In the past buildings were massively over engineered, because the engineer wasn't sure what the tolerances were. Witness Isenbard Kingdom Brunels arches, still in production use 170+ years later or Sir Christopher Wren's dome at St Pauls in London.
IIRC there are Roman bridges which are still in use.
It isn't until recently that engineers have been able to not over engineer things. This however means that things don't last as long,
Even all this engineering knowlage has not stopped buildings failing. A massivly over-engineered structure will most likely stay up even if the materials or construction is a little substandard.
THe idea was to give licenses to only those who can actually drive safely. But, if they really implement that there will be very few people with licenses and car companies will go bankrupt ( no more wars maybe??). So, they give this easy test for the license and every TD&H can drive.
It dosn't help that a bunch of jokers decided that what was originally intended as a document to indicate someone could operate a motor vehicle should also (in some cases primarily) be used as an identification document.
Such a plane could function as the equivalent of a local communications satellite, with the latency benefits of not being thousands of miles away in geosync orbit.
Also a lot easier and cheaper to get it where it needs to be. In order to launch a comsat you need to place a complex and expensive machine on top of another machine made up mostly of explosives. You are also constrained by the schedule of the launching company.
I mean really, WHY ? Just because they think they can ? What are the possible implication in a commercial market ? NONE....
A plane which can fly around the world on solar power means that it can stay in the air indefinitly. Such a plane could perform functions carried out by comsats, but would be a lot cheaper and potentially recoverable for servicing and upgrading.
Now if someone said they were going to fly around the world on NATURAL GAS, or Cow Shit, that would be cool. Seriously, a LNG plane would be cool, and there are a lot of reasons to do it,
You could power a plane on compressed methane, except that the tankage you'd need is more complex and heavier than the liquid fuels used now.
but SOLAR is NOT going to be powering any transport planes in the near future.
A large part of the takeoff weight of a plane is fuel.
It's not often I get to ask this politely... what planet are you on? This one rotates too fast (1670 km/hr at the equator, 670 km/hr at the Artic/Antarctic Circles).
So long as it's summer chasing the sun ceases to be an issue within the Artic/Antartic Circles:)
I don't know how fast this flimsy looking plane will travel but consider the speed of sound at sea level is 1225 km/hr.
There is no way this plane is designed to travel at anything close to the speed of sound. Even if it has a reasonable top speed it may well have poor acceleration.
When Concorde was around you could arrive in New York earlier than you left London.
This is because Concorde could cruise at twice the speed of sound. In older to do this it required 4 thirsty afterburning turbojet engines.
In any case, you could start your journey early in the morning local time, and arrive in the evening local time, which would allow you to fly slower than the earth's rotation and still stay in daylight.
This won't work over any distance without a plane which can fly at something close to the speed of sound. This plane does not have the right wing shape to do this.
This is true at the equator, but as you get closer to the poles, the speed will reduce. At the north and south poles, there will only be rotation. Since London is quite a bit north of the equator, the speed of the Earth below will be less than 1,000 mph.
Especially given that the pictures show what look like cockpit windows:)
They state a 60 meter wingspan. That would like be about 6 meters wide, if they keep a 10-1 ratio. The ground and sea also reflect a certain percentage of solar energy. Overall, it looks to me that the would have about 360m^2 of direct sunlight potential and about the same amount of reflected sunlight.
There is also the fuselage and the horizontal stabaliser.
Voyager only required two engines for take-off and to provide a secondary engine in case of problems with the first. The weight here will be constant throughout, so they will not need a second engine for take-off. (Voyager was basically a flying fuel tank on take-off and needed 300HP to take-off on it's runway.
Constant weight throughout the flight means also that the trim does not need altering to compensate for burning fuel.
One of the side effects of the music industry attempts to stomp out music piracy at any cost however is more and more criminalisation of copyright violations. That will help the smaller free software people no end because it will be the police busting down corporate doors for them (at least so the theory goes 8))
So far it appears to be theory only. Given that SCO still appear to have all their doors intact. Maybe by the time the super-duper-DMCA comes around it will be the music industry who will be amongst the first targets, which would be suitably ironic.
However, we had to conclude that this would be a bad idea, because even if we complied fully with the terms of the GPL, it would be virtually impossible to ensure that our customers also did so (since they often modify our code).
You have no responsibility, duty or even power to ensure that your customers don't infringe other people's copyrights.
In the worst case, we fear that we might be villified for the actions of our customers.
Are there any cases where a supplier of a copyright infringer has been considered responsible? It's hard to see how this could happen without your customers enguaging in fraud against you...
Hmm, instead of paying someone to maintain the code, why don't they just purchase an off-the-shelf application that does the same thing
For many real world applications there is no such thing as an "off-the-shelf application". Even if you use one as a starting point it can easily wind up with extensive reconfiguration. Or worst you can end up having to reconfigure your business to cope with the application's shortcommings.
and plus has a support number?
Will the phone number be answered 24/7? Will the person who answers have the relevent skills to deal? Is a telephone the best way to deal with any likely problems in the first place?
Every company should have someone who is responsible for tracking what software is used, who is using it, and what releases are used. They should check at least monthly to see if there are any updates, what the updates do, and whether the updates are critical or desirable for the company. This person is usually an administrator with no programming skills. This applies whether the software is all proprietary, all OSS, or mized. It is REQUIRED if proprietary software is involved to track the per-person and per-server and per-CPU licenses.
If anything there is more need for this with proprietary software. Since proprietary software licences can easily "mutate" or a patch can end up altering both a piece of software and it's licence. With something like an EULA you might need lawyers to work out what it actually means in terms of how you can use the software. Most obviously where "you" are a corporation and the EULA is written assuming an individual.
Technqiue 1: If your managers are out of compliance with the GPL, tell the FSF anonymously with the name of the company and they'll nail them.
Actually you should tell the Copyright Holder(s), who may or may not be the FSF. The Copyright Holder is the only entity able to take action in response to copyright infringement. N.B. The GPL does not oblige you to distribute anything. It places conditions on you if you distribute to a third party. With those conditions only applying to the entities you actually distribute to. There is no obligation to distribute patches to the original author or any "primary maintainer".
No, it's not daft, and a CD is not simply a republication. It is a republication that makes it much easier for people to steal (read: copy, and use without permission.
It's not that hard to copy microfilm. Yet periodicals have been available on microfilm for decades...
If I license a photograph to someone for use in a print advertisement or brochure, I know that's the only place that image will be used.
This isn't what the photographers in question did. They licenced their work to publishers of a periodical under well known rules. The licence they agreed to allows that publisher to make reprints, using any media they see fit.
If my clients suddenly started distributing my images on a CD to their clients... this becomes a problem. I usually license the images to them for a single use, or for unlimited use for a specific purpose.
Unless your agreement with them is that only a specific medium or reproduction technology can be used then they can use any suitable medium or technology.
What most people don't realize, but what I hope most slashdotters do, is that the DMCA was driven by the politicians who were backed by groups like the RIAA and MPAA. This means that despite it's seeming purpose of protecting rights (which it doesn't do anyways), it merely gives the groups mentioned above more ways to pursue "pirates" and "hackers."
But apparently utterly useless to individual copyright holders.
The sad fact is they don't have to really prove anything, just invoke the DMCA and they've got a case.
If it were that simple then there is no way SCO would still be distributing any GPL software. Dispite all these copyright laws piled on top of each other we have a business enguaging in industrial scale copyright infringement in public...
How about instead of patching the law with new special cases for electronic media, we recognize that the law is fundamentally broken and come up with coherent answers for the general case?
The reason that it is fundermentally broken is that current laws only serve a small minority. Thing is that this minority has a hugely disproportionate amount of political power. Often only members of this minority have "patch rights", let alone the ability to request a radical overhaul.
The DMCA does nothing to stop copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is illegal to begin with. Making it 'more' illegal isn't going to stop anyone who was going to commite the crime in the first place.
It's more to make those who are passing the laws feel they are doing their job.
Say a thief is going to break into your home to steal your tv. Making it illegal to pick locks isnt really going to deter him. All it will lead to is poorly designed locks.
It can lead to all sorts of other issues. Especially if picking locks viewed as a more serious crime than burglary.
Unlike our worls where people use Oxen to draw their ploughs instead of nice Massey-Ferguson or John Deer tractors for example?
Well these companies have yet to develop self-repairing and self-fueling tractors. Let alone those who's "exhaust" acts as a fertilizer. In the case of serious damage or breakdown there is a lot more meat on an ox than a tractor.
We have to farm out most of the development to other countries, because most of the world doesn't speak English very well, and you can't develop software in the US that works in any language but English.
An alternative explanation is that it's the US which "dosn't speak English very well".
There is a common belief among Americans (and which is rampant in American management), that the rest of the world is learning English, so there's no need of any other language.
Whilst English is the second most common language on the planet. The US version is so "non standard", in all sorts of ways, that it's fairly common for English language books to be published in two versions. One for the US and one for the rest of the world (including Canada). There is a rather old joke of "English spoken, American understood"...
This is a common error. IP laws were originally designed to provide an incentive to add to the public domain.
This is also a common error. Copyright did not start with the Statute of Anne or the US Constitution. The original purpose of copyright was censorship, specifically to stop anything being printed which the authorities did not approve of.
Copyright is an incentive to create. People can share if they want. Without copyright, there would be no more incentive to create public works than there is today, perhaps even less.
People were being creative for 10's of thousands of years before copyright was invented. It's rather hard to prove that copyright actually encourages creation and publication. It's certainly possible to find examples where the existance of copyright provided no incentive at all.
Re:What happens when it crashes.
on
A.I. Helicopter?
·
· Score: 1
If confined to things like chasing car thieves at night, in non-crowded areas, it might be OK, but not in daytime when there are lots of people outdoors, in the street for example, who would be at risk.
There's also the issue of other air traffic to consider whilst your regular "chopper copper" can follow ATC instructions. How is one of these tiny UAVs (with a small RCS) going to be told to avoid getting squished by a passing airliner.
For the record, I still see planes working better, even in many of the cited examples; even "inspecting a bridge" doesn't generally need hover capability,
To inspect power lines a stable fixed wing aircraft with a movie camera (capable of filming in both visible and infrared) would appear to be a better choice.
Slashdot Mirror
In the past buildings were massively over engineered, because the engineer wasn't sure what the tolerances were. Witness Isenbard Kingdom Brunels arches, still in production use 170+ years later or Sir Christopher Wren's dome at St Pauls in London.
IIRC there are Roman bridges which are still in use.
It isn't until recently that engineers have been able to not over engineer things. This however means that things don't last as long,
Even all this engineering knowlage has not stopped buildings failing. A massivly over-engineered structure will most likely stay up even if the materials or construction is a little substandard.
THe idea was to give licenses to only those who can actually drive safely. But, if they really implement that there will be very few people with licenses and car companies will go bankrupt ( no more wars maybe??). So, they give this easy test for the license and every TD&H can drive.
It dosn't help that a bunch of jokers decided that what was originally intended as a document to indicate someone could operate a motor vehicle should also (in some cases primarily) be used as an identification document.
Yes, everybody knows UK thieves have enough morals to play nice with the cops and leave the speed limiter/engine killer module in their getaway cars.
The same thieves would never get hold of a car stopping device and leave persuing police to negotiate a traffic jam either...
Such a plane could function as the equivalent of a local communications satellite, with the latency benefits of not being thousands of miles away in geosync orbit.
Also a lot easier and cheaper to get it where it needs to be. In order to launch a comsat you need to place a complex and expensive machine on top of another machine made up mostly of explosives. You are also constrained by the schedule of the launching company.
I mean really, WHY ? Just because they think they can ? What are the possible implication in a commercial market ? NONE....
A plane which can fly around the world on solar power means that it can stay in the air indefinitly. Such a plane could perform functions carried out by comsats, but would be a lot cheaper and potentially recoverable for servicing and upgrading.
Now if someone said they were going to fly around the world on NATURAL GAS, or Cow Shit, that would be cool. Seriously, a LNG plane would be cool, and there are a lot of reasons to do it,
You could power a plane on compressed methane, except that the tankage you'd need is more complex and heavier than the liquid fuels used now.
but SOLAR is NOT going to be powering any transport planes in the near future.
A large part of the takeoff weight of a plane is fuel.
It's not often I get to ask this politely... what planet are you on? This one rotates too fast (1670 km/hr at the equator, 670 km/hr at the Artic/Antarctic Circles).
:)
So long as it's summer chasing the sun ceases to be an issue within the Artic/Antartic Circles
I don't know how fast this flimsy looking plane will travel but consider the speed of sound at sea level is 1225 km/hr.
There is no way this plane is designed to travel at anything close to the speed of sound. Even if it has a reasonable top speed it may well have poor acceleration.
When Concorde was around you could arrive in New York earlier than you left London.
This is because Concorde could cruise at twice the speed of sound. In older to do this it required 4 thirsty afterburning turbojet engines.
In any case, you could start your journey early in the morning local time, and arrive in the evening local time, which would allow you to fly slower than the earth's rotation and still stay in daylight.
This won't work over any distance without a plane which can fly at something close to the speed of sound. This plane does not have the right wing shape to do this.
This is true at the equator, but as you get closer to the poles, the speed will reduce. At the north and south poles, there will only be rotation. Since London is quite a bit north of the equator, the speed of the Earth below will be less than 1,000 mph.
Still in excess of 600 mph...
No reason why it wouldn't be manned.
:)
Especially given that the pictures show what look like cockpit windows
They state a 60 meter wingspan. That would like be about 6 meters wide, if they keep a 10-1 ratio. The ground and sea also reflect a certain percentage of solar energy. Overall, it looks to me that the would have about 360m^2 of direct sunlight potential and about the same amount of reflected sunlight.
There is also the fuselage and the horizontal stabaliser.
Voyager only required two engines for take-off and to provide a secondary engine in case of problems with the first. The weight here will be constant throughout, so they will not need a second engine for take-off. (Voyager was basically a flying fuel tank on take-off and needed 300HP to take-off on it's runway.
Constant weight throughout the flight means also that the trim does not need altering to compensate for burning fuel.
One of the side effects of the music industry attempts to stomp out music piracy at any cost however is more and more criminalisation of copyright violations. That will help the smaller free software people no end because it will be the police busting down corporate doors for them (at least so the theory goes 8))
So far it appears to be theory only. Given that SCO still appear to have all their doors intact. Maybe by the time the super-duper-DMCA comes around it will be the music industry who will be amongst the first targets, which would be suitably ironic.
However, we had to conclude that this would be a bad idea, because even if we complied fully with the terms of the GPL, it would be virtually impossible to ensure that our customers also did so (since they often modify our code).
You have no responsibility, duty or even power to ensure that your customers don't infringe other people's copyrights.
In the worst case, we fear that we might be villified for the actions of our customers.
Are there any cases where a supplier of a copyright infringer has been considered responsible? It's hard to see how this could happen without your customers enguaging in fraud against you...
Hmm, instead of paying someone to maintain the code, why don't they just purchase an off-the-shelf application that does the same thing
For many real world applications there is no such thing as an "off-the-shelf application". Even if you use one as a starting point it can easily wind up with extensive reconfiguration. Or worst you can end up having to reconfigure your business to cope with the application's shortcommings.
and plus has a support number?
Will the phone number be answered 24/7? Will the person who answers have the relevent skills to deal? Is a telephone the best way to deal with any likely problems in the first place?
Every company should have someone who is responsible for tracking what software is used, who is using it, and what releases are used. They should check at least monthly to see if there are any updates, what the updates do, and whether the updates are critical or desirable for the company. This person is usually an administrator with no programming skills. This applies whether the software is all proprietary, all OSS, or mized. It is REQUIRED if proprietary software is involved to track the per-person and per-server and per-CPU licenses.
If anything there is more need for this with proprietary software. Since proprietary software licences can easily "mutate" or a patch can end up altering both a piece of software and it's licence. With something like an EULA you might need lawyers to work out what it actually means in terms of how you can use the software. Most obviously where "you" are a corporation and the EULA is written assuming an individual.
Technqiue 1: If your managers are out of compliance with the GPL, tell the FSF anonymously with the name of the company and they'll nail them.
Actually you should tell the Copyright Holder(s), who may or may not be the FSF. The Copyright Holder is the only entity able to take action in response to copyright infringement.
N.B. The GPL does not oblige you to distribute anything. It places conditions on you if you distribute to a third party. With those conditions only applying to the entities you actually distribute to. There is no obligation to distribute patches to the original author or any "primary maintainer".
No, it's not daft, and a CD is not simply a republication. It is a republication that makes it much easier for people to steal (read: copy, and use without permission.
It's not that hard to copy microfilm. Yet periodicals have been available on microfilm for decades...
If I license a photograph to someone for use in a print advertisement or brochure, I know that's the only place that image will be used.
This isn't what the photographers in question did. They licenced their work to publishers of a periodical under well known rules. The licence they agreed to allows that publisher to make reprints, using any media they see fit.
If my clients suddenly started distributing my images on a CD to their clients... this becomes a problem. I usually license the images to them for a single use, or for unlimited use for a specific purpose.
Unless your agreement with them is that only a specific medium or reproduction technology can be used then they can use any suitable medium or technology.
What most people don't realize, but what I hope most slashdotters do, is that the DMCA was driven by the politicians who were backed by groups like the RIAA and MPAA. This means that despite it's seeming purpose of protecting rights (which it doesn't do anyways), it merely gives the groups mentioned above more ways to pursue "pirates" and "hackers."
But apparently utterly useless to individual copyright holders.
The sad fact is they don't have to really prove anything, just invoke the DMCA and they've got a case.
If it were that simple then there is no way SCO would still be distributing any GPL software.
Dispite all these copyright laws piled on top of each other we have a business enguaging in industrial scale copyright infringement in public...
How about instead of patching the law with new special cases for electronic media, we recognize that the law is fundamentally broken and come up with coherent answers for the general case?
The reason that it is fundermentally broken is that current laws only serve a small minority. Thing is that this minority has a hugely disproportionate amount of political power. Often only members of this minority have "patch rights", let alone the ability to request a radical overhaul.
The DMCA does nothing to stop copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is illegal to begin with. Making it 'more' illegal isn't going to stop anyone who was going to commite the crime in the first place.
It's more to make those who are passing the laws feel they are doing their job.
Say a thief is going to break into your home to steal your tv. Making it illegal to pick locks isnt really going to deter him. All it will lead to is poorly designed locks.
It can lead to all sorts of other issues. Especially if picking locks viewed as a more serious crime than burglary.
Unlike our worls where people use Oxen to draw their ploughs instead of nice Massey-Ferguson or John Deer tractors for example?
Well these companies have yet to develop self-repairing and self-fueling tractors. Let alone those who's "exhaust" acts as a fertilizer.
In the case of serious damage or breakdown there is a lot more meat on an ox than a tractor.
We have to farm out most of the development to other countries, because most of the world doesn't speak English very well, and you can't develop software in the US that works in any language but English.
An alternative explanation is that it's the US which "dosn't speak English very well".
There is a common belief among Americans (and which is rampant in American management), that the rest of the world is learning English, so there's no need of any other language.
Whilst English is the second most common language on the planet. The US version is so "non standard", in all sorts of ways, that it's fairly common for English language books to be published in two versions. One for the US and one for the rest of the world (including Canada).
There is a rather old joke of "English spoken, American understood"...
This is a common error. IP laws were originally designed to provide an incentive to add to the public domain.
This is also a common error. Copyright did not start with the Statute of Anne or the US Constitution. The original purpose of copyright was censorship, specifically to stop anything being printed which the authorities did not approve of.
Regardless, I would suggest that most code is not written in order to receive a copyright.
IMHO this applies to most pieces of creative work. Also where someone is paid they are unlikely to be the copyright holder...
Copyright is an incentive to create. People can share if they want. Without copyright, there would be no more incentive to create public works than there is today, perhaps even less.
People were being creative for 10's of thousands of years before copyright was invented.
It's rather hard to prove that copyright actually encourages creation and publication. It's certainly possible to find examples where the existance of copyright provided no incentive at all.
If confined to things like chasing car thieves at night, in non-crowded areas, it might be OK, but not in daytime when there are lots of people outdoors, in the street for example, who would be at risk.
There's also the issue of other air traffic to consider whilst your regular "chopper copper" can follow ATC instructions. How is one of these tiny UAVs (with a small RCS) going to be told to avoid getting squished by a passing airliner.
For the record, I still see planes working better, even in many of the cited examples; even "inspecting a bridge" doesn't generally need hover capability,
To inspect power lines a stable fixed wing aircraft with a movie camera (capable of filming in both visible and infrared) would appear to be a better choice.