In other words, it's still Google's exclusive content which you can then license from Google. You can't get the 'same deal' and it's still not public domain.
Why are writers and creators of media singled out for loosing everything upon their deaths?
You're not. Anything you physically own before you die will be passed on to your family (local laws permitting), just like any other person on the planet... house, money, car, copies of your books, porn mags, etc.
The real question should be: why are writers and creators singled out for _EXTRA_ rights which aren't given to anyone else? If I die, my kids won't be able to go to my boss and demand that he continues to pay them my salary, why should writers be any different?
Except your example is nothing like the situation a writers family is in. A writers family is in the same situation I am - I inherited a piece of property, and I have every right to insist the tenants on that property continue to pay rent. I inherited a sales contract on an automobile, and I have every right to insist the payments be made on time and in full. Etc. etc..
So no, the writers family isn't any different. They inherit property and contracts the same as you and me.
Google is attempting to re-create "public domain" in an industry where Disney is trying to kill it.
How, exactly, does Google's sole right to reproduce and disseminate an authors copyrighted works re-create public domain? The works won't be in the public domain, they'll be controlled by Google.
She just doesn't want to be screwed over by Google in a land grab deal negotiated by an 'Authors Guild' that doesn't represent her.
What good is a petition, then? An agreement between Google and this 'Author's Guild' doesn't change the black-letter copyright law of this country.
Yes, it does. By creating an opt-out system whereby Google can reproduce the work of any author merely by paying a fee to 'Authors Guild', whether or not that 'Authors Guild' has any legal right to represent that author. I really don't understand why this needs to be repeated each and every time this settlement appears on Slashdot.
If she's not represented by the Guild, then when Google reproduces her work withour her permission, then she can sue them for copyright infringement.
Under the terms of the current settlement - she has lost her legal right to sue over copyright infringement because Google has been given the unlimited right to reproduce any works it chooses after paying a nominal fee to the 'Authors Guild'. The only right she has left is to apply to the 'Authors Guild' for her share of the fees paid to them. (And it's not clear that they are actually legally obligated to pay - since she has no contract with them.)
It's amazing how so many people who never passed a high school science class (or their schools 'science' class hadn't gone past basic atomic structure) are utterly afraid of crackpot doomsday predictions about something scientific that they don't even have the faintest inkling of comprehension of, while all the experts in that field aren't afraid or worried in the slightest.
It's not as if passing high school science stops the Slashdot crowd from wild speculation either.
I considered supported Wikileaks - until they pulled their "we have money to operate, but we're shutting down until we get more" stunt. They don't get another dime from me, as they've proved they can't be trusted.
He blasts the panel for 'claiming' his vehicles isn't man rated - but then states "it is man rated except for the escape system"
All of the parts that have been funded and already designed/built are man-rated to NASA standards.
When you have to spin to divert attention from the facts (which are that the entire flight vehicle is not man rated), you do nothing but reveal either weakness of your case, or the intensity of your bias.
It's also worth pointing out that Musk has a major financial stake in whether or not commercial providers are chosen.
If you read the article you linked, you also see where he weasels... He blasts the panel for 'claiming' his vehicles isn't man rated - but then states "it is man rated except for the escape system". (Um, Elon - being man rated is like being pregnant, you either are or you aren't.) The same goes for the Falcon 9 - he claims it isn't 'paper' like the Ares, but then the article points out that it hasn't flown and that its scheduled first flight is likely to slip (again).
For all of its vaunted simplicity, the Apollo flights only flew 18 times and had one very very close loss of the crew in space (and of course one actual loss of crew on the ground).
Actually, it had multiple incidents and close calls...
Consider the flight of Apollo 6. The pogo problems discovered on the flight weren't fully cured until Apollo 14. (And in fact those problems nearly caused the loss of Apollo 13 during ascent.) Then consider such incidents as the low fuel problems on Apollo 11, the docking problems on Apollo 14, the SPS issues on Apollo 15 and 16, the RCS problems on Skylab 3, the near poisoning of the crew on ASTP during reentry and landing...
There's more to safety than just not killing someone or coming close. Apollo had multiple incidents that threatened the life of the crew.
When the government is both the provider of a service and the one auditing it, you end up with no independent evaluators except at the accident boards.
The USN Submarine Force has operated that way, and without independent evaluators, for decades - and has an outstanding safety record.
Excess nitrogen comes from a wide variety of sources - here, the Hood Canal gets its excess nitrogen (IIRC) from failing septic systems and lawn fertilizer.
Yes, space exploration is about overcoming new challenges. But modifying the ISS to operate unmanned is 'challenge' equivalent to dropping a hundred pound concrete block on one's hand. You know it's going to hurt, and you know it's going to cost great deal of time, money, and effort to restore a fraction of the functionality it used to have. There's just no point in taking up the challenge.
Even so, you're never going to get rid of the ground based standing army. Operating a facility like ISS is a complex job, and automation doesn't replace analysis.
And given that ISS is more like the tenth or twelfth station (estimated, as I don't have time to count up all the Salyut and Almaz stations), I don't see what your point is. Even if it were the third, demolishing it is no different than tearing down any other building that is no longer needed.
It's not the speed - it's angles. You simply cannot 'shoot something into orbit' without ending up in an unstable elongated elliptical orbit. You need some form of propulsion on the projectile to convert this into a stable circular orbit.
But the real problem is that after you consider the (relatively speaking) small size and modest performance of possible projectiles and heavy structure needed to brace against the shock loads... You end up with a fairly dismal cargo capacity.
Sure, it's cheap to mail an automobile across the continent by breaking it down into parts that will fit into the size and weight limits of a standard manila envelope - but it's inefficient as hell because of the massive amounts of labor and overhead involved in fastening all the bits together at the other end. The same is true of launching cargo to the space station by cannon, the daily disruption of retrieving the cargo packet isn't worth the small amount of cargo retrieved.
Space cannons are like air launch and perpetual motion machines... Every so often somebody 'rediscovers' them and touts them widely without ever running the numbers. When you do run the numbers, you find out why nobody has ever actually built a working one.
I've heard this suggested somewhere before that ISS would make an awesome vehicle for getting to mars.
If by 'awesome' you actually mean 'utterly and completely unsuitable', sure. Otherwise no.
It's structure isn't designed to take the stresses that pushing out of Earth orbit will entail. (And no, ion engines aren't the answer. They aren't up to the job.) Even if it were designed to take those stresses, passing through the Van Allen belts will fry it's unshielded electronics and crew. Their corpses will then be nicely frozen when the environmental control systems, designed for the relatively toasty environment of LEO, fails in the freezing environment of interplanetary space. Anything left alive/functioning after being blasted with radiation and being deep frozen will die as the ISS loses electric power as the intensity of sunlight hitting it's solar panel decreases as it moves away from the sun.
The basic problem is that the ISS isn't designed to operate unattended and requires a small support army on the ground to monitor it's system, orbit, attitude, etc... (And no, it's not going to be neither cheap nor trivial to change either.)
Infrastructure is pretty much at the top of the list for things that Haiti needs, since their "roads" look like dried riverbeds, running water is all but nonexistent, and power is provided only to major cities and only on a rotational basis.
It's ironic that Slashdotters, who railed at managers who didn't appreciate their hard work fixing the "Y2K disaster that wasn't", are on the other side here.
Pretty much predictable though, it's a chance to rail against two of Slashdot's favorite straw men - Big Corporations and Big Government.
I am a doctor, and like many in the medical field, I am fed-up with all the BS related to the swine flu.
And the second part of this statement reveals your true motivations - you aren't actually any more qualified than the rest of us, but you'll puff yourself up with "I'm a doctor, therefore I know better than you" and use that to lend weight to your false arguments.
Every time that news agencies (Reuters, AFP, etc) publish headlines saying "12500 deaths from the Swine flu" but omit to state in the article that the "classic" seasonal flu kills hundreds of thousands worldwide every year, this is inappropriately biased. I think we can call this fear-mongering.
I call your statements ignorant. How many people normally die is utterly and completely irrelevant. The Swine flu was largely killing people outside of the demographics that normally are felled by the flu and outside the normal flu seasons. Failing to acknowledge that and repeating the narrow minded handwaving just shows your true colors - you aren't interested in facts, but in bias.
disclaimer: Former SSBN crewman, Missile, guidance, and fire control tech.
That technology looks to be pretty cool and excellent for routine maintenance, but I can see how it would suck for troubleshooting.
That depends on what part/type of troubleshooting it was used for I should think. It seems pretty useful for locating a particular cable in a rats nest, or an obscure adjustment or lubrication point. I can think of a couple of troubleshooting procedures it would have been very handy to have such a device had I ever had to do them. One emergency procedure I was trained to do, for example, hadn't ever been done in the thirty year history of the Force when I was in. (Odds are, that still holds true for complicated reasons I won't go into here.)
The solution as-is is not suitable for finer military electronics which are tangled messes of RF hardlines, circuit cards, and even wire-wrapped backplanes.
You're looking at from the backshop POV, not the line maintenance POV.
Also, there's more to the service than avionics. Aircraft are designed around LRU's which are quickly swapped out from a pool to get the aircraft ready, then the LRU's are sent to the shops for more leisurely repair.
On the boats, we don't have LRU's that are swapped out or backshops to send them to - we open the gear and work on it directly, so the design/packaging philosophy is different. Most of my fire control gear (and much of the rest of the electronics on the submarine) had modules on the front, plugged into a backplane, and then cables on the back of the backplane, which was hinged like a door for when access was required.
99% percent of the troubleshooting and repair was done just by swapping circuit card modules, and the system was designed to have that maintenance done 'live' in real time. (That is, we powered down the backplane containing the module of interest, leaving the rest of the unit powered.) That way (in fire control for example) could rapidly enter the equipment and make repairs even while shooting missiles using the redundant string or shooting the missiles that weren't impacted by the fault.
A system like the one in TFA that was hooked into our BITE systems and could lead the tech directly to the 051C9B35 module (for example) would be quite useful under battle conditions.
You are making a very silly assumption. You assume the military budget just goes down a black hole. It doesn't. We get two benefits from that money. First is tech, probably more tech than NASA has delivered and NASA has done some good stuff. But look how much tech came out of two World Wars and the Cold War (WWIII in everything but body count) and compare it to NASA.
Not to mention that a great of tech that NASA uses has its origins in military budgets. Pressure suits? Owe a great deal to research into suits for high altitude warplanes. Rocket engines? A great deal of the field is based on basic and applies research for ICBM's and rocket powered aircraft. Inertial guidance? The military wanted it for airplanes, rockets and missiles, and submarines - and NASA tagged along. (And in the guidance systems for rockets and missiles the electronics industry learned the techniques of building rugged lightweight computing systems - of exactly the same kind that NASA would later use.)
For that matter the computers onboard the Apollo CM and LM were based on the guidance computers for the Polaris A-1.
For that matter, the Apollo spacecraft wouldn't have had the Saturn V to boost it - had the USAF not started developing a million pound thrust engine 'on spec' in 1956.
We went to the moon 'in a decade' because in the previous decade the DoD spent a lot of money on basic technology that NASA later adopted.
The fact that they continued the mission shows it wasn't budget constraints that limited it to 90 days... at least not the operations budget.
While budget constraints didn't limit it to 90 days, ongoing operations do impact the budget. The operators don't work for free, and neither do the guys supporting the specialized hardware the operators are using. The rooms the operators are in don't come free either.
All those man-hours have to be paid from somewhere, and that somewhere is the budgets of other projects.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, it's still Google's exclusive content which you can then license from Google. You can't get the 'same deal' and it's still not public domain.
Actually, Google will have sole rights - that's why some many different groups are protesting the 'settlement'.
And even if I could get the same rights as Google, that still means I have to pay - which isn't public domain.
Except your example is nothing like the situation a writers family is in. A writers family is in the same situation I am - I inherited a piece of property, and I have every right to insist the tenants on that property continue to pay rent. I inherited a sales contract on an automobile, and I have every right to insist the payments be made on time and in full. Etc. etc..
So no, the writers family isn't any different. They inherit property and contracts the same as you and me.
How, exactly, does Google's sole right to reproduce and disseminate an authors copyrighted works re-create public domain? The works won't be in the public domain, they'll be controlled by Google.
Yes, it does. By creating an opt-out system whereby Google can reproduce the work of any author merely by paying a fee to 'Authors Guild', whether or not that 'Authors Guild' has any legal right to represent that author. I really don't understand why this needs to be repeated each and every time this settlement appears on Slashdot.
Under the terms of the current settlement - she has lost her legal right to sue over copyright infringement because Google has been given the unlimited right to reproduce any works it chooses after paying a nominal fee to the 'Authors Guild'. The only right she has left is to apply to the 'Authors Guild' for her share of the fees paid to them. (And it's not clear that they are actually legally obligated to pay - since she has no contract with them.)
It's not as if passing high school science stops the Slashdot crowd from wild speculation either.
I considered supported Wikileaks - until they pulled their "we have money to operate, but we're shutting down until we get more" stunt. They don't get another dime from me, as they've proved they can't be trusted.
When you have to spin to divert attention from the facts (which are that the entire flight vehicle is not man rated), you do nothing but reveal either weakness of your case, or the intensity of your bias.
It's also worth pointing out that Musk has a major financial stake in whether or not commercial providers are chosen.
If you read the article you linked, you also see where he weasels... He blasts the panel for 'claiming' his vehicles isn't man rated - but then states "it is man rated except for the escape system". (Um, Elon - being man rated is like being pregnant, you either are or you aren't.) The same goes for the Falcon 9 - he claims it isn't 'paper' like the Ares, but then the article points out that it hasn't flown and that its scheduled first flight is likely to slip (again).
Actually, it had multiple incidents and close calls...
Consider the flight of Apollo 6. The pogo problems discovered on the flight weren't fully cured until Apollo 14. (And in fact those problems nearly caused the loss of Apollo 13 during ascent.) Then consider such incidents as the low fuel problems on Apollo 11, the docking problems on Apollo 14, the SPS issues on Apollo 15 and 16, the RCS problems on Skylab 3, the near poisoning of the crew on ASTP during reentry and landing...
There's more to safety than just not killing someone or coming close. Apollo had multiple incidents that threatened the life of the crew.
The USN Submarine Force has operated that way, and without independent evaluators, for decades - and has an outstanding safety record.
Excess nitrogen comes from a wide variety of sources - here, the Hood Canal gets its excess nitrogen (IIRC) from failing septic systems and lawn fertilizer.
Assuming the Archives have eminent domain authority.
Yes, space exploration is about overcoming new challenges. But modifying the ISS to operate unmanned is 'challenge' equivalent to dropping a hundred pound concrete block on one's hand. You know it's going to hurt, and you know it's going to cost great deal of time, money, and effort to restore a fraction of the functionality it used to have. There's just no point in taking up the challenge.
Even so, you're never going to get rid of the ground based standing army. Operating a facility like ISS is a complex job, and automation doesn't replace analysis.
And given that ISS is more like the tenth or twelfth station (estimated, as I don't have time to count up all the Salyut and Almaz stations), I don't see what your point is. Even if it were the third, demolishing it is no different than tearing down any other building that is no longer needed.
It's not the speed - it's angles. You simply cannot 'shoot something into orbit' without ending up in an unstable elongated elliptical orbit. You need some form of propulsion on the projectile to convert this into a stable circular orbit.
But the real problem is that after you consider the (relatively speaking) small size and modest performance of possible projectiles and heavy structure needed to brace against the shock loads... You end up with a fairly dismal cargo capacity.
Sure, it's cheap to mail an automobile across the continent by breaking it down into parts that will fit into the size and weight limits of a standard manila envelope - but it's inefficient as hell because of the massive amounts of labor and overhead involved in fastening all the bits together at the other end. The same is true of launching cargo to the space station by cannon, the daily disruption of retrieving the cargo packet isn't worth the small amount of cargo retrieved.
Space cannons are like air launch and perpetual motion machines... Every so often somebody 'rediscovers' them and touts them widely without ever running the numbers. When you do run the numbers, you find out why nobody has ever actually built a working one.
On the other hand, to shoot a rocket into orbit from a cannon you need enormous amounts of extra structure and extremely heavy heat shielding...
If by 'awesome' you actually mean 'utterly and completely unsuitable', sure. Otherwise no.
It's structure isn't designed to take the stresses that pushing out of Earth orbit will entail. (And no, ion engines aren't the answer. They aren't up to the job.) Even if it were designed to take those stresses, passing through the Van Allen belts will fry it's unshielded electronics and crew. Their corpses will then be nicely frozen when the environmental control systems, designed for the relatively toasty environment of LEO, fails in the freezing environment of interplanetary space. Anything left alive/functioning after being blasted with radiation and being deep frozen will die as the ISS loses electric power as the intensity of sunlight hitting it's solar panel decreases as it moves away from the sun.
The basic problem is that the ISS isn't designed to operate unattended and requires a small support army on the ground to monitor it's system, orbit, attitude, etc... (And no, it's not going to be neither cheap nor trivial to change either.)
And that was before the earthquake.
A contention you fail to support. In fact, you don't even try.
Pretty much predictable though, it's a chance to rail against two of Slashdot's favorite straw men - Big Corporations and Big Government.
And the second part of this statement reveals your true motivations - you aren't actually any more qualified than the rest of us, but you'll puff yourself up with "I'm a doctor, therefore I know better than you" and use that to lend weight to your false arguments.
I call your statements ignorant. How many people normally die is utterly and completely irrelevant. The Swine flu was largely killing people outside of the demographics that normally are felled by the flu and outside the normal flu seasons. Failing to acknowledge that and repeating the narrow minded handwaving just shows your true colors - you aren't interested in facts, but in bias.
Sounds like all the recriminations on Mon Jan 3rd - 2000. "The world didn't end, so obviously we didn't need to do anything".
disclaimer: Former SSBN crewman, Missile, guidance, and fire control tech.
That depends on what part/type of troubleshooting it was used for I should think. It seems pretty useful for locating a particular cable in a rats nest, or an obscure adjustment or lubrication point. I can think of a couple of troubleshooting procedures it would have been very handy to have such a device had I ever had to do them. One emergency procedure I was trained to do, for example, hadn't ever been done in the thirty year history of the Force when I was in. (Odds are, that still holds true for complicated reasons I won't go into here.)
You're looking at from the backshop POV, not the line maintenance POV.
Also, there's more to the service than avionics. Aircraft are designed around LRU's which are quickly swapped out from a pool to get the aircraft ready, then the LRU's are sent to the shops for more leisurely repair.
On the boats, we don't have LRU's that are swapped out or backshops to send them to - we open the gear and work on it directly, so the design/packaging philosophy is different. Most of my fire control gear (and much of the rest of the electronics on the submarine) had modules on the front, plugged into a backplane, and then cables on the back of the backplane, which was hinged like a door for when access was required.
99% percent of the troubleshooting and repair was done just by swapping circuit card modules, and the system was designed to have that maintenance done 'live' in real time. (That is, we powered down the backplane containing the module of interest, leaving the rest of the unit powered.) That way (in fire control for example) could rapidly enter the equipment and make repairs even while shooting missiles using the redundant string or shooting the missiles that weren't impacted by the fault.
A system like the one in TFA that was hooked into our BITE systems and could lead the tech directly to the 051C9B35 module (for example) would be quite useful under battle conditions.
Not to mention that a great of tech that NASA uses has its origins in military budgets. Pressure suits? Owe a great deal to research into suits for high altitude warplanes. Rocket engines? A great deal of the field is based on basic and applies research for ICBM's and rocket powered aircraft. Inertial guidance? The military wanted it for airplanes, rockets and missiles, and submarines - and NASA tagged along. (And in the guidance systems for rockets and missiles the electronics industry learned the techniques of building rugged lightweight computing systems - of exactly the same kind that NASA would later use.)
For that matter the computers onboard the Apollo CM and LM were based on the guidance computers for the Polaris A-1.
For that matter, the Apollo spacecraft wouldn't have had the Saturn V to boost it - had the USAF not started developing a million pound thrust engine 'on spec' in 1956.
We went to the moon 'in a decade' because in the previous decade the DoD spent a lot of money on basic technology that NASA later adopted.
While budget constraints didn't limit it to 90 days, ongoing operations do impact the budget. The operators don't work for free, and neither do the guys supporting the specialized hardware the operators are using. The rooms the operators are in don't come free either.
All those man-hours have to be paid from somewhere, and that somewhere is the budgets of other projects.