Yes, it would be more appropriate to call it a Shire. A County is historically a geographical area under jurisdiction of a count, which clearly we don't have any of in the US, but a shire is under jurisdiction of a sheriff, which makes more sense. So while they're getting up in arms over the whole master/slave issue, someone might want to let them in on it. LA Shire might not sound as good as LA County, but we're trying to be policially correct here.
The law sounds good in theory, but there are still adaquate loopholes if the company really wanted to fight the issue. First off, what is defined as your own time? If you get paid by the hour and punch in and punch out each day, the distinction is obvious. But tech jobs rarely work this way. In many cases, you're paid salary and many employees telecommute or take work home with them to some degree, which means just because you're not actually at your place of employment, doesn't necessarily mean you're not "on the clock" so to speak.
Now, if your job entails only writing microcode for new processors, and the program in question is a database that stores food recipes, it's unlikely that the company would be able to claim the software was job related. But what happens when the distinction is more fuzzy. If Apple wants to incorporate the program, there's a good chance that they've been planning to for some time now, and if the employee coded the software after so much as hearing a single peep about the idea, it's possible the company could push that the code was developed as a result of some indirect effort of the employer's. Certainly, it's still a weak argument, but the law does have provisions to allow for it.
In the end, if you don't want this problem, amend the boilerplate contract before getting hired. Make it clear what is and is not company time/property and make a decision based on those merits. Law or no law, it's a lot easier to fight if your employment contract specifically states that you're in the clear.
They don't have to carry these things around when they're not in school. And when they ARE in school, they're supposed to get on/off the bus at a specific time, they're supposed to be in specific classes at specific times. They're not supposed to leave campus during classes (with obvious legitimate exceptions, of course). Each class always takes roll, and if the student hasn't shown up for class that day, and the office hasn't been notified why, the parents are contacted. This happens already, why would adding RFID tags make any difference? It might be helpful to know that the student got off the bus, but hasn't shown up to class. Or walked out of the building after 3rd period not to return. The advantage of using RFID is that this information can be made available immediately if needed, and if there is a real problem, you don't have to spend a couple hours tracking down attendance records from the teachers or watching hours of video looking for the important 3 seconds.
I suppose it's sad that anyone thinks that this is necessary, but the same can be said for metal detectors and locks on the doors. The only problem I can see with this is if someone relies on on the RFID and ONLY the RFID for tracking purposes. Manual attendance counts should still be taken and verified to avoid any attempts to abuse the system. But lets not get too excited about a perceived loss of privacy where there really has never been a whole lot of it anyway.
How does "coming up with an idea..." to do something have anything to do with copyright? You have to actually produce something first. If this demonstrates anything, it demonstrates the issue of prior art, where they are not permitted to pursue their dream and copyright it because someone else already did.
If you want the kids to really get an idea, they're going to have to spend all their time and effort working on something, tell them that they'll be able to sell it when they're done, and then after months of effort, take away the fruits of their labors and tell them you were just kidding.
Of course, the problem with this is, they'll have to actually create something that someone would be interested in purchasing, and it's unlikely that the average 5-9th grader will be able to pull this off, no matter what it is, and most especially not a product of an intellectual nature. Sure there are the rare exceptions, but this is a project aimed at ALL students, not the TAG crowd.
So at best this will be another boring assignment that the students will only half heartedly pay attention to. And at worst, the few students that have yet to figure out what "that there interweb" thing is all about will suddenly realize that they're missing out on a ton of free music.
This is probably another one of those sugarcoated efforts to make the public cry for the poor starving artists that are being robbed blind by the malicious 12 year olds who download their music, instead of realizing that the record industry is the one robbing them blind.
While we're talking about short memories, don't forget that Loki failed not because they had no market, but because they were poorly managed. They were one of many holdouts to the dotcom era who's only ambition, only hope, was not to bring the love of gaming to linux, but to IPO and cash out. It's sad too, seeing how many of the employees of this company that was doomed to fail, stuck it out regardless, and at the end, went months without getting paid, and in some case even spending their own cash to keep the company alive, and in the end, they get screwed by the owner.
Had the company been managed properly, they'd still be around today, and going strong. Linux would have a much stronger influence on game companies pondering to make a linux port, and if they were successful, there would be other serious competitors. Alas, the chance was lost, only because people at the top had the wrong vision.
Actually, google is pretty good about removing any pages you don't want listed. I'll bet they'd remove usenet posts too if you could prove you were the poster.
Problem with posting to usenet though, you're already giving them the rights to redistribute it, as all usenet servers propogate the content to other newsservers. And any of those servers can be pay only, and there's not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it. So to say that google suddenly is out of compliance because they happen to have a server with extremely good retention doesn't change the facts much. I'd have to check the posting policy on a few newsservers to know for sure though.
Well, technically when you sue the corporation you ARE suing the shareholders. The only difference is, the most you can possibly get from them is the value of the shares.
IRC, usenet, thousands of scattered ftp servers on funny ports. They all serve the same purpose as Kazza with one distinct difference. They require half a brain and some patience to use them. And yes, while I understand the disturbing concept of assuming that most people on IRC have a brain, which scenario would you prefer if you didn't know any better:
A: enter song name in search field, click search, click on the first name that shows up. launch file when done.
or
B: connect to IRC. Server full, connect to another IRC server. Wait. Join a channel. Spend two minutes closing all the popup spam windows. Sift through lists of fserve postings. Copy/paste the trigger. If necessary, sift through the fserve looking for the file you wanted. Discover that the user actually expects you to upload something first. Upload something. Get kicked off because that user doesn't want what you're uploading. Find someone else offering the same file. Makes you go to a bunch of porn sites to assemble a password for his ftp server. Connect to said ftp server. Watch while it recycles because it's already maxed out. Finally connect. Oh look, you have to upload something here too.........
Half the people using Kazza probably don't even realize that they're sharing files. That's both the beauty and the curse of that system. People contribute what they've downloaded back to the world, even if they're not aware of it. It's also the reason that fakes, broken files, sabotaged files live on forever because people don't delete them, and they get served back out for others to propogate. But the ease of use by the users also makes it easy to target by the RIAA. Lots of clueless, easy to target people, all in one place.
I can't touch your billboard, just like I can't hack into the ad server and replace your ads with one of my own.
However, if I design a windshield that detects the presence of your billboards and superimposes another image over it, such that your billboard has a different message, that's fine. The only difference is, it's a lot easier to do this online than in real life.
But they could do the Silmarillion. Although I doubt anyone would watch it if they did. It's a really tough book to follow, I can't imagine how they'd make a movie out of it. However, Blind Guardian made an album based on the events of that book, so who knows.
In many places, spam itself isn't illegal either, however most ISPs worth their salt will glady rid themselves of customers that spam, and I would imagine they would be willing to do the same to harvesters. Of course, this isn't as cut&dry as reporting a spam, since you won't have the ever-so-informative email headers to provide evidence, but if enough individual reports come in, it would probably be effective.
But that won't work if the software is repackaged and sold as-is. They only have to make the code available with it, but since the code will already be available elsewhere anyway, and the goverment won't likely care, it's hardly an issue.
The only way a dual license would work is if mr. slick salesman wants to use the GPL'ed software because it accomplishes 90% of what the customer is demanding. So he takes that code, adds in the extra 10% required, but then doesn't want to redistribute the changes. This is where a dual license would come in handy. However, if the slick salesman released the changes, which he probably would since he's already got his hand in the government's pocket anyway, then this wouldn't do much good.
Why is it that most... ok, ALL, video game- based movies are bad?
1. The movies typically come out long after the games they're based on have lost most if not all of their popularity.
2. Marketed to the wrong people. Instead of creating a movie that would appeal to the video game fans, of which there might be a few hundred thousand, they instead try to appeal to the mainstream teenage audience, from which the original game probably found no audience.
3. Wrong people involved in the creative process. You end up with a halfwashed script that only vaguely resembles the plot of the original game, assuming there was ever a plot to begin with. It's one thing to just make up an entire story with something like Street Fighter, where there wasn't really anything to work with anyway, but not to take a game that already had a rich story, like Wing Commander, and base a movie on that game which short of a few token character names might as well have been a different movie. The people who script out these movies needed to play the games. They needed to have a foothold in the culture surrounding those games. Heck, a lot of them even have published novels, with great, action packed and dramatic elements that would translate well to the big screen. Someone clued in would know these things, but instead, whoever ends up with the project, has no objectivity with regards to the subject matter. And so we end up with garbage.
There is a bit of potentially good news though. At some point the game engines themselves are going to be good enough that a decent movie can be created entirely within the engine itself, by anyone who wants to, on virtually no budget. Of course, most of the home movies that come from this will probably be no better than what's on the big screen, but at least there won't be any excuses anymore.
I found myself consumed in Ultima Online for the first 6 months is was available, played it a minimum of 8 hours a day and for the last few months, I found myself absolutely hating the game, and it most certainly had a negative influence on my life. For all practical purposes, I would consider myself addicted. I would spend all day at work dreaming, thinking, planning, or researching the game so when I finally got home I could play more efficiently, etc. I couldn't wait to get out of there. That game was calling to me. I stayed up very late playing it, I would wake up early to play it. I dropped out of school to play it.
Yet, on a lark, one day I was replying to posts in one of the newsgroups. I can't even remember what the post was about, and I can't find it in the google archives, but I started the reply as a hard core gamer, and 10 minutes later when I was done, I had decided to quit. Went home that night, logged in, gave away all my stuff, shut it down, and never played it again.
However, unlike a dependancy, I never once longed to go back to it. Not the next day, or a week later, or months later. I didn't miss it at all.
I've never tried to quit smoking or quit using drugs, primarily because I never tried them in the first place, so I have no idea how easy something like that would be to quit, but I'm quite sure it's orders of magnitude more difficult. I certainly can't seem to kick my caffiene habit, which is a pretty mild addiction as they go. So it's hard to consider that the game had much control over me. I willingly devoted my life to it, for reasons I can't fully explain. But it served no purpose. Satisfied no need. Nothing stopped me from quitting, and nothing tried to draw me back.
If I had to guess, I would say the draw to these types of games is that they never end. You can't win, you can't lose, you just keep on existing. Almost all games, be they FPS, adventure, etc have a defined point at which you can say the game is over. At some point you can easily choose to shut down the game or start a new one, but you don't feel like you're walking out of the middle of a party when you think it's time to quit.
And I have no doubt that the MMORPGs are designed with just that addictive tendancy in mind. There is no revenue scheme more ideal than a legal form of crack, especially when you know very well that you can market it to kids. As long as you keep it relatively free of cultural taboos, games like GTA will get all the ire of the anti-gaming crowd, and you can slip under the radar.
Not the same. This more closely relates to the stock market. You have to buy the land when it's cheap. At that time, you can only assume that it will be worth something in the future, and even then, you're going to have to wait 15-20 years before it suddenly becomes valuable. The more developed the area is, the more the land is going to cost you at the time you choose to invest in this way, and if you keep holding out for a better price, there's always a chance that growth in the area might die off, or a recession will hit, or the area will suddenly go to pot and you'll be stuck with worthless land. SOMEONE has to own the land at some point.
You can offer up the new flavor without a patent at all. Chances are good they'll want it to be a trade secret anyway, so you can have them focus group it under an NDA and if they're interested, you'll make all your money anyway, and you don't even have to spend the 20 grand on a patent first.
If they actually intend to produce the product, that's a big difference from having a vague idea and just obtaining the patent to extort money from others who will do all the work to R&D, market, and mass produce the product.
Europa might have a plentiful supply of water, and in all fairness, they might have grabbed all of that too, but Earth has more, and it's in a form that's probably easier to obtain. They also were looking for food, slaves, and soldiers, of which Europa had none.
Of course, the stupid metric conversion problem only accounted for one of the failures, but it's indicitive of a larger problem. There's obviously a shortcoming in quality control and verification if such an obvious mistake could be overlooked. What less obvious problems are we missing all together? Most of the failures occured during the orbital entry phase, during which time they shut off the transmitter, and therefore don't have up to the second data on the reason for the failure. Sure, they likely wouldn't have much of an opportunity to save the mission, but they would have a good chance at figuring out what the problem actually was so it could be fixed the next time around. Instead, we're left to guess. Cost concerns are always mentioned as the reason, but how much have we "saved" really? An extra million $$ to keep the transmitter on would probably have paid for itself a long time ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it would be more appropriate to call it a Shire. A County is historically a geographical area under jurisdiction of a count, which clearly we don't have any of in the US, but a shire is under jurisdiction of a sheriff, which makes more sense.
So while they're getting up in arms over the whole master/slave issue, someone might want to let them in on it. LA Shire might not sound as good as LA County, but we're trying to be policially correct here.
-Restil
The law sounds good in theory, but there are still adaquate loopholes if the company really wanted to fight the issue. First off, what is defined as your own time? If you get paid by the hour and punch in and punch out each day, the distinction is obvious. But tech jobs rarely work this way. In many cases, you're paid salary and many employees telecommute or take work home with them to some degree, which means just because you're not actually at your place of employment, doesn't necessarily mean you're not "on the clock" so to speak.
Now, if your job entails only writing microcode for new processors, and the program in question is a database that stores food recipes, it's unlikely that the company would be able to claim the software was job related. But what happens when the distinction is more fuzzy. If Apple wants to incorporate the program, there's a good chance that they've been planning to for some time now, and if the employee coded the software after so much as hearing a single peep about the idea, it's possible the company could push that the code was developed as a result of some indirect effort of the employer's. Certainly, it's still a weak argument, but the law does have provisions to allow for it.
In the end, if you don't want this problem, amend the boilerplate contract before getting hired. Make it clear what is and is not company time/property and make a decision based on those merits. Law or no law, it's a lot easier to fight if your employment contract specifically states that you're in the clear.
-Restil
They don't have to carry these things around when they're not in school. And when they ARE in school, they're supposed to get on/off the bus at a specific time, they're supposed to be in specific classes at specific times. They're not supposed to leave campus during classes (with obvious legitimate exceptions, of course). Each class always takes roll, and if the student hasn't shown up for class that day, and the office hasn't been notified why, the parents are contacted. This happens already, why would adding RFID tags make any difference? It might be helpful to know that the student got off the bus, but hasn't shown up to class. Or walked out of the building after 3rd period not to return. The advantage of using RFID is that this information can be made available immediately if needed, and if there is a real problem, you don't have to spend a couple hours tracking down attendance records from the teachers or watching hours of video looking for the important 3 seconds.
I suppose it's sad that anyone thinks that this is necessary, but the same can be said for metal detectors and locks on the doors. The only problem I can see with this is if someone relies on on the RFID and ONLY the RFID for tracking purposes. Manual attendance counts should still be taken and verified to avoid any attempts to abuse the system. But lets not get too excited about a perceived loss of privacy where there really has never been a whole lot of it anyway.
-Restil
How does "coming up with an idea..." to do something have anything to do with copyright? You have to actually produce something first. If this demonstrates anything, it demonstrates the issue of prior art, where they are not permitted to pursue their dream and copyright it because someone else already did.
If you want the kids to really get an idea, they're going to have to spend all their time and effort working on something, tell them that they'll be able to sell it when they're done, and then after months of effort, take away the fruits of their labors and tell them you were just kidding.
Of course, the problem with this is, they'll have to actually create something that someone would be interested in purchasing, and it's unlikely that the average 5-9th grader will be able to pull this off, no matter what it is, and most especially not a product of an intellectual nature. Sure there are the rare exceptions, but this is a project aimed at ALL students, not the TAG crowd.
So at best this will be another boring assignment that the students will only half heartedly pay attention to. And at worst, the few students that have yet to figure out what "that there interweb" thing is all about will suddenly realize that they're missing out on a ton of free music.
This is probably another one of those sugarcoated efforts to make the public cry for the poor starving artists that are being robbed blind by the malicious 12 year olds who download their music, instead of realizing that the record industry is the one robbing them blind.
-Restil
While we're talking about short memories, don't forget that Loki failed not because they had no market, but because they were poorly managed. They were one of many holdouts to the dotcom era who's only ambition, only hope, was not to bring the love of gaming to linux, but to IPO and cash out. It's sad too, seeing how many of the employees of this company that was doomed to fail, stuck it out regardless, and at the end, went months without getting paid, and in some case even spending their own cash to keep the company alive, and in the end, they get screwed by the owner.
Had the company been managed properly, they'd still be around today, and going strong. Linux would have a much stronger influence on game companies pondering to make a linux port, and if they were successful, there would be other serious competitors. Alas, the chance was lost, only because people at the top had the wrong vision.
At least we got SDL out of it.
-Restil
You have to make tabacco illegal first. And don't think they aren't trying. You HAVE been paying attention lately, haven't you?
-Paul
LSL2, and only runs on 8086 processors. And it really scares me that I remember this.
-Restil
Actually, google is pretty good about removing any pages you don't want listed. I'll bet they'd remove usenet posts too if you could prove you were the poster.
Problem with posting to usenet though, you're already giving them the rights to redistribute it, as all usenet servers propogate the content to other newsservers. And any of those servers can be pay only, and there's not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it. So to say that google suddenly is out of compliance because they happen to have a server with extremely good retention doesn't change the facts much. I'd have to check the posting policy on a few newsservers to know for sure though.
-Restil
Well, technically when you sue the corporation you ARE suing the shareholders. The only difference is, the most you can possibly get from them is the value of the shares.
-Restil
You were saying?
-Restil
Aye, you would think, wouldn't you? :)
-Restil
IRC, usenet, thousands of scattered ftp servers on funny ports. They all serve the same purpose as Kazza with one distinct difference. They require half a brain and some patience to use them. And yes, while I understand the disturbing concept of assuming that most people on IRC have a brain, which scenario would you prefer if you didn't know any better:
A: enter song name in search field, click search, click on the first name that shows up. launch file when done.
or
B: connect to IRC. Server full, connect to another IRC server. Wait. Join a channel. Spend two minutes closing all the popup spam windows. Sift through lists of fserve postings. Copy/paste the trigger. If necessary, sift through the fserve looking for the file you wanted. Discover that the user actually expects you to upload something first. Upload something. Get kicked off because that user doesn't want what you're uploading. Find someone else offering the same file. Makes you go to a bunch of porn sites to assemble a password for his ftp server. Connect to said ftp server. Watch while it recycles because it's already maxed out. Finally connect. Oh look, you have to upload something here too.........
Half the people using Kazza probably don't even realize that they're sharing files. That's both the beauty and the curse of that system. People contribute what they've downloaded back to the world, even if they're not aware of it. It's also the reason that fakes, broken files, sabotaged files live on forever because people don't delete them, and they get served back out for others to propogate. But the ease of use by the users also makes it easy to target by the RIAA. Lots of clueless, easy to target people, all in one place.
-Restil
I can't touch your billboard, just like I can't hack into the ad server and replace your ads with one of my own.
However, if I design a windshield that detects the presence of your billboards and superimposes another image over it, such that your billboard has a different message, that's fine. The only difference is, it's a lot easier to do this online than in real life.
-Restil
But they could do the Silmarillion. Although I doubt anyone would watch it if they did. It's a really tough book to follow, I can't imagine how they'd make a movie out of it. However, Blind Guardian made an album based on the events of that book, so who knows.
-Restil
In many places, spam itself isn't illegal either, however most ISPs worth their salt will glady rid themselves of customers that spam, and I would imagine they would be willing to do the same to harvesters. Of course, this isn't as cut&dry as reporting a spam, since you won't have the ever-so-informative email headers to provide evidence, but if enough individual reports come in, it would probably be effective.
-Restil
But that won't work if the software is repackaged and sold as-is. They only have to make the code available with it, but since the code will already be available elsewhere anyway, and the goverment won't likely care, it's hardly an issue.
The only way a dual license would work is if mr. slick salesman wants to use the GPL'ed software because it accomplishes 90% of what the customer is demanding. So he takes that code, adds in the extra 10% required, but then doesn't want to redistribute the changes. This is where a dual license would come in handy. However, if the slick salesman released the changes, which he probably would since he's already got his hand in the government's pocket anyway, then this wouldn't do much good.
-Restil
After ROTK gets mastered, there'll be one hell of a lot of processing power laying idle.
:)
Yeah, because high quality CGI was so 2003, ya know. Won't be needing it for anything else.
-Restil
Why is it that most... ok, ALL, video game- based movies are bad?
1. The movies typically come out long after the games they're based on have lost most if not all of their popularity.
2. Marketed to the wrong people. Instead of creating a movie that would appeal to the video game fans, of which there might be a few hundred thousand, they instead try to appeal to the mainstream teenage audience, from which the original game probably found no audience.
3. Wrong people involved in the creative process. You end up with a halfwashed script that only vaguely resembles the plot of the original game, assuming there was ever a plot to begin with. It's one thing to just make up an entire story with something like Street Fighter, where there wasn't really anything to work with anyway, but not to take a game that already had a rich story, like Wing Commander, and base a movie on that game which short of a few token character names might as well have been a different movie. The people who script out these movies needed to play the games. They needed to have a foothold in the culture surrounding those games. Heck, a lot of them even have published novels, with great, action packed and dramatic elements that would translate well to the big screen. Someone clued in would know these things, but instead, whoever ends up with the project, has no objectivity with regards to the subject matter. And so we end up with garbage.
There is a bit of potentially good news though. At some point the game engines themselves are going to be good enough that a decent movie can be created entirely within the engine itself, by anyone who wants to, on virtually no budget. Of course, most of the home movies that come from this will probably be no better than what's on the big screen, but at least there won't be any excuses anymore.
-Restil
I found myself consumed in Ultima Online for the first 6 months is was available, played it a minimum of 8 hours a day and for the last few months, I found myself absolutely hating the game, and it most certainly had a negative influence on my life. For all practical purposes, I would consider myself addicted. I would spend all day at work dreaming, thinking, planning, or researching the game so when I finally got home I could play more efficiently, etc. I couldn't wait to get out of there. That game was calling to me. I stayed up very late playing it, I would wake up early to play it. I dropped out of school to play it.
Yet, on a lark, one day I was replying to posts in one of the newsgroups. I can't even remember what the post was about, and I can't find it in the google archives, but I started the reply as a hard core gamer, and 10 minutes later when I was done, I had decided to quit. Went home that night, logged in, gave away all my stuff, shut it down, and never played it again.
However, unlike a dependancy, I never once longed to go back to it. Not the next day, or a week later, or months later. I didn't miss it at all.
I've never tried to quit smoking or quit using drugs, primarily because I never tried them in the first place, so I have no idea how easy something like that would be to quit, but I'm quite sure it's orders of magnitude more difficult. I certainly can't seem to kick my caffiene habit, which is a pretty mild addiction as they go. So it's hard to consider that the game had much control over me. I willingly devoted my life to it, for reasons I can't fully explain. But it served no purpose. Satisfied no need. Nothing stopped me from quitting, and nothing tried to draw me back.
If I had to guess, I would say the draw to these types of games is that they never end. You can't win, you can't lose, you just keep on existing. Almost all games, be they FPS, adventure, etc have a defined point at which you can say the game is over. At some point you can easily choose to shut down the game or start a new one, but you don't feel like you're walking out of the middle of a party when you think it's time to quit.
And I have no doubt that the MMORPGs are designed with just that addictive tendancy in mind. There is no revenue scheme more ideal than a legal form of crack, especially when you know very well that you can market it to kids. As long as you keep it relatively free of cultural taboos, games like GTA will get all the ire of the anti-gaming crowd, and you can slip under the radar.
-Restil
The finer points of dating might be lost on some of this crowd, but I'm quite certain the great majority know what ents are. :)
-Restil
Not the same. This more closely relates to the stock market. You have to buy the land when it's cheap. At that time, you can only assume that it will be worth something in the future, and even then, you're going to have to wait 15-20 years before it suddenly becomes valuable. The more developed the area is, the more the land is going to cost you at the time you choose to invest in this way, and if you keep holding out for a better price, there's always a chance that growth in the area might die off, or a recession will hit, or the area will suddenly go to pot and you'll be stuck with worthless land. SOMEONE has to own the land at some point.
-Restil
You can offer up the new flavor without a patent at all. Chances are good they'll want it to be a trade secret anyway, so you can have them focus group it under an NDA and if they're interested, you'll make all your money anyway, and you don't even have to spend the 20 grand on a patent first.
-Restil
If they actually intend to produce the product, that's a big difference from having a vague idea and just obtaining the patent to extort money from others who will do all the work to R&D, market, and mass produce the product.
-Restil
Europa might have a plentiful supply of water, and in all fairness, they might have grabbed all of that too, but Earth has more, and it's in a form that's probably easier to obtain. They also were looking for food, slaves, and soldiers, of which Europa had none.
-Restil
Of course, the stupid metric conversion problem only accounted for one of the failures, but it's indicitive of a larger problem. There's obviously a shortcoming in quality control and verification if such an obvious mistake could be overlooked. What less obvious problems are we missing all together? Most of the failures occured during the orbital entry phase, during which time they shut off the transmitter, and therefore don't have up to the second data on the reason for the failure. Sure, they likely wouldn't have much of an opportunity to save the mission, but they would have a good chance at figuring out what the problem actually was so it could be fixed the next time around. Instead, we're left to guess. Cost concerns are always mentioned as the reason, but how much have we "saved" really? An extra million $$ to keep the transmitter on would probably have paid for itself a long time ago.
-Restil