It was a tragedy, an accident, a misfortune. A tsunami that kills 125000 people and makes millions homeless is a disaster. A hurricane and weak levees that kill hundreds, combined with a helpless Department of Homeland Security that unhomes 1.3 million, that's a disaster. An earthquakeor volcanic explosion that kills hundreds or thousands and destroys entire towns, that's a disaster. A vehicle accident that kills 7 people is not a disaster, no matter how expensive the vehicle is or how famous the people are. It is the "Challenger Accident", not the "Challenger Disaster". Keep some perspective.
IIRC, most humans lose consciousness around 18-20 k feet if not supplemented with oxygen. It seems 46k feet would even cause trained fighter pilots to black out without O2 to help. Again, IIRC, there was just a "click" or "pock" sound at the end of the tape, nothing more. Or at least, I recall that from public news sources, who knows what or if anything more was covered up.
Shuttle tiles were used cuz in the 1970's the metal alloys to withstand the >4000 F reentry temps (allowing for hot reentry in failure/emergencies) were either too expensive or not yet invented. In the 1990's NASA JPL developed a metal alloy that can take the heat without losing strength. Titanium may melt at 3500F, but it loses strength long before that. Unfortunately, the NASA program was scrapped after a few test flights of working 1/2 scale models. The knife-edge surfaces are needed for hypersonic flight. The shuttle does not "fly" at mach umpteen, it "falls", belly first, and ablates orbital speed in exchange for a huge plasma cone that can probably be heard on radio out to pluto. modern tech can probably build a high-temp reentry surface that can actually fly under (limited) control to any chosen landing spot - making the New York - Canberra run an hour-and-a-half or so.
I've worked at NASA JSC since 1979. There was a history archive building (or actually, several). I worked in one of them on a very slow second shift, watching data reduction programs design the leading edge of the shuttle wing, among other things. I browsed the library for reading material while I waited for tapes to spin and printers to print. (And card readers to read, too!) All the plans were there. When they shut down the office, they dumped boxes and boxes of duplicate records, books, etc, that had been collected as the various parts of Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, etc shutdown. I got a chronology of Skylab. Another coworker got books on Apollo and Gemini, along with drafts of the first space shuttle - the one called Dynasoar, and its descendents, from back in the 1950's. "Systematic destruction" is complete baloney.
The lunar command module and landers photographed and filmed each other on all six successful Apollo missions to the moon. Also, Apollo 8 (which didn't land), filmed a rendezous with a lander as it took place around the moon. The article uses the wording, not "extraterrestrial", but "while orbitting another planet..." The article is correct, article poster is wrong.
Like the email app whose name escapes me right now... embed computer-generated, copyrighted haiku in the torrents and packets. License it such that interdiction is a violation of copyright. Then sue the britches off any **AA agent that intercepts the torrents or packets for DMCA and other copyright violations. At the very least, illegally obtained evidence is inadmissable in court.
The ISS's orbit has a high inclination so the Russians can get to it from Baikonur. I think it's about a 25% difference between ISS and Hubble, which is a more Florida-friendly orbit.
I was thinking the story was about the title: "Backing a bad HUBBLE decision". shuttle-to-shuttle docking has no impact on Hubble repair mission, because Hubble isn't a space shuttle. Since no one has ever done a "rescue mission" of one manned space craft using another manned space craft (with the possible exception of a few of the trips up to Mir), designing everything needed to make it work, and to make sure it would work under most plausible failure modes would take far longer than Hubble can wait. If one shuttle has one thousand things that can go wrong, then two shuttles have 1000 * 1000 = One Million things that can go wrong. Combinations thereof can be fatal, even if each taken separately is not. This is nontrivial to analyze. Personally, I don't think it has anything to do with Hubble - I think it was cut so that US can get out of the space shuttle era as quickly as possible. They'd probably abandon the station also if they didn't have international commitments. As for the long repair mission, I was addressing a point made in the article - that a supply depot alongside the shuttle could somehow help rescue the shuttle. The risk assessment may have been simply a review of all of the criticality one issues that have been waivered in order to do the job. The list is pretty long. That's a personal guess with no insight into what actually went into the decision, and does not reflect the position of my employer. Yes, I work at NASA, for a contractor. The article is trying to spin an unpopular decision as being not just unpopular, but somehow flawed. That may be - but planners up and down the ladder had to remanifest more space flights and payloads then the entire US manned space program even attempted for its first 20 years, and they had to do it in a very, very short time in order to meet top level expectations and public pressure. This on top of actually investigating the Columbia accident and redesigning the ground process, the flight hardware, software and procedures, and Chuthulu knows what else in under about a year. And, other than actual launches, everything else keeps going until the decisions are made - Crew Avionics Upgrade, Pad refitting, main engine work, etc. The decision basis, my wild guess here, wasn't "is it safe", but "can even the effort to analyze it be justified, considering how muddy the water is now?" Doing too many things in a dangerous project is a risk in itself, even if the goals' risks are mitigated.
The Shuttle's most dangerous mission was Centaur, which would have put a fully fueled liquied booster in the payload bay - at a few tons over the rated capacity of the launch vehicle. It was cancelled in the wake of the Challenger accident, and I heard none of the engineers wishing it hadn't been... "...not an engineering task". Actually, we refer to some forms of management as "electropolitical engineering".
NASA officials have stated publicly the agency's decision to cancel further servicing to Hubble was made on safety issues alone, not cost.
I hope so, I don't want to think that it's too expensive to save lives...the article rewords this same position 7 times in a row as if there's something wrong with this position.
As Gregory told Congress, "Administrator O'Keefe made a very conscious, deliberate and well-informed decision that the shuttle would not service the Hubble."
... "NASA historian Steven Dick... revealed that, in fact, no formal risk analysis had been completed."
This doesn't say anyone claimed there was a formal document generated. One can be well-informed without lots of formal paperwork.
The decision was made (by O'Keefe) based on what he perceived was the risk."
Sometimes it's just a no-brainer. Why strain over it?
For example, according to... anonymous, one company actually proposed using an updated version of the module that was built in the 1990s to allow the shuttle to dock with Russian Mir space station...so the crews could be transferred from one spacecraft to the other in a shirt-sleeve environment...
Docking between human life support systems is irrelevant. Hubble is not a human-bearing spacecraft, and has no "inside" to dock to, no airlock. The piece of equipment mentioned here is as useless to fixing Hubble as it would be to fixing the engine of your lawnmower.
O'Keefe testified before the National Academy of Sciences in June 2004, he made no mention of this docking module option, telling academy panel members that the only method available for crew rescue was a spacewalk
Since there's no "inside" of Hubble, the repairs have to be made from the outside of Hubble, like your car has to be repaired from the *outside* of the engine, this was and will always be true. So a spacewalk is the only way. Kinda like getting wet is the only way to swim.
Nor has NASA ever apparently considered the idea of using one of the several available supply modules to supplement the provisions of an orbiting shuttle...such a module could be used as a supply depot for a damaged shuttle - a form of safe haven..."
A "supply depot" is not a "safe haven" - it's a spare parts cabinet. A "safe haven" would be a second working space craft that could replicate all the functions of the first, otherwise, if something goes wrong, you have two sets of problems: the limits of the disabled vehicle, and the limits of the "safe haven". If they both can't do the same thing at any point, you're dead. Redundancy for safety must be planned in total in advance, or it's useless.
...thereby extending its time in orbit...
Having a safe haven does not lengthen the time the orbiter can stay in orbit - same as the "supply depot" situation. The redundancy is not there to be relied on for primary mission objectives, but to bail you out if needed.
Two such supply modules...are under development...
Now we know why they weren't considered. They don't exist yet.
As Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., noted during those same science committee hearings, "If we're unwilling to take the risks to go to Hubble, then what does that say about (our willingness to mount) a moon and eventual Mars mission?
It says that we recognize that the shuttle's old and busted technology left over from the 1970's and if we're gonna do something bold, we gotta do it with new hotness.
I could go on, but I think I've made my points....
I think so - (IANAL) IF those who deploy the software: >don't know that the person getting the trojan has broken the law (and there's no way they could know), and >don't know whether the person getting the trojan would consent to receiving it, then >those who deploy the software are criminal-crackers just as much as someone who defaces a website. Actually, it doesn't even matter if the person getting the trojan has tried (or succeeded in the past) to violate copyrights - one illegal act does not excuse another in civil law. At least *some* p2p users *are* violating copyright, but statistical probabilities are no excuse for widespread harmful, criminal behavior.
By definition, it's not their copyrighted material that's being downloaded - it's trojan software that's being installed on someone else's computer without the owner's foreknowledge and consent. This is like saying "Some people have burgled my house and escaped in a white car, so I'm gonna slash the tires of every white car I see." IF those who deploy the software: >don't know that the person getting the trojan has broken the law (and there's no way they could know), and >don't know whether the person getting the trojan would consent to receiving it, then >those who deploy the software are criminal-crackers just as much as someone who defaces a website. At least *some* p2p users *are* violating copyright, but statistical probabilities are no excuse for widespread harmful, criminal behavior.
"good faith" requires that a human verify the data before the notice is sent. Machines are not capable of being faithful, humans must look at the results and determine, with faithfulness to the law and honesty, whether a violation is probable. Then, and only then, is it legal, right, moral, honest, ethical, or in any way acceptable to send the notice.
What happens? Then M$ becomes competitive based on the merits of its products. If M$'s other behaviors haven't been fixed by then, the software industry will be in big trouble. Bad behavior + good products = freedom to dictate how the industry will be run. Like the RIAA back in the 1950-1970 era. Rock'n'Roll was big, the RIAA was bad. look at modern music now. M$ could not maintain a quality product very long under those conditions - not enough motivation to do so. Look at the pressure they were already under when Linux was taking less than 2% of the market place (See Halloween #1). All that pressure, years go by, Windows still sucks. But during a tiny window of opportunity - say, two years - while Windows actually works and M$ isn't reined in - M$ can get laws put in place to make itself god over software and most of the rest of the computer industry. Then the product quality erodes, Open source programmers are jailed or leave the country, the US software industry dies, Software industries elsewhere are wounded. A new Open Source movement starts within the new framework, but it will be hobbled and crippled by M$ laws. It will take decades to undo the damage of those two years, and other countries will step in to take up the technological leadership that the US abandoned.
You so eloquently covered nearly all the bases, that I feel even more embarrassed than usual at having nothing to post except "me too". One thing the facility-setter-uppers did right at my company was in the floor plan: every location in the building is represented by "NxxWyyy" where xx and yyy are the number of feet North and West of the southeast corner of the building. Everywhere in the building are these signs, about 6 inches by 3 inches, hanging from the ceiling with the coordinates. If you have to go to a conference room or someone else's cubical or office, they'll say something like "I'm at 2N0W71" (my coords, actually) - meaning second floor, up against the south windows, 71 feet west. Look up, see where you're at, do a little arithmetic and you know which direction to go and how far. Some bumble brained bureaucrat sometime back tried to get it changed to some other kind of numbering/lettering system. She said "we're not all engineers here - some of us can't do that much math in our heads". Luckily, she was already a well-known twit and her idea didn't get anywhere. This is as opposed to what NASA uses at JSC - the rooms have numbers like these (All in the same hallway!): 2E14, 2011, 201, 24, 122, F241, etc. > The numbers are not in sequential order. > The numbers are not odd on one side of the hall, even on the other. > The letters are not all at the start or end of the identifier. > The floor number (2, in this case) is not consistently embedded in the room number. In short, it makes no friggen sense whatsoever. If you have a room number, you have no clue as to where that room might be. Find a map, and start looking, or wander the halls. If your number is "108" and you find "104", "106", you have no assurance that "108" is next.
#include IANAL.H
#include IANATE.H/* I am not a troll either */
#include TICMBAI.H/* Tho I certainly may be an idiot */
Look, you can't ever dictate to somebody else what to do with their property.
Ever. You can't dictate to a customer what to do with a third party's property that you have licensed. Only that third party can.
And that's where a conventional license and GPL are exactly the same.
It hurts my fingers to type about "code that SCO owns", so I'll invent a company name, say, "Moon". Moon owns some code.
Think about it: If Sun wants to distribute Sun code plus Moon code, then Sun must distribute Moon's code under Moon's conditions. No matter how many hands Moon's code goes thru, or what other code it's mixed with, it's still Moon's code, so Moon's permissions still apply to the distribution of Moon's code.
This is true with either GPL or any copyright license that permits secondary distributions. Calling the GPL "viral" because of this and not calling other licenses viral is pure FUD.
If the license says "source code goes with it (GPL)", or if the license says "source must NOT go with it (non-GPL)", either way, Moon's permissions rule over Moon's code and Sun's permissions rule over Sun's code.
That's if the code is actually separate products (like IBM's code)
Derivative works are a little different. How "integrated" software is before it becomes "a derivative of" is for the courts to decide, and they do so with a lot of variation. But once decided - the law is clear:
The right to create derivative works is controlled by the owner of the original. That's why only Paramount can spawn endless spinoffs of Star Trek. Paramount's choice to prohibit others from creating derivatives is Paramount's right. I believe the license that ATT and IBM agreed to allows IBM to create and own any derivative they want. That ownership would naturally include licensing and distribution rights. (else it wouldn't be "ownership") GPL developers choose to not prohibit, but to conditionally allow distribution of exact copies and derivatives. As a copyright owner, it is their right. This is not viral. This is an exercise of the owner's exclusive right to control their own property.
I worked on a CDC 6600 back in 1979-1981 at NASA JSC in Houston. It was used to run the math models for space shuttle simulation - engineering simulation, that is, no thanx, 60 bit floating point isn't enough, we'll use double words (120 bits of floating point!). I was a computer operator then, a wee lad shoving punch cards thru the card reader.
The CDC beastie had 10 "peripheral processors" (Math processors), about 256K bytes, ran at about 4Hz (That last number may be wrong), and required chilled water and by golly lots of it to stay cool. It was about the size of a basketball half court. In the picture linked by the parent post, the desk the guy is sitting at has two display screens - perfectly circular, about 18" - 24" in diameter, basically ocilliscopes using vector cathode rays (none of them newfangled "pixels", no sir!). I used to wonder if I'd ever get cataracts from having my eyeballs xrayed every night.
Mac Dac (MacDonell Douglas) was designing the leading edge of the shuttle wing. Did you know that the leading edge of the wing is movable? That is, it's made of dozens of separate units that can be unscrewed (on the ground of course, not in space), reshaped, adjusted to a new leading edge line or curve as desired. I had to run hundreds of cards into that cyber for each run of the model. The runs took all night, and each run was for a slightly different shape of leading edge. It took several years of computer time to design a smooth curve that didn't have hot spots or where the max Q wouldn't cause the Carbon Carbon structure to buckle. 18000 mph plasma is hot and hits really hard.
15 years later, the Russians launch their shuttle (unmanned prototype) the leading edge of the wing was exactly matching the US shuttle...
Yeah, right, they developed their own. I'm ocnvinced they copied, and never intended to build one to actually put people in.
by the way, to keep the corporate bloodsuckers off my back: my posting is not the opinion or position of my employer, and I may not even agree with it if I stop and think about it too long...
Clueless, trendy, "We should have a website" type people love to put flash on the website's home page and force you to use it. My son's school district's home page uses a flash applet to navigate - you can't get anywhere on their site without using flash. I haven't taken the time to figure it out, but they managed to make it so you can't get to any of their site (even with bookmarks) without going through their flash app. I can't begin to express my contempt for that kind of website design. It automatically bars anyone not using monopolistic spying computer-clogging software, in other words, anyone who knows what the hell a computer is good for.
That one sentence alone tells me either: the author's an idiot; the author's on some anti-Linux payroll. Oh, oops, it's the second one. Here's another sentence of his: "It conducts Linux feasibility studies for customers and even helps software makers rewrite their programs to run on Linux."
Does IBM do that for free?
My comments are not the opinions of my employer, and even I may not agree with them.
" That doesn't mean it's accepted the GPL by the act of distributing the software, if it has no knowledge of the GPL" Copyright law says exactly this - If I create a work, I own the rights to it automatically, and no one can copy it, even if they don't know it's mine. The law does not require that I put a notice in my code in order for my ownership of that code to be protected. ".. am in breach of contract for not paying for it..." A recent discussion by someone else put it this way: If I own some land on a river, I can grant you and everyone else the right to fish from the bank that I own (and even charge for it). I can impose restrictions such as "Not on Tuesday and NO LIGHT BEER!". As the GPL says, if you don't like my rules, you don't have to accept them, but my terms are the only terms that grant you permission to fish from my land. That's the difference between a contract and a license: The GPL is a license becuz the (C) owner holds all the cards - the licensee does not get the chance to "agree", any more than you get the chance to "agree" to my prohibition of light beer on my property. The GPL can "force" someone to license their derivation modifications under the GPL for one of two reasons: Either you're distributing something I own (my original code) with something you own (your modifications), or because, as the original copyright owner, I control the rights to the creation of derivative works (such as a "Star Wars" cartoon on TV). You can only start with my stuff when creating something new if I grant you the right. As the mods go forth: "JetScootr" becomes "JetSkater" (derivative 1), which becomes "RocketSkater" (Derivative 2) becomes "BlasterSkateboard" (derivative 3), my rights as the original owner ensure that as my parts of the work are distributed, I still control my part of it, and thus, my restrictions on the part of it I created are inviolate. As my example implies, "derivation" is a matter of (judicial) interpretation, and decisions vary widely. Assuming the judge can be convinced that the following works are derivations, my rights to control the licensing of what I own in them is assured.
"While someone distributing software without permission is in breach of copyright, it's different to distributing software in breach of the GPL" No, "distributing without permission" is a copyright violation, regardless of what other rights the copyright owner chooses to grant. The other terms of the license are irrelevant - if you don't have permission to distribute, then it's a violation to distribute, period.
I've had an email account for 3 years that was totally spam-free. I was careful with it, wasn't "promiscuous" with it. I carefully shielded it by using a "spamtrap" address to vet companies - any company I start doing bidniz with is "on probation" for a coupla months, then if they behave and don't send me ads, I'll update my addy with them to my protected account. I do several other things also to protect myself. Then a person to whom I'd given my email to stupidly answered the ebay-phishing email, got trojan'd and harvested. No, I wasn't stupid to give my email to that person. I needed to communicate. I received 10 spams the next day, and I'm "WTF is all this $&#^@????". I'm soon gonna have to change my email cuzza this. No matter how careful a user is, he/she must actually share his/her email address for it to be of any use at all (by definition). There's no way to be sure that absolutely everyone to whom you MUST provide an email is as careful as you are. Even if they and you are both careful, there's no garauntee that the M$ critical-security-flaw-of-the-week isn't going to be exploited and hit you or them 10 seconds before you/they click the button to apply the patch.
"In IE, it copied itself over..." (means to me: IE is vulnerable, and your test is valid) "Firefox, OTOH, didn't budge...same thing with Netscape and Opera..."
Does "Same thing" mean your test with Netscape and Opera showed they were safe like Firefox, or they were vulnerable like IE?
I think you mean your test suggests they're safe, but I want to be sure....
Slashdot Mirror
It was a tragedy, an accident, a misfortune.
A tsunami that kills 125000 people and makes millions homeless is a disaster. A hurricane and weak levees that kill hundreds, combined with a helpless Department of Homeland Security that unhomes 1.3 million, that's a disaster.
An earthquakeor volcanic explosion that kills hundreds or thousands and destroys entire towns, that's a disaster.
A vehicle accident that kills 7 people is not a disaster, no matter how expensive the vehicle is or how famous the people are.
It is the "Challenger Accident", not the "Challenger Disaster".
Keep some perspective.
IIRC, most humans lose consciousness around 18-20 k feet if not supplemented with oxygen. It seems 46k feet would even cause trained fighter pilots to black out without O2 to help.
Again, IIRC, there was just a "click" or "pock" sound at the end of the tape, nothing more. Or at least, I recall that from public news sources, who knows what or if anything more was covered up.
Shuttle tiles were used cuz in the 1970's the metal alloys to withstand the >4000 F reentry temps (allowing for hot reentry in failure/emergencies) were either too expensive or not yet invented. In the 1990's NASA JPL developed a metal alloy that can take the heat without losing strength. Titanium may melt at 3500F, but it loses strength long before that.
Unfortunately, the NASA program was scrapped after a few test flights of working 1/2 scale models.
The knife-edge surfaces are needed for hypersonic flight. The shuttle does not "fly" at mach umpteen, it "falls", belly first, and ablates orbital speed in exchange for a huge plasma cone that can probably be heard on radio out to pluto.
modern tech can probably build a high-temp reentry surface that can actually fly under (limited) control to any chosen landing spot - making the New York - Canberra run an hour-and-a-half or so.
I've worked at NASA JSC since 1979. There was a history archive building (or actually, several). I worked in one of them on a very slow second shift, watching data reduction programs design the leading edge of the shuttle wing, among other things. I browsed the library for reading material while I waited for tapes to spin and printers to print. (And card readers to read, too!)
All the plans were there. When they shut down the office, they dumped boxes and boxes of duplicate records, books, etc, that had been collected as the various parts of Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, etc shutdown. I got a chronology of Skylab. Another coworker got books on Apollo and Gemini, along with drafts of the first space shuttle - the one called Dynasoar, and its descendents, from back in the 1950's.
"Systematic destruction" is complete baloney.
Another word for "thesaurus" is "omnipendium".
Look it up, but use an unabridged dictionary. It's not in the litty bitty "college" editions.
errr...I sit corrected, mainly cuz I'm too lazy to stand;) thanx.
The lunar command module and landers photographed and filmed each other on all six successful Apollo missions to the moon. Also, Apollo 8 (which didn't land), filmed a rendezous with a lander as it took place around the moon.
The article uses the wording, not "extraterrestrial", but "while orbitting another planet..."
The article is correct, article poster is wrong.
Like the email app whose name escapes me right now...
embed computer-generated, copyrighted haiku in the torrents and packets. License it such that interdiction is a violation of copyright. Then sue the britches off any **AA agent that intercepts the torrents or packets for DMCA and other copyright violations.
At the very least, illegally obtained evidence is inadmissable in court.
When I asked about this in my journal. Anyone interested?
The ISS's orbit has a high inclination so the Russians can get to it from Baikonur. I think it's about a 25% difference between ISS and Hubble, which is a more Florida-friendly orbit.
I was thinking the story was about the title: "Backing a bad HUBBLE decision". shuttle-to-shuttle docking has no impact on Hubble repair mission, because Hubble isn't a space shuttle.
Since no one has ever done a "rescue mission" of one manned space craft using another manned space craft (with the possible exception of a few of the trips up to Mir), designing everything needed to make it work, and to make sure it would work under most plausible failure modes would take far longer than Hubble can wait.
If one shuttle has one thousand things that can go wrong, then two shuttles have 1000 * 1000 = One Million things that can go wrong. Combinations thereof can be fatal, even if each taken separately is not. This is nontrivial to analyze.
Personally, I don't think it has anything to do with Hubble - I think it was cut so that US can get out of the space shuttle era as quickly as possible. They'd probably abandon the station also if they didn't have international commitments.
As for the long repair mission, I was addressing a point made in the article - that a supply depot alongside the shuttle could somehow help rescue the shuttle.
The risk assessment may have been simply a review of all of the criticality one issues that have been waivered in order to do the job. The list is pretty long.
That's a personal guess with no insight into what actually went into the decision, and does not reflect the position of my employer.
Yes, I work at NASA, for a contractor.
The article is trying to spin an unpopular decision as being not just unpopular, but somehow flawed. That may be - but planners up and down the ladder had to remanifest more space flights and payloads then the entire US manned space program even attempted for its first 20 years, and they had to do it in a very, very short time in order to meet top level expectations and public pressure. This on top of actually investigating the Columbia accident and redesigning the ground process, the flight hardware, software and procedures, and Chuthulu knows what else in under about a year. And, other than actual launches, everything else keeps going until the decisions are made - Crew Avionics Upgrade, Pad refitting, main engine work, etc.
The decision basis, my wild guess here, wasn't "is it safe", but "can even the effort to analyze it be justified, considering how muddy the water is now?"
Doing too many things in a dangerous project is a risk in itself, even if the goals' risks are mitigated.
The Shuttle's most dangerous mission was Centaur, which would have put a fully fueled liquied booster in the payload bay - at a few tons over the rated capacity of the launch vehicle. It was cancelled in the wake of the Challenger accident, and I heard none of the engineers wishing it hadn't been...
"...not an engineering task".
Actually, we refer to some forms of management as "electropolitical engineering".
I think so - (IANAL) IF those who deploy the software: >don't know that the person getting the trojan has broken the law (and there's no way they could know), and >don't know whether the person getting the trojan would consent to receiving it, then >those who deploy the software are criminal-crackers just as much as someone who defaces a website.
Actually, it doesn't even matter if the person getting the trojan has tried (or succeeded in the past) to violate copyrights - one illegal act does not excuse another in civil law.
At least *some* p2p users *are* violating copyright, but statistical probabilities are no excuse for widespread harmful, criminal behavior.
By definition, it's not their copyrighted material that's being downloaded - it's trojan software that's being installed on someone else's computer without the owner's foreknowledge and consent.
This is like saying "Some people have burgled my house and escaped in a white car, so I'm gonna slash the tires of every white car I see."
IF those who deploy the software: >don't know that the person getting the trojan has broken the law (and there's no way they could know), and >don't know whether the person getting the trojan would consent to receiving it, then >those who deploy the software are criminal-crackers just as much as someone who defaces a website.
At least *some* p2p users *are* violating copyright, but statistical probabilities are no excuse for widespread harmful, criminal behavior.
"good faith" requires that a human verify the data before the notice is sent. Machines are not capable of being faithful, humans must look at the results and determine, with faithfulness to the law and honesty, whether a violation is probable.
Then, and only then, is it legal, right, moral, honest, ethical, or in any way acceptable to send the notice.
What happens? Then M$ becomes competitive based on the merits of its products. If M$'s other behaviors haven't been fixed by then, the software industry will be in big trouble. Bad behavior + good products = freedom to dictate how the industry will be run. Like the RIAA back in the 1950-1970 era. Rock'n'Roll was big, the RIAA was bad. look at modern music now.
M$ could not maintain a quality product very long under those conditions - not enough motivation to do so. Look at the pressure they were already under when Linux was taking less than 2% of the market place (See Halloween #1). All that pressure, years go by, Windows still sucks.
But during a tiny window of opportunity - say, two years - while Windows actually works and M$ isn't reined in - M$ can get laws put in place to make itself god over software and most of the rest of the computer industry.
Then the product quality erodes, Open source programmers are jailed or leave the country, the US software industry dies, Software industries elsewhere are wounded.
A new Open Source movement starts within the new framework, but it will be hobbled and crippled by M$ laws. It will take decades to undo the damage of those two years, and other countries will step in to take up the technological leadership that the US abandoned.
But that's just an opinionated conjecture.
You so eloquently covered nearly all the bases, that I feel even more embarrassed than usual at having nothing to post except "me too".
One thing the facility-setter-uppers did right at my company was in the floor plan: every location in the building is represented by "NxxWyyy" where xx and yyy are the number of feet North and West of the southeast corner of the building. Everywhere in the building are these signs, about 6 inches by 3 inches, hanging from the ceiling with the coordinates.
If you have to go to a conference room or someone else's cubical or office, they'll say something like "I'm at 2N0W71" (my coords, actually) - meaning second floor, up against the south windows, 71 feet west.
Look up, see where you're at, do a little arithmetic and you know which direction to go and how far.
Some bumble brained bureaucrat sometime back tried to get it changed to some other kind of numbering/lettering system. She said "we're not all engineers here - some of us can't do that much math in our heads". Luckily, she was already a well-known twit and her idea didn't get anywhere.
This is as opposed to what NASA uses at JSC - the rooms have numbers like these (All in the same hallway!):
2E14, 2011, 201, 24, 122, F241, etc.
> The numbers are not in sequential order.
> The numbers are not odd on one side of the hall, even on the other.
> The letters are not all at the start or end of the identifier.
> The floor number (2, in this case) is not consistently embedded in the room number.
In short, it makes no friggen sense whatsoever. If you have a room number, you have no clue as to where that room might be. Find a map, and start looking, or wander the halls. If your number is "108" and you find "104", "106", you have no assurance that "108" is next.
#include IANAL.H /* I am not a troll either */ /* Tho I certainly may be an idiot */
#include IANATE.H
#include TICMBAI.H
Look, you can't ever dictate to somebody else what to do with their property. Ever. You can't dictate to a customer what to do with a third party's property that you have licensed. Only that third party can.
And that's where a conventional license and GPL are exactly the same.
It hurts my fingers to type about "code that SCO owns", so I'll invent a company name, say, "Moon". Moon owns some code.
Think about it: If Sun wants to distribute Sun code plus Moon code, then Sun must distribute Moon's code under Moon's conditions. No matter how many hands Moon's code goes thru, or what other code it's mixed with, it's still Moon's code, so Moon's permissions still apply to the distribution of Moon's code.
This is true with either GPL or any copyright license that permits secondary distributions. Calling the GPL "viral" because of this and not calling other licenses viral is pure FUD.
If the license says "source code goes with it (GPL)", or if the license says "source must NOT go with it (non-GPL)", either way, Moon's permissions rule over Moon's code and Sun's permissions rule over Sun's code.
That's if the code is actually separate products (like IBM's code)
Derivative works are a little different. How "integrated" software is before it becomes "a derivative of" is for the courts to decide, and they do so with a lot of variation. But once decided - the law is clear:
The right to create derivative works is controlled by the owner of the original. That's why only Paramount can spawn endless spinoffs of Star Trek. Paramount's choice to prohibit others from creating derivatives is Paramount's right.
I believe the license that ATT and IBM agreed to allows IBM to create and own any derivative they want. That ownership would naturally include licensing and distribution rights. (else it wouldn't be "ownership")
GPL developers choose to not prohibit, but to conditionally allow distribution of exact copies and derivatives. As a copyright owner, it is their right. This is not viral. This is an exercise of the owner's exclusive right to control their own property.
I worked on a CDC 6600 back in 1979-1981 at NASA JSC in Houston. It was used to run the math models for space shuttle simulation - engineering simulation, that is, no thanx, 60 bit floating point isn't enough, we'll use double words (120 bits of floating point!). I was a computer operator then, a wee lad shoving punch cards thru the card reader.
The CDC beastie had 10 "peripheral processors" (Math processors), about 256K bytes, ran at about 4Hz (That last number may be wrong), and required chilled water and by golly lots of it to stay cool. It was about the size of a basketball half court. In the picture linked by the parent post, the desk the guy is sitting at has two display screens - perfectly circular, about 18" - 24" in diameter, basically ocilliscopes using vector cathode rays (none of them newfangled "pixels", no sir!). I used to wonder if I'd ever get cataracts from having my eyeballs xrayed every night.
Mac Dac (MacDonell Douglas) was designing the leading edge of the shuttle wing. Did you know that the leading edge of the wing is movable? That is, it's made of dozens of separate units that can be unscrewed (on the ground of course, not in space), reshaped, adjusted to a new leading edge line or curve as desired. I had to run hundreds of cards into that cyber for each run of the model. The runs took all night, and each run was for a slightly different shape of leading edge. It took several years of computer time to design a smooth curve that didn't have hot spots or where the max Q wouldn't cause the Carbon Carbon structure to buckle. 18000 mph plasma is hot and hits really hard.
15 years later, the Russians launch their shuttle (unmanned prototype) the leading edge of the wing was exactly matching the US shuttle...
Yeah, right, they developed their own. I'm ocnvinced they copied, and never intended to build one to actually put people in.
by the way, to keep the corporate bloodsuckers off my back: my posting is not the opinion or position of my employer, and I may not even agree with it if I stop and think about it too long...
Clueless, trendy, "We should have a website" type people love to put flash on the website's home page and force you to use it. My son's school district's home page uses a flash applet to navigate - you can't get anywhere on their site without using flash.
I haven't taken the time to figure it out, but they managed to make it so you can't get to any of their site (even with bookmarks) without going through their flash app.
I can't begin to express my contempt for that kind of website design. It automatically bars anyone not using monopolistic spying computer-clogging software, in other words, anyone who knows what the hell a computer is good for.
Here's the "solutions" in Linux that IBM markets:
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/va_4049.shtml
That one sentence alone tells me either: the author's an idiot; the author's on some anti-Linux payroll. Oh, oops, it's the second one. Here's another sentence of his:
"It conducts Linux feasibility studies for customers and even helps software makers rewrite their programs to run on Linux."
Does IBM do that for free?
My comments are not the opinions of my employer, and even I may not agree with them.
" That doesn't mean it's accepted the GPL by the act of distributing the software, if it has no knowledge of the GPL" .."
Copyright law says exactly this - If I create a work, I own the rights to it automatically, and no one can copy it, even if they don't know it's mine. The law does not require that I put a notice in my code in order for my ownership of that code to be protected.
".. am in breach of contract for not paying for it.
A recent discussion by someone else put it this way: If I own some land on a river, I can grant you and everyone else the right to fish from the bank that I own (and even charge for it). I can impose restrictions such as "Not on Tuesday and NO LIGHT BEER!".
As the GPL says, if you don't like my rules, you don't have to accept them, but my terms are the only terms that grant you permission to fish from my land.
That's the difference between a contract and a license: The GPL is a license becuz the (C) owner holds all the cards - the licensee does not get the chance to "agree", any more than you get the chance to "agree" to my prohibition of light beer on my property.
The GPL can "force" someone to license their derivation modifications under the GPL for one of two reasons: Either you're distributing something I own (my original code) with something you own (your modifications), or because, as the original copyright owner, I control the rights to the creation of derivative works (such as a "Star Wars" cartoon on TV). You can only start with my stuff when creating something new if I grant you the right.
As the mods go forth: "JetScootr" becomes "JetSkater" (derivative 1), which becomes "RocketSkater" (Derivative 2) becomes "BlasterSkateboard" (derivative 3), my rights as the original owner ensure that as my parts of the work are distributed, I still control my part of it, and thus, my restrictions on the part of it I created are inviolate.
As my example implies, "derivation" is a matter of (judicial) interpretation, and decisions vary widely. Assuming the judge can be convinced that the following works are derivations, my rights to control the licensing of what I own in them is assured.
"While someone distributing software without permission is in breach of copyright, it's different to distributing software in breach of the GPL"
No, "distributing without permission" is a copyright violation, regardless of what other rights the copyright owner chooses to grant. The other terms of the license are irrelevant - if you don't have permission to distribute, then it's a violation to distribute, period.
I've had an email account for 3 years that was totally spam-free. I was careful with it, wasn't "promiscuous" with it. I carefully shielded it by using a "spamtrap" address to vet companies - any company I start doing bidniz with is "on probation" for a coupla months, then if they behave and don't send me ads, I'll update my addy with them to my protected account. I do several other things also to protect myself.
Then a person to whom I'd given my email to stupidly answered the ebay-phishing email, got trojan'd and harvested. No, I wasn't stupid to give my email to that person. I needed to communicate.
I received 10 spams the next day, and I'm "WTF is all this $&#^@????". I'm soon gonna have to change my email cuzza this.
No matter how careful a user is, he/she must actually share his/her email address for it to be of any use at all (by definition).
There's no way to be sure that absolutely everyone to whom you MUST provide an email is as careful as you are.
Even if they and you are both careful, there's no garauntee that the M$ critical-security-flaw-of-the-week isn't going to be exploited and hit you or them 10 seconds before you/they click the button to apply the patch.
"In IE, it copied itself over..." (means to me: IE is vulnerable, and your test is valid)
"Firefox, OTOH, didn't budge...same thing with Netscape and Opera..."
Does "Same thing" mean your test with Netscape and Opera showed they were safe like Firefox, or they were vulnerable like IE?
I think you mean your test suggests they're safe, but I want to be sure....