Thanks for the clarification. However I still wonder if being stricken is some sort of line between being treated as a warship and being treated as a commercial ship with respect to salvage. For example if a ship has been stricken and sinks while being delivered to a buyer who does not yet have title does commercial salvage law apply?
It's possession of title that matters - because being struck from the register is a matter of internal Navy bookkeeping and tradition, irrelevant to salvage law. In the case of your example, that's something for the lawyers to sort out - real life salvors keep one on speed dial and don't touch a thing unless they have their ducks in a row.
It doesn't matter how wrong you think he was about what Amazon supposedly does badly, that was just setting the scene for what he thought Amazon did and does right.
No, you missed my point - if he's wrong about the parts I can see, how reliable is he about the parts I can't?
In the form of a car analogy - if a salesman tells me the car is in great shape inside and out, and I can see peeling paint and bald tires... I'm disinclined to believe him about the condition of the engine.
That said, I think rant is an inappropriate word for this.
No, "rant" seems more appropriate to me... For all his complaints about how Amazon Invariably Does It Wrong and Nobody Can Use Amazon's Website - he fails to square those claims with some very publicly visible things; a) their nearly bulletproof infrastructure, and b) that millions of people do manage to use the site on a daily basis. Those failures undermine the balance of his 'argument'. (Worse yet, he seems to confuse and interchange user accessibility and developer accessibility.)
Just like the rants you see elsewhere on the net, his is a confused mish-mash of (seemingly) stream of consciousness writing. If he's gotten something right, it's more on the "stopped clock" principle than anything else as near as I can tell.
Does this mean that the US federal government has jurisdiction on the moon?
Federal law asserts that the the Government retains title to Government property, always and forever, regardless of location and even if the Government is currently unaware of the location of the property. In this, Federal law is in agreement with international salvage and admiralty law. (Which is why the statute of limitations doesn't apply - he's not being charged with a crime, he's being sued to force him to return Government property.)
It may not be abandoned in a legal sense. For example it is my understanding that a naval vessel remains property of the navy until stricken from the navy's registry.
Being stricken from the registry only means it's no longer being carried on the books as an active vessels. It remains government (Navy) property until title is specifically transferred or renounced. For example, Arizone was stricken from the registery in 1942 - but the USN still retains title to her.
The only time abandoned property within international territory is off-limits is when it's a war grave. So unless the government isn't telling us something, salvage rights would seem to apply.
Salvage law does apply here - and in this case, salvage law states that government property remains government property forever unless the government in question explicitly and specifically renounces it's rights over the property. (Which NASA has never done for the hardware in question.) That's why the US Navy took custody over the CSS Hunley wreck site - the US Government took custody of all CS Government property at the end of the war and transferred custody of Naval property to the USN, who never renounced their claim to the Hunley. That what Curt Newport had to negotiate salvage rights for the Liberty Bell 7 with NASA, and why NASA claims ownership over the various bits of Challenger and Columbia that surface from time-to-time.
Only in very narrow and very specific (and generally pretty unusual) cases does Salvage Law allow "finders keepers" - and this one isn't one of them.
Also, it's pretty clear that Obama's core voters don't see space exploration as a priority or even a necessity.
That's thing that the space advocacy community has failed to acknowledge for a long time - outside of Congressional pork, nobodies core constituency cares about space exploration.
Eve did what first? Allowing you to buy ingame items for real world money and then turn around and sell them for ingame money? Nope - Puzzle Pirates did that first with the Doubloon Exchange back in 2005.
If there's someone Lou Friedman should be complaining about, it's Senators Nelson and Shelby and their fixation on providing pork to large aerospace contractors in return for bribes, I mean campaign donations.
I would have hoped that someone in his position would be better informed, frankly.
Having read Mr Friedman's regular pieces in The Space Review for quite some time now... I have to say that facts aren't his long suite. Like many in the space advocacy community, he's mostly about the Vision and the Dream. Facts are irrelevant to this lofty calling. Usually, they're a positive impediment.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s in the US, model rocketry was promoted as a way to interest youth in science and technology and, therefore, strengthen and defend the nation.
Mostly by the model rocketry industry as a way to bandwagon on the public's brief infatuation with space travel.
However, amateur and, to a lesser extent, model rocketry are today seen by much of the public as a dangerous technology that should be suppressed, to keep it out of the hands of dangerous terrorists.
That's what the tinfoil hat crowd would like to believe - because that's what their paranoid dogma requires them to believe. In reality, much of the public (when they think about it at all, which is rarely) thinks it's a mildly geeky hobby that a few weirdos and guys with too much time on their hands indulge in. (I.E. in the same category as model railroading, r/c airplanes, etc.. etc..)
How can the rocketry community regain public support?
You can't regain what you never really had in the first place except in the minds of marketers with a vested interest in producing the illusion of that belief.
The grandparent didn't say it was impossible for C-17's to land in Antartica, he said it was impossible for them to land *at Admundsen*. So while it's a wonderful picture, it's irrelevant.
So, needless to say I've done some reading up on this...from what I can tell, the law does actually seem to be on the side of the fascists because civil liberties have eroded so badly. It's difficult to tell if the situation is worse in the U.S. or Canada, but in both countries there are a number of ways in which you can be legally harrassed for taking photos inside a place of business.
Your rights while on someone else's property have always been limited (if nothing else by good manners). There's no "fascism"[1] or "erosion" here, just a strong and mistaken sense of self-entitlement on your part. If you'd actually read (and comprehended) the applicable law as you claim to have, you'd find that the US actually has among the most liberal laws in the world protecting photographers rights.
[1] A term you demonstrably have no understanding of the meaning of.
When you read these histories, some of the things said by actors on both sides are eerily similar.
What you also find when you read those histories is that the protests that accomplished something were those that were part of a larger system with well defined goals and a roadmap for getting there. The 'Occupy' movement has nothing but populist slogans.
The goal seems to be to get enough people riled up to join the protests and finally to annoy the wealthy enough so that they call in the government guns
That plan is based on the tinfoil hat notion that there's a set of "government guns" to call in - and that the 'wealthy' are just salivating for the chance to use them.
inciting a revolution ala Egypt.
Um... what revolution in Egypt?
Seriously, just because the 'net declared "mission accomplished" and moved on to it's next meme doesn't mean anything has actually changed. Egypt is firmly in the control of one of the previous regimes most powerful supporters. No substantive change has occurred. And that's true all across the region - the groundhog saw his shadow and instead of a Jasmine Spring, we've got a nasty mess of winter.
I do not know how I feel about this.
You should feel very frightened that a populist mass with empty slogans and no plans or agenda is gaining such traction. That's not a recipe for change.
Gmail was very successful with it's invitation system: it was elitist, and everyone ached to get in...
What your analysis misses is that Gmail actually addressed a pressing need in the free email marketplace: space. On top of offering an order of magnitude more storage than its competitors, GMail also brought distinct improvements to the email paradigm (tagging, search, spam filtering). That allowed it to attract users from Hotmail/Yahoo and even private web hosts.
What your analysis misses is that Gmail behaved almost exactly like G+ is doing - a huge initial surge, followed by... nothing. Gmail is still a distant third in the free email marketplace. It just doesn't offer enough once it's competitors caught up, and it's quirky UI has been enough to turn off many people I know that have tried it.
I wouldn't count G+ out just yet. It's Google after all. Those millions of inactive users could quickly become active if G+ somehow jumps ahead of the curve.
Historically, that's a huge leap of faith. Google usually has no problem attracting an initial surge - their historical problem is maintaining and growing that base.
There's simple inertia, for sure, but G+ also lacks basic features. Events stand out as the single biggest missing feature for me.
Not just events... G+ is also missing business pages, fan pages, and organization pages. Probably half of my activity on Facebook is in the page for the submarine I served on in the 80's. I know of guys in the group for whom that's nearly the whole of their Facebook activity.
On top of that... G+ doesn't always link to other sites neatly. When I link to one of the photographs I've posted on Flickr, Facebook grabs and displays the title and a snippet of the text. G+ does not. Facebook actually does this for every external site I've seen links posted for, while G+ is very inconsistent (not only about what sites it does fetch a preview for, but sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't).
But TFA just shows the truth of what I said before (and got shouted/modded down for), Google's problem isn't attracting users - it's keeping them and growing the userbase beyond that initial flush. Their strategy of 'exclusiveness' that worked so well for Gmail is the kiss of death for a social network. Their notoriously short attention span, lengthy 'beta' periods, quirky UI's and general benign neglect of their products once they're made publicly available are just straws on a camel with an already broken back.
They would now be considered a homeland security threat or some such shit and locked up
Maybe you should read the article before reaching for the tinfoil - because Mr Draper (AKA Captain Crunch) was in fact locked up back then. (As were other phone phreakers.) The only reason Jobs and Woz were never so treated is that they managed to stay off the radar and were never caught during their brief careers as phreakers.
IIRC, the mere possession of a 'box' could net you a hefty fine. If they could prove you used it - that was wire fraud. And that's a Federal offense.
Argh... we're building weapons systems based on windows or mac or linux?
I'd be willing to bet that since the drones started out as non combat systems, doing was acceptable in the beginning - and they've never gone back and redone the system as the drones have gradually morphed into combat systems and then into weapons systems. Or, they've justified not doing so on the basis that to do so would cost $X megabucks cause Y years delay in deployment.
As to the whole "this may be caused by our own monitoring"... (Left hand/right hand.) It wouldn't be the first time I've seen something like this. Back in the 80's, one of the Navy's technical branches came up with a spiffy new system that needed the submarine's heading as one of it's inputs. So when they installed the prototype on my boat, they spliced into an existing analog signal - one that also also fed ships heading to the [Trident backfit] missile fire control system. When the spiffy was operating, it would read the signal every minute - loading down the line and taking it out of spec for fire control, causing fire control to go into alarm.
Making things even more frustrating for the navigation guys and for us down in fire control, the spiffy (which was operated by a third, different, division) was only operated a couple of hours a day - making it look like an intermittent fault. An intermittent fault that didn't match up to anything either navigation or fire control was doing., and as any tech knows, that's hardest kind to troubleshoot. (Not to mention, what the hell kind of intermittent occurs precisely every sixty seconds for an hour - and then quits?) Finally, after a month of great frustration trying to track the fault, we made a Hail Mary pass and started physically tracing the signal from the nav center down to fire control - and discovered the splice.
It turned out that the branch that 'owned'[1] the spiffy also 'owned' the junction box the splice was made in, even though they didn't 'own' the signal that passed through it. Since a) the spiffy was highly classified [2], b) they 'owned' the junction box, and c) it was cheaper to make that splice than to run a cable to a less accurate heading source that they 'owned', they didn't feel any need to ask permission or inform anyone that they had done so.
Our CO solved the problem by ordering the spiffy shut down and tagged out... This then turned into an enormous turf war between the branches. It took Even Higher Authority explained the to spiffy's 'owners' that interfering with the ships strategic mission was Not Acceptable even if it made their spiffy more expensive. In the end, the spiffy was never deployed operationally anyhow because of other problems, and when the Cold War ended Congress declined further funding for it.
[1] Everything on the boat belongs to someone, on and off hull, and that someone is responsible for maintenance, training, funding, etc...
[2] Outside of the guys onboard that operated it and a few officers, all we knew was that "something" had been installed aboard for testing.
Now... I've obviously made some typos and a few things could be made clearer in the above... unfortunately/. doesn't allow editing or clarification of a post after it's written...
That's what the "preview" button is for, so you can see what it looks like and can edit it down int the edit box before submitting.
Opposing piston engines are hardly new and they scale up just fine.
The engine in question, with it's much more complex valve gear and being a four stroke vice a two stroke is in fact new - and thus, whether it will scale well is unknown.
The Balao, Tang, and Barbel class submarines used such engines.
No, the Fairbanks-Morse opposed piston Diesels used in the Fleet boats were two stroke - the engine described in TFA are four stroke. And, as mentioned above, the intake and exhaust valving system is totally different.
Cleeves says his engine can also be scaled up for larger vehicles, and can easily be modified to run on diesel, ethanol, or even compressed natural gas, which means it could also turn up in light commercial vehicles or even cars
Mr Cleeves seems awfully confident about what can be accomplished with an engine that he only has one prototype of, and exactly zero experience with actually scaling up, or modifying for different uses. But such things are always easy on paper.
Also left unmentioned in TFA are the effects of the increased mechanical complexity on manufacturing, maintenance, and lifespan.
in our grandparents' era, a lot of people worked for only one or two companies, never got fucked at all, and retired without ever knowing what it's like.
In Happy Rose Colored La La Land maybe. In the real world, not so much.
If I remember correctly, and I'm sure I do, NASA was moving from Apollo hardware to shuttle hardware so they restricted spending on additional Apollo hardware.
You don't remember correctly. Which means you're pretty much batting.0000.
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It's possession of title that matters - because being struck from the register is a matter of internal Navy bookkeeping and tradition, irrelevant to salvage law. In the case of your example, that's something for the lawyers to sort out - real life salvors keep one on speed dial and don't touch a thing unless they have their ducks in a row.
No, you missed my point - if he's wrong about the parts I can see, how reliable is he about the parts I can't?
In the form of a car analogy - if a salesman tells me the car is in great shape inside and out, and I can see peeling paint and bald tires... I'm disinclined to believe him about the condition of the engine.
No, "rant" seems more appropriate to me... For all his complaints about how Amazon Invariably Does It Wrong and Nobody Can Use Amazon's Website - he fails to square those claims with some very publicly visible things; a) their nearly bulletproof infrastructure, and b) that millions of people do manage to use the site on a daily basis. Those failures undermine the balance of his 'argument'. (Worse yet, he seems to confuse and interchange user accessibility and developer accessibility.)
Just like the rants you see elsewhere on the net, his is a confused mish-mash of (seemingly) stream of consciousness writing. If he's gotten something right, it's more on the "stopped clock" principle than anything else as near as I can tell.
Federal law asserts that the the Government retains title to Government property, always and forever, regardless of location and even if the Government is currently unaware of the location of the property. In this, Federal law is in agreement with international salvage and admiralty law. (Which is why the statute of limitations doesn't apply - he's not being charged with a crime, he's being sued to force him to return Government property.)
Being stricken from the registry only means it's no longer being carried on the books as an active vessels. It remains government (Navy) property until title is specifically transferred or renounced. For example, Arizone was stricken from the registery in 1942 - but the USN still retains title to her.
Salvage law does apply here - and in this case, salvage law states that government property remains government property forever unless the government in question explicitly and specifically renounces it's rights over the property. (Which NASA has never done for the hardware in question.) That's why the US Navy took custody over the CSS Hunley wreck site - the US Government took custody of all CS Government property at the end of the war and transferred custody of Naval property to the USN, who never renounced their claim to the Hunley. That what Curt Newport had to negotiate salvage rights for the Liberty Bell 7 with NASA, and why NASA claims ownership over the various bits of Challenger and Columbia that surface from time-to-time.
Only in very narrow and very specific (and generally pretty unusual) cases does Salvage Law allow "finders keepers" - and this one isn't one of them.
That's thing that the space advocacy community has failed to acknowledge for a long time - outside of Congressional pork, nobodies core constituency cares about space exploration.
Eve did what first? Allowing you to buy ingame items for real world money and then turn around and sell them for ingame money? Nope - Puzzle Pirates did that first with the Doubloon Exchange back in 2005.
Having read Mr Friedman's regular pieces in The Space Review for quite some time now... I have to say that facts aren't his long suite. Like many in the space advocacy community, he's mostly about the Vision and the Dream. Facts are irrelevant to this lofty calling. Usually, they're a positive impediment.
Mostly by the model rocketry industry as a way to bandwagon on the public's brief infatuation with space travel.
That's what the tinfoil hat crowd would like to believe - because that's what their paranoid dogma requires them to believe. In reality, much of the public (when they think about it at all, which is rarely) thinks it's a mildly geeky hobby that a few weirdos and guys with too much time on their hands indulge in. (I.E. in the same category as model railroading, r/c airplanes, etc.. etc..)
You can't regain what you never really had in the first place except in the minds of marketers with a vested interest in producing the illusion of that belief.
The grandparent didn't say it was impossible for C-17's to land in Antartica, he said it was impossible for them to land *at Admundsen*. So while it's a wonderful picture, it's irrelevant.
Your rights while on someone else's property have always been limited (if nothing else by good manners). There's no "fascism"[1] or "erosion" here, just a strong and mistaken sense of self-entitlement on your part. If you'd actually read (and comprehended) the applicable law as you claim to have, you'd find that the US actually has among the most liberal laws in the world protecting photographers rights.
[1] A term you demonstrably have no understanding of the meaning of.
What you also find when you read those histories is that the protests that accomplished something were those that were part of a larger system with well defined goals and a roadmap for getting there. The 'Occupy' movement has nothing but populist slogans.
There's a difference between goals and slogans. The protesters fail to realize that - and so do you.
That plan is based on the tinfoil hat notion that there's a set of "government guns" to call in - and that the 'wealthy' are just salivating for the chance to use them.
Um... what revolution in Egypt?
Seriously, just because the 'net declared "mission accomplished" and moved on to it's next meme doesn't mean anything has actually changed. Egypt is firmly in the control of one of the previous regimes most powerful supporters. No substantive change has occurred. And that's true all across the region - the groundhog saw his shadow and instead of a Jasmine Spring, we've got a nasty mess of winter.
You should feel very frightened that a populist mass with empty slogans and no plans or agenda is gaining such traction. That's not a recipe for change.
What your analysis misses is that Gmail behaved almost exactly like G+ is doing - a huge initial surge, followed by... nothing. Gmail is still a distant third in the free email marketplace. It just doesn't offer enough once it's competitors caught up, and it's quirky UI has been enough to turn off many people I know that have tried it.
Historically, that's a huge leap of faith. Google usually has no problem attracting an initial surge - their historical problem is maintaining and growing that base.
Not just events... G+ is also missing business pages, fan pages, and organization pages. Probably half of my activity on Facebook is in the page for the submarine I served on in the 80's. I know of guys in the group for whom that's nearly the whole of their Facebook activity.
On top of that... G+ doesn't always link to other sites neatly. When I link to one of the photographs I've posted on Flickr, Facebook grabs and displays the title and a snippet of the text. G+ does not. Facebook actually does this for every external site I've seen links posted for, while G+ is very inconsistent (not only about what sites it does fetch a preview for, but sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't).
But TFA just shows the truth of what I said before (and got shouted/modded down for), Google's problem isn't attracting users - it's keeping them and growing the userbase beyond that initial flush. Their strategy of 'exclusiveness' that worked so well for Gmail is the kiss of death for a social network. Their notoriously short attention span, lengthy 'beta' periods, quirky UI's and general benign neglect of their products once they're made publicly available are just straws on a camel with an already broken back.
Maybe you should read the article before reaching for the tinfoil - because Mr Draper (AKA Captain Crunch) was in fact locked up back then. (As were other phone phreakers.) The only reason Jobs and Woz were never so treated is that they managed to stay off the radar and were never caught during their brief careers as phreakers.
IIRC, the mere possession of a 'box' could net you a hefty fine. If they could prove you used it - that was wire fraud. And that's a Federal offense.
Especially since searching assumes that all your correspondents have been kind enough to use the appropriate keywords in their messages.
I'd be willing to bet that since the drones started out as non combat systems, doing was acceptable in the beginning - and they've never gone back and redone the system as the drones have gradually morphed into combat systems and then into weapons systems. Or, they've justified not doing so on the basis that to do so would cost $X megabucks cause Y years delay in deployment.
As to the whole "this may be caused by our own monitoring"... (Left hand/right hand.) It wouldn't be the first time I've seen something like this. Back in the 80's, one of the Navy's technical branches came up with a spiffy new system that needed the submarine's heading as one of it's inputs. So when they installed the prototype on my boat, they spliced into an existing analog signal - one that also also fed ships heading to the [Trident backfit] missile fire control system. When the spiffy was operating, it would read the signal every minute - loading down the line and taking it out of spec for fire control, causing fire control to go into alarm.
Making things even more frustrating for the navigation guys and for us down in fire control, the spiffy (which was operated by a third, different, division) was only operated a couple of hours a day - making it look like an intermittent fault. An intermittent fault that didn't match up to anything either navigation or fire control was doing., and as any tech knows, that's hardest kind to troubleshoot. (Not to mention, what the hell kind of intermittent occurs precisely every sixty seconds for an hour - and then quits?) Finally, after a month of great frustration trying to track the fault, we made a Hail Mary pass and started physically tracing the signal from the nav center down to fire control - and discovered the splice.
It turned out that the branch that 'owned'[1] the spiffy also 'owned' the junction box the splice was made in, even though they didn't 'own' the signal that passed through it. Since a) the spiffy was highly classified [2], b) they 'owned' the junction box, and c) it was cheaper to make that splice than to run a cable to a less accurate heading source that they 'owned', they didn't feel any need to ask permission or inform anyone that they had done so.
Our CO solved the problem by ordering the spiffy shut down and tagged out... This then turned into an enormous turf war between the branches. It took Even Higher Authority explained the to spiffy's 'owners' that interfering with the ships strategic mission was Not Acceptable even if it made their spiffy more expensive. In the end, the spiffy was never deployed operationally anyhow because of other problems, and when the Cold War ended Congress declined further funding for it.
[1] Everything on the boat belongs to someone, on and off hull, and that someone is responsible for maintenance, training, funding, etc...
[2] Outside of the guys onboard that operated it and a few officers, all we knew was that "something" had been installed aboard for testing.
That's what the "preview" button is for, so you can see what it looks like and can edit it down int the edit box before submitting.
And it's not like they were uncommon or anything either.
The engine in question, with it's much more complex valve gear and being a four stroke vice a two stroke is in fact new - and thus, whether it will scale well is unknown.
No, the Fairbanks-Morse opposed piston Diesels used in the Fleet boats were two stroke - the engine described in TFA are four stroke. And, as mentioned above, the intake and exhaust valving system is totally different.
This part too...
Mr Cleeves seems awfully confident about what can be accomplished with an engine that he only has one prototype of, and exactly zero experience with actually scaling up, or modifying for different uses. But such things are always easy on paper.
Also left unmentioned in TFA are the effects of the increased mechanical complexity on manufacturing, maintenance, and lifespan.
In Happy Rose Colored La La Land maybe. In the real world, not so much.
You don't remember correctly. Which means you're pretty much batting .0000.