culture is a secular one, the George Washington cherry tree story. A piece of fiction, presented as a true story, to make the point that one shouldn't lie... The guy that first published it must have been a very devout christian.
Why should we allow a corporate pseudo-person to exist, with rights, but with fewer responsibilities than we ourselves have? Because we allowed corporate pseudo-persons to offer b^r^i^b^e^s^ campaign contributions to congresscritters just like they were real citizens.
Without filtering technology to make the internet a little more palatable, many countries might be tempted to ban it altogether. So what we really have to fear is _effective_ filtering software???
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But why not just put a simple wheel on the back? Because they were trying to take up no more ground space than a human being. Put the wheels close together with the rider standing, and you either need the micros and gyros, or you need an alert and well-coordinated rider to keep in balance -- no old folks.
If you go to a conventional trike design (seated rider, wheels far enough apart for little chance of tipping over), you can't find a place to park it, can't bring it into your office cube, and chances are it will be banned from the sidewalks as a motorized vehicle and also banned from the roads fornot meeting auto safety standards... (See the posts about the Sinclair C5, for a electric trike that bombed on the market.)
You lean back and it senses that and brakes the wheels enough to put you back upright. This is pretty much what you do when you are walking and need to stop. I do wonder how well a panic stop would work, though...
The gyroscopes let people with lousy balance reflexes ride it without falling off and breaking bones. Since steering, braking, and throttle are all controlled by balance, do you really want people with lousy balance riding it on a crowded sidewalk? Instead of the incompetent riders getting hospitalized (as with bikes and scooters), it's everyone else that's in danger.
Give it radar and the capability of stopping without the rider's cooperation (requires at least one more wheel), and it would be OK for my grandmother to scoot around on.
Maybe then I could get Kamen's stair climbing wheelchair invention and hack that too so that it'll purposely spin me around and dump me unceremoniously down the stairs it had just climbed. Sounds good. Help evolution along a little...
Yes, it's controlled by sensing when you lean and running the wheels that way. So to top or slow down, you'd lean back and it would slow the wheels enough to bring you back to vertical. At a stop, it would be creeping back and forth a little. You'd have to be careful when talking to someone not to lean towards them, or the thing would ram them...
It doesn't sound like it would be too good at fast stops.
Much of the cost of a PC is in the monitor ($200 - 500 and up), the hard drive ($150), the case and power supply ($100), and the OS (around $200 list price, but real price to OEM's may be a lot lower). A 3-Pentium embedded controller board would probably cost $500 in mass production. Not sure about the gyros; I don't know any intrinsic reason they have to cost more than $20 each, but good quality ones have never before been a mass production item. That's still pretty expensive in comparison to a bike or small motor scooter, but these don't balance themselves...
The Sedgway/Ginger/"IT" is better when it gets crowded. Bicycles take up much more room, and below a minimum speed (depending on the rider) you have to get off the bike until things open up. Apparently the Sedgway stabilizes itself right down to 0 speed. On an open bike path, the advantage may be to the bikes. Reports conflict about the Sedgway top speed, either it's 8mph or 17mph -- not many people can keep a bike above 17mph for long, but 12mph is easy.
As for exercise -- most Americans would drive their car to go to the gym 3 blocks away. For many years I did ride a bicycle or walked to work, but this was when I was in the Air Force (physical fitness was mandatory), I was never going more than 3 miles, and I was on bases in the southwest where the weather is almost always good. And I still saw guys driving to the base gym... Now I'm 48, living where it snows 6 months a year, and my right knee won't take any more bicycling, anyhow. (I doubt it would take standing on that gismo more than 15 minutes, either.)
It certainly needs some more engineering though -- a luggage rack, a good way to chain it down, and cost reductions. Or if you wanted to put my grandmother on a city sidewalk with it, you'd better add radar so she isn't running over people. 8-)
its pretty clear that you could adjust the thing for a person with limited mobility by tweaking some of the control parameters. It does make more sense in that role. It's gyroscopic system prevents falling -- this is a very big deal for many elderly people, who could operate an electric bicycle quite well but wouldn't survive a fall. And it would work much better than a bike on a crowded sidewalk. However, if it's controlled by shifting weight, would a cerebral palsy patient be able to control it well enough to stay on the sidewalk, let alone be safe in a crowd?
if you rode your motorcycle on the sidewalk at 17 mph or slower, I bet it'd be pretty safe. :p Except for the pedestrians you ran over. If you are too clumsy to ride a bicycle, the "Ginger's" gyroscope will keep you from falling over, but since it steers according to how you balance, you'll be all over the sidewalk. Yes, I can see my grandmother whizzing along at 17mph on this. Bump. "Sorry" Bump. "Sorry" ...
SLAPP = Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. In other words, corporations threatening or even starting lawsuits that they know they can't actually win at trial, in order to scare people away from talk that the corps don't like. I think the RIAA's letter to Felten fits. But it's a new concept, only a few states (maybe only California?) have passed legislation about SLAPP, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the best Congress money can buy to take up this issue at the federal level... So Felten can't use this in Federal court. But maybe now that he has a federal court's declaration that he never was in danger under the DMCA, he can file suit in California or another SLAPP state, if there is some reason that state's courts could have jurisdiction.
In Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court heard arguments and ruled although the original case was moot (Roe wasn't pregnant anymore) long before it reached the SC. But there were several special circumstances. A three-judge District Court, which consolidated the actions, held that Roe and Hallford, and members of their classes, had standing to sue and presented justiciable controversies. The SC understood that since it takes more than 9 months to get through the various lower courts, any particular woman's case was bound to be moot before they heard it. So they considered Roe as a representative of a class -- there was always _someone_ seeking an abortion. In addition, they consolidated Roe's case with that of Hallford, a doctor who would do more abortions if they were legal and hence didn't lose his standing in 9 months...
The SC doesn't want to decide hypothetical cases for two very good reasons. One is that most of the time the peculiar circumstances of a real case matter more than the abstract principles, so there is a likelyhood that a decision issued on a hypothetical case is likely to be too disconnected from reality. And the other thing is that historically many of the SC's worst rulings came from spewing about abstract principles that went far beyond the facts of the case at hand -- Dred Scott for instance.
On the other hand, the lack of a way to verify in advance that publishing a certain item is protected by the 1st amendment certainly does have a chilling effect on free speech... So is the prospect of having to pay lawyers a few $100K to defend you even when there is little doubt you'll win. Or maybe the problem isn't that asserting your constitutional rights is expensive and risky, but that writing and voting for unconstitutional laws poses no risk or expense for the legislators. Now, if we could have the sponsors of unconstitutional laws liable to pay the defense and other costs, and maybe behead any congressman who wrote 3 unconstitutional bills for treason against the constitution... But I think it would be a little hard to get that amendment through congress or state legislatures.
Magic Lantern is a program that installs itself on your system without your knowledge or consent. A virus is a program that installs itself on your system without your knowledge or consent, then uses your system to spread itself.
If Magic Lantern can get in, then viruses can enter through the same security hole.
Viruses weren't a big concern in those days. Maybe the trojanned computer could punch multiple copies of the program onto cards, but tricking the staffers into mailing them to other computer centers was difficult... 8-)
The great-grandchildren of the author don't make any money. The great-grandchildren of the executives of the publishing company who extorted the rights from the author make the money. IIRC, the rights do have to eventually revert back to the author, so if there is still any money to be made the author's great-granchildren will get their share. Unfortunately, the creator's share has generally be 10% or less, and there is no sign that this share is increasing at all as technology drives the physical cost of publication to essentially zero (for music and software).
The exception to the rule that rights revert to the creator is "work for hire". That's fair enough when the work is essentially a corporate creation. There was one underhanded attempt to change this; a Congressional staffer, at the end of a session when nobody was reading what they were voting for, snuck in an amendment that made all musical recordings work for hire. (You get one guess as to what industry that guy is now working for.) When the musicians noticed it, they went to Congress and got it overturned. At the hearing, no one at all dared show up and try to defend this change, and certainly no Congressman wants to have 100 rock stars campaigning against him. But it took time, and so the record companies own outright most of the recordings made that year...
Where this article talks about "scrapping the greater part of the established punch card calculating routine", it isn't about scrapping the punch card keyboarding machines, but about using the cards as input instead of as the databases themselves. From the 1880 census until the 1950's large databases consisted of boxes (and sometimes cabinets or rooms) full of punch cards. To process the data, there were a number of specialized machines:
Keypunches: a keyboard that punched holes into cards. Good ones also typed the data along the top of the card so it was human-readable, and could copy part or all of a card. The ones I worked with could be programmed by typing control codes onto a card and wrapping it around a spool inside the machine -- this gave you tab stops and let you set it to automatically copy headers from each card to the next one, until you hit an escape key to let you change the headers...
Sorters & mergers: Sorting and grouping was accomplished by machines that would physically shuffle the cards into order. The operation was counter-intuitive; to alphabetize a 20 letter name field, you'd start by sorting into 26 bins on the _last_ (rightmost) letter, stack them up and sort on the next letter (which left cards differing only in the last letter in order), and repeat for 20 times through. Searches were done by setting the sorter to set aside cards matching the criteria and running the whole set through. And after doing a search or other operation that split the deck into two categories, it was nice to have a machine to merge the two decks back together into order without requiring a full-scale sort.
Tabulators: Would read the sorted, grouped, cards and add up the columns. Also could perform calculations on a card (like hoursworked * payrate = grosspay) and punch the answer into the card, or onto a new card. Tabulators generally did not type human-readable text on the cards, so...
Printers: One kind would read cards and type text along the top. Some of these were still in use in the 1980's, because mainframes still could output to card punches, and those punches did not type text... The other kind read cards and printed the report on paper.
When I started hanging out at the college computer center (1971), the databases were kept on removable hard disk packs, and punch cards were mainly for data input. However, even though they'd keep 3 copies of each database on different disks, the reliability was low enough that for really important stuff they'd also store the punch cards as a backup, or sometimes have the computer punch a backup into cards. The machine that printed on those cards was kept running, just in case. At least a half-dozen keypunches were in continuous use (and the card reader on the computer had to be overhauled once a week so it could continue reading all those cards). The tabulator was just gathering dust, but the sorter was used frequently -- batch database updates run faster if the input is in the same order as the disk file.
IANAL, and I haven't taken the time to find the forums or the offending posts themselves, but it really sounds like the court was just going back to common sense. That is, to be libelous or slanderous, a statement must assert facts, be in such a form and forum that it will be taken seriously, and the facts must be untrue. "X sucks" doesn't assert a fact. Both of your examples do assert facts, not just opinions.
"Exorbitant spending" is pretty much opinion -- my Scottish ancestors would think my own budget quite exorbitant, but Californian dotcommers with two beamers in the driveway would think I'm a miser. Your statement about pandas asserts a fact, but unless you also claim to be in a particular position to know, it's doubtful that a reasonable person would take it seriously. And if a forum consists mostly of statements like these, only an idiot would take anything posted on it to be a statement of fact.
"Person X embezzles money from his company" on anything but a humor site is indeed libellous if you don't have a good reason to think it's true. However, the whole example becomes less and less believable as it goes on. On slashdot I wouldn't believe any of it, but in the NY Times I'd figure either there was a reliable source for everything or the editors were about to pay out some big bucks.
Slashdot gets some well thought out posts by people who actually do know the facts, so don't count on it being taken as opinions only. If you are saying something that sounds at all like a fact, but you don't actually know or have a reliable source, start with "IMO" or something so it is clear that it's an opinion. (And I really, really would appreciate it if certain people would start their posts "I just made up some statistics...")
A SSTO rocket needs a mass ratio of at least 20:1. That's fueled weight:dry weight. Engines, fuel tanks, payload, and control system all come out of the short end of that ratio. One thing this means is that very tiny weight savings help quite a lot. It doesn't help the shuttle all that much weight-wise to ditch it's rebuildable boosters and disposable external fuel tank, but at anywhere near full payload it wouldn't make it to orbit otherwise. (Not that I think this was a great design decision, but apparently given the military's specification of a 60,000 pound payload, and the decision to not launch from a custom made carrier airplane, that was the best the engineers could do.)
Another effect of this is that engines that are barely big enough to lift the rocket off the launch pad become ridiculously oversized as fuel is burned off. If you kept a single set of engines running at full power for the whole takeoff, and takeoff was at merely 2g, the rocket structure would have to be built to stand up to 40g when the tanks were almost empty. And it's weakest with empty tanks, so you definitely cannot push it at 40g when the only heavy parts left are engines in the tail and the payload in the nose. (Liquid rocket fuel/lox tanks are essentially aluminum balloons. So are beer cans. Fun science experiment: find one of those idiots that likes to crush empty beer cans with his forehead and switch the empty with a full one without him noticing. It's a good idea to move and change your name before he comes out of the coma. 8-) If you are throttling engines back or turning them off later in the flight, you might as well toss them out and save the extra weight. It's different for re-usable shuttles where ditched engines add cost to the next launch, but most space shots are still single-use rockets.
If it's explicitly a lease, then the customers can decide whether that is the way they want to buy software or not. I don't think that software leases will sell very well. The problem is that the software vendors are trying to take away rights one would normally have in a sale, without making it clear that it's not a sale. At the worst, individual copies of XP will apparently sold with activation code that means that each time you have to re-install it, or change your computer too much, or the "antipiracy" code just fsckin malfunctions, you have to get microsoft to give you a new code # to restart it. And no guarantees as to how long MS will keep that service working.
So, for all practical purposes XP is a leased product with an indefinite expiration date. If Microsoft was honest about this, the box would say in large letters "This product is not sold, it is only leased until such time as we decide we want you to buy a newer version and stop supporting the activation codes." But that might sharply cut into their market...
To me, it looks like the RIAA attempted to use the threat of a lawsuit to attempt to deter Dr. Felten from presenting his results, even though they knew there was no basis for such a lawsuit. This attempt was only temporarily successful. I have heard many other instances of threats of unfounded lawsuits being used "tactically".
My question is for Dr. Felten's legal team, not himself: Is there any precedent in American law for collecting damages for legal threats made without actual intention to sue or any good reason to think a suit could be successful? Would you recommend legislation to make it possible or easier to collect such damages, e.g. for the cost of a lawyer to check out the threat and delays incurred in planned activities while studying the matter?
An airship (blimp, zeppelin, etc.) or balloon can start the rocket above most of the atmosphere. A big cargo jet also gives it 550 knots initial velocity, which saves a significant amount of fuel. And there is better infrastructure available for handling jets. The only thing I'm not sure about is how available jets are with a tail cargo door that can be opened fully in flight.
I'm dubious about airships having higher lift capacity than the big jets. The C5A lifts well over 100 tons. It takes an awfully big gas bag to displace 100+ tons of air. Airships do have a definite advantage when the load is some big odd-shaped thing that has to hang below instead of riding inside: a jet can't fly with a Victorian mansion (for example) hanging from the belly, but an airship is less sensitive to messy aerodynamics in the first place, and can go as slow as necessary so aerodynamic forces on the load aren't an issue. Nor are you limited by undercarriage height when picking something up with an airship -- if you want to pick up a house, you just anchor it well, come in with gasbags half deflated or lots of ballast, tie to the house, then add gas or dump ballast until you get sufficient lift and release the anchors. (Winds have to be low so the airship isn't getting bashed around during this, but in most cases you can wait for a calm day.) That makes an airship perfect for moving something that really wasn't built to fly, but rockets tend to be long, skinny, and streamlined, a decent fit for an airplane cargo bay if the fins are folded.
There isn't a major effect, because with the instrumentation we have, all we can see is planets as big as Jupiter or bigger, and usually in orbits closer to the sun than Venus. So we're only able to see uninhabitable planets in solar systems rather unlike ours, and this doesn't say much about the prevalence of solar systems like ours.
It does finally settle one 300-year old astronomical debate: whether planet formation happens in freak accidents such as near-collisions between stars, or as a normal part of star formation. Astronomers strongly leaned towards the latter hypothesis, because calculations and computer simulations don't show the near-collision scenario as leaving planets in stable orbits, while it is fairly easy to get a star with planets to condense from a simulated gas & dust cloud. Now that we know lots of stars do have some sort of planet, freak accident theories are definitely ruled out.
There's a better article in nytimes.com (registration required). The Hubble's spectrograph is detecting tiny traces of sodium in the planet's atmosphere as it transits between the star (its sun) and us. They set it to look for sodium, because that has the strongest spectrum lines of any element. The article didn't say, but I think these must be absorption lines where the starlight shines through the atmosphere of the planet, around the edges as it transits. I would assume it is ionic sodium -- you just plain don't find sodium in any other form.
The planet is Jupiter-sized, and close to it's sun, so the atmosphere is hot enough to melt copper. Not a good place to visit... But with the present methods for detecting extra-solar planets, any we can spot will be too big and too hot.
Mostly, planets are detected because their mass as they orbit makes the star jiggle just a little (the star and the planet orbit the common center of gravity -- which is still somewhere inside the star, but not the exact middle). The stars motion doppler shifts it's light, and so there is a periodic shift in the star's spectrogram. The bigger the planet is and the closer to the star, the more jiggle -- someone in another solar system looking at ours with instruments of similar capability wouldn't detect Earth because it's too small, and might miss Jupiter because it's orbit is too wide and slow.
This particular planet was detected by a different method; it happens that the planet's orbit causes it to transit between the star and Earth, blocking a small part of the star's light. If the planet is big enough, this drop in the star's intensity is detectable. But such an orbital alignment must be something like a one in a million shot...
On a personal note, it amazes me that anyone who has simply read the Constitution could come to a conclusion like this. Many devout "Christians" have truly amazing capabilities of rationalizing lying in what they consider a good cause. For a fairly recent example, see the "she said yes" stories about Columbine -- complete fabrication, but repeated as fact in churches all across the USA within a few days. So, no surprise to me that some preacher who darn well knew better made up that story about a "Christian nation", and even less surprise that it has been repeated infinitely without even the most basic fact checking. (The good news is, very few Christians will any longer commit mass murder, no matter how Christian the cause. However, dropping bombs from high altitude tends not to be seen as murder...)
Of course, the most hypocritical lie of all in American culture is a secular one, the George Washington cherry tree story. A piece of fiction, presented as a true story, to make the point that one shouldn't lie... The guy that first published it must have been a very devout christian.
Why should we allow a corporate pseudo-person to exist, with rights, but with fewer responsibilities than we ourselves have? Because we allowed corporate pseudo-persons to offer b^r^i^b^e^s^ campaign contributions to congresscritters just like they were real citizens.
Without filtering technology to make the internet a little more palatable, many countries might be tempted to ban it altogether. So what we really have to fear is _effective_ filtering software???