The plane couldn't glide far at all, and I don't think the soft wall is necessarily that close to something you'd want to target.
Airliners do glide perfectly well. An Airbus was able to make an unpowered landing in Canada after running out of fuel and a BA 747 had all of it's engines fail due to flying through a volcanic erruption. (After landing 3 engines, all of the cockpit windows and several external lights needed to be replaced.)
The plane couldn't glide far at all, and I don't think the soft wall is necessarily that close to something you'd want to target. It might be a over a mile from the edge...
A mile isn't going to do you much good against someone using a plane as a guided missile. All the hijackers need do is line the plane up from several miles away then shutdown all power.
That's true for passenger jets (and one of the reasons that all the new passenger 'security measures' are such a joke) but, as I'm sure the bad guys have figured out, the next soft targets are commercial cargo jets.
This was tried before 9/11, a disgruntled Fed-Ex employee attempted to gain control of a DC-10 and crash it.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie!" while you reach for a big enough stick.
Without the threat of force, there is no grounds for diplomacy. Without the threat, you're just making a lot of noise that nobody has to pay attention to.
In order for it to be effective all parties need big sticks though. North Korea and Iran appear to know the rules rather better than Afghanistan and Iraq...
If you're worried about killing people, don't. It doesn't matter. We can kill as many people as we damn well please anyway. This precision weapon would just give us another option to destroy a target.
Having precise weapons is only useful if the people operating them can use them in a precise way. US forces have been notorious for "friendly fire" incidents from at least as far back as the second world war.
I'd rather have a less effective military and more effective means of getting people to other countries. We'd be a lot less hated if we delivered tourists and businessmen, rather than bombs, to foreign countries.
Assuming the tourists and businessmen can behave themselves when they get there...
Problem is, once you get there, you need overfly rights from those pesky countries in the way. If your aircraft is in space, outside the national exclusionary zone, you can go wherever you please, and bomb the shit out of whomever you please, at will.
Assuming you don't want to overfly anywhere with the capability shoot down objects in low Earth orbit.
A hypersonic bomber allows the kind of responce time an ICBM exhibits (ok, a bit longer) while not encouraging everyone and their brother to whip out the 2,000,000 sunblock. A small contingent of these weapons would allow limited airstrikes on specific and high priority targets.
How are they ment to know that such a bomber isn't carrying nukes? At this kind of speed you can forget any idea of stealth too.
This is obvious, as most businesses dont want developers to spend time on code that already works. If it doesnt work, then it gets rewritten. If the spec changes, then it gets rewritten.
Or alternativly the spec gets changed to avoid needing to rewrite/debug:)
Well, yeah, that seems intuiative... but if you're working with a team of half a dozen other people in a big company with strict coding guidelines, then it seems to be there would be a fair bit of peer review.
This could easily turn out to be little better than a single person working on the code. Since all the people are in the same environment, subject to the same "corporate culture".
Whereas if you're working on one of the smaller open source projects with just you developing and the odd patch coming in, not to mention no boss figure looking critically at your code, there's little reason to clean code up.
The difference here is that someone looking at the code is likely to be a completly different party.
On good example is konqueror and its identification of file type through filename's suffix. Do you have time to tell 300 users of your computers to rename "download.htm" to "bild.gif" to be able to click on it. (Oh, sorry I forgot, you are using your computer alone...)
This is an example of copying a design flaw from Windows. When doing things the "unix way", use/etc/magic and take no notice of the file name, would work far better.
Pure and simple: the EULA is not an enforceable contract because there is no evidence of actual agreement between two parties. Of course, all you have to do is show me my signature and I'll take all the above back.
Even if it was consider the case of software bought by corporation A, installed by a contractor from corporation B then used by a contractor from corporation C (or even a member of the public).
Do you think JK Rowling should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in her favor the huge success of all the stories that came before that talk about magic, witchcraft, good, evil, etc., to boost the acceptability and profit potential of her derivative?
The etc includes characters like "The reluctant hero", "The genius", "The member of a big family who feels overshadowed by siblings", "The elder", "The prankster", "The black sheep", "The fool who seeks status", "The bigot", "The victim of bigotry", "The power seeker" and so on.
And remember the entire reason for copyright in the U.S.: "to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts".
Note also that the US Constitution simply allows copyright, it does not mandate it.
Not to make the originators of the works a boatload of money. Not to confer status.
Ironically Ms Rowling appears to have an attitude to fame and status not unlike that of her character.
So you should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in your favour the huge success of JK Rowling's work to boost the acceptability and profit potential of your derivative?
You realise that she originally wrote for her own pleasure. She didn't seek to be rich or to compete with Madonna for the title of "world's most famous woman".
So let's start with this: you have a completely wrong notion of what Copyright is intended to protect. Is is specifically intended to protect ideas, not a particular physical object in which they are captured. It is specifically intended to prevent anyone from copying your ideas so closely that they are confusingly similar to or even indistinguishable from the original work. It is specifically intended to protect the intellectual creations of a person from use (without permission) by any third party.
Actually copyright started out as a way for the state to control the then new invention of the printing press. Which as a side effect made the first publishers very rich. It was a later revision of the idea which assigned copyright to authors, for the past few hundred years publishes have been trying to get control of copyright back. Which they have managed better with music and video recordings than with books. Into the mix which is modern copyright law you also have added the idea that copyrights should somehow act as a combination of pension and life insurance. The concept of an author's "moral rights" which can mean anything from a work being the author's "baby" to their always being credited. The idea from the US Constitution that copyright is there to further the progress of "Science and the useful arts". Probably a few other bits and bobs. As a result of various treaties, the WIPO and attempts at "harmonisation" most copyright statutes are Chimira like.
A character and a setting are VERY specific intellectual property or expressions. Although the fantasy and science fiction genres are HUGE, nearly every renowned work has immediately recognisable and distinguishable characters and settings. Middle Earth, Dune, Narnia, the Nautilus, Jedi, Discworld, Gandalf, Vimes, Paul Atreides - what makes you think that you can merely take the VAST amount of "development time" these authors spent on their creations and use it in a novel of your own?
None of the authors involved here invented their universe from scratch (nor did Rowling for that matter)...
If you're right about how "derivative works" is interpreted as regards copyright law, then I have to ask: who the fuck came up with the brilliant notion that characters, settings, etc., which are all ideas and not specific expressions, are protected under copyright law instead of trademark law?
In some cases people do attempt to apply trademarks to fictional characters. The most extreme case being Paramont which at one time appeared to be attempting to trademark any proper noun associated with Star Trek(tm).
Put another way: I should be able to write a brand spanking new novel set in the Star Wars universe and involving some of the characters within it, without that novel being declared a "derivative work" and thus a violation of copyright. Why? Because I didn't copy anything except ideas.
You could still get in trouble just for using the same "universe" even if all your characters were original. The only exception would be if your work was some kind of parody of the original. There are two things which have come together to create problems, one is copyrights which last longer than human lifetimes. The other is the ability for information to be sent anywhere at a trivial cost. (Even something like a book can be shipped anywhere on the planet within a day at a price affordable to hundreds of millions of people.) The likes of "fanfiction" simply could not exist in a world where the fastest way to diseminate information is the speed of a horse.
At the rate we're going, Ford won't be allowed to take apart Chevys to see how they work... McDonald's employees will be jailed when they eat at Burger King... and software engineers who look at competitor's interfaces will be blinded with hot irons.
Not exactly funny since there actually is a case of a Coke delivery driver being sacked after being caught drinking a Pepsi. (Or possibly vice versa.)
I'm responsible for all IT support contracts for my company (no we are not a tiny startup). After seeing how people struggle just to successfully communicate problems to support techs who are usually only 1/10 as intelligent, not to mention familiar with the products, I've mostly stopped buying software support. I'll still buy hardware support, so we can get replacement hardware when it breaks, but otherwise it's just a waste. I don't think I've yet seen a case where a software support contract helped us solve a single problem - that applies to Microsoft, Compaq, Dell, Cisco, and Avaya at least. These are top companies in their fields, and we have expensive support contracts, but nothing comes of it. Even talking to tier 3 techs is usually useless.
Sounds like you are thinking of "support" in the "techie way". As something to fix it when it goes wrong or to stop it going wrong in the first place.
I can't understand why anyone thinks software support is vital. I consider it a waste of money by managers who just want to cover their asses.
These people appear to see "support" as meaning something to help with finger pointing and passing on blame when things go wrong. With actually fixing the problem being of secondary importance.
In this economy, it's much more cost-effective to hire excellent staff on your own team than to pay premium prices for incompentent vendor support.
As well as avoiding paying out for expensive proprietary licences for programs which duplicate the functions of freely available software.
In other words, the barrier to adoption may be support, but if your stuff is simpler to use then the need for support is reduced. The *NIX crowds (Linux, BSD, etc) need to take note of how relatively simple it is to set up and run a Windows or Mac OS X system, and start realizing that ease-of-use and consistent graphic interfaces are something real people care about.
One of the biggest problems with Windows is the deliberate bluring of user and administration tasks. Thus describing "set up" as being "ease of use". Which leads to people who think they know what they are doing not realising they are completly out of their depth until the whole thing falls over in an untidy heap. To actually administer Windows properly takes a great deal of skill. Not helped by most configurations being stored in a machine friendly "registry" and the way various different components are intertwined with each other.
Organisations absolutely, positively hate this. "Single point of failure". They piss you off, you quit and get a better job, you get killed in a bizarre gardening act, and they are up shit creek
An external vendor could easily be just as bad. Possibly worst, since if they only person who knows how XYZ piece of proprietary software works were to suddenly disappear they are more likely to keep taking your money than actually bother to tell you.
You will find they were just as popular before anyone ever announced that movies were going to be made of the books. And note that WB has not committed yet to movies past book 3 (someone correct me on this if I'm wrong). So there is no guarantee that books 4 and 5 will ever make it to a screenwriter.
There is also quite a bit of fear about what might happen to them should they be turned into movies.
But I doubt if the children get even a quarter of the stuff she talked about (the phoenix is a symbol of rebirth and Jesus Christ
The phoenix predates Christianity anyway only a Christian would see an analogy. One interesting thing about the entire series is that virtually no character is assigned any kind of religious faith.
it's named Fawkes after Guy Fawkes etc.).
British kids would get this quite easily. A better example of some of the more obscure references would be that Hagrid bought Fluffy from a Greek man...
As for the comparison between old literature to modern literature: Of course old literature is harder to read! It was written in a vernacular that is no longer used. People write and speak differently now, and so modern literature looks easier simply because thats how you speak. Old prose being harder to read does not increase its literary merit.
Old prose which is still available is however likely to be amongst the best from it's time. Simply because anything from the same time which is poor is likely to be long forgotten. A similar thing applies to classical music.
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The plane couldn't glide far at all, and I don't think the soft wall is necessarily that close to something you'd want to target.
Airliners do glide perfectly well. An Airbus was able to make an unpowered landing in Canada after running out of fuel and a BA 747 had all of it's engines fail due to flying through a volcanic erruption. (After landing 3 engines, all of the cockpit windows and several external lights needed to be replaced.)
The plane couldn't glide far at all, and I don't think the soft wall is necessarily that close to something you'd want to target. It might be a over a mile from the edge...
A mile isn't going to do you much good against someone using a plane as a guided missile. All the hijackers need do is line the plane up from several miles away then shutdown all power.
That's true for passenger jets (and one of the reasons that all the new passenger 'security measures' are such a joke) but, as I'm sure the bad guys have figured out, the next soft targets are commercial cargo jets.
This was tried before 9/11, a disgruntled Fed-Ex employee attempted to gain control of a DC-10 and crash it.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie!" while you reach for a big enough stick.
Without the threat of force, there is no grounds for diplomacy. Without the threat, you're just making a lot of noise that nobody has to pay attention to.
In order for it to be effective all parties need big sticks though. North Korea and Iran appear to know the rules rather better than Afghanistan and Iraq...
The Concorde was neither built by a US company nor operated by a US airline.
IIRC some of the planes were at one time leased to a US airline.
If you're worried about killing people, don't. It doesn't matter. We can kill as many people as we damn well please anyway. This precision weapon would just give us another option to destroy a target.
Having precise weapons is only useful if the people operating them can use them in a precise way. US forces have been notorious for "friendly fire" incidents from at least as far back as the second world war.
I'd rather have a less effective military and more effective means of getting people to other countries. We'd be a lot less hated if we delivered tourists and businessmen, rather than bombs, to foreign countries.
Assuming the tourists and businessmen can behave themselves when they get there...
Problem is, once you get there, you need overfly rights from those pesky countries in the way. If your aircraft is in space, outside the national exclusionary zone, you can go wherever you please, and bomb the shit out of whomever you please, at will.
Assuming you don't want to overfly anywhere with the capability shoot down objects in low Earth orbit.
A hypersonic bomber allows the kind of responce time an ICBM exhibits (ok, a bit longer) while not encouraging everyone and their brother to whip out the 2,000,000 sunblock. A small contingent of these weapons would allow limited airstrikes on specific and high priority targets.
How are they ment to know that such a bomber isn't carrying nukes? At this kind of speed you can forget any idea of stealth too.
This is obvious, as most businesses dont want developers to spend time on code that already works. If it doesnt work, then it gets rewritten. If the spec changes, then it gets rewritten.
:)
Or alternativly the spec gets changed to avoid needing to rewrite/debug
Well, yeah, that seems intuiative... but if you're working with a team of half a dozen other people in a big company with strict coding guidelines, then it seems to be there would be a fair bit of peer review.
This could easily turn out to be little better than a single person working on the code. Since all the people are in the same environment, subject to the same "corporate culture".
Whereas if you're working on one of the smaller open source projects with just you developing and the odd patch coming in, not to mention no boss figure looking critically at your code, there's little reason to clean code up.
The difference here is that someone looking at the code is likely to be a completly different party.
On good example is konqueror and its identification of file type through filename's suffix. Do you have time to tell 300 users of your computers to rename "download.htm" to "bild.gif" to be able to click on it. (Oh, sorry I forgot, you are using your computer alone...)
/etc/magic and take no notice of the file name, would work far better.
This is an example of copying a design flaw from Windows. When doing things the "unix way", use
Pure and simple: the EULA is not an enforceable contract because there is no evidence of actual agreement between two parties. Of course, all you have to do is show me my signature and I'll take all the above back.
Even if it was consider the case of software bought by corporation A, installed by a contractor from corporation B then used by a contractor from corporation C (or even a member of the public).
Do you think JK Rowling should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in her favor the huge success of all the stories that came before that talk about magic, witchcraft, good, evil, etc., to boost the acceptability and profit potential of her derivative?
The etc includes characters like "The reluctant hero", "The genius", "The member of a big family who feels overshadowed by siblings", "The elder", "The prankster", "The black sheep", "The fool who seeks status", "The bigot", "The victim of bigotry", "The power seeker" and so on.
And remember the entire reason for copyright in the U.S.: "to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts".
Note also that the US Constitution simply allows copyright, it does not mandate it.
Not to make the originators of the works a boatload of money. Not to confer status.
Ironically Ms Rowling appears to have an attitude to fame and status not unlike that of her character.
So you should be able to write a Harry Potter novel, using in your favour the huge success of JK Rowling's work to boost the acceptability and profit potential of your derivative?
You realise that she originally wrote for her own pleasure. She didn't seek to be rich or to compete with Madonna for the title of "world's most famous woman".
So let's start with this: you have a completely wrong notion of what Copyright is intended to protect. Is is specifically intended to protect ideas, not a particular physical object in which they are captured. It is specifically intended to prevent anyone from copying your ideas so closely that they are confusingly similar to or even indistinguishable from the original work. It is specifically intended to protect the intellectual creations of a person from use (without permission) by any third party.
Actually copyright started out as a way for the state to control the then new invention of the printing press. Which as a side effect made the first publishers very rich. It was a later revision of the idea which assigned copyright to authors, for the past few hundred years publishes have been trying to get control of copyright back. Which they have managed better with music and video recordings than with books.
Into the mix which is modern copyright law you also have added the idea that copyrights should somehow act as a combination of pension and life insurance. The concept of an author's "moral rights" which can mean anything from a work being the author's "baby" to their always being credited. The idea from the US Constitution that copyright is there to further the progress of "Science and the useful arts". Probably a few other bits and bobs. As a result of various treaties, the WIPO and attempts at "harmonisation" most copyright statutes are Chimira like.
A character and a setting are VERY specific intellectual property or expressions. Although the fantasy and science fiction genres are HUGE, nearly every renowned work has immediately recognisable and distinguishable characters and settings. Middle Earth, Dune, Narnia, the Nautilus, Jedi, Discworld, Gandalf, Vimes, Paul Atreides - what makes you think that you can merely take the VAST amount of "development time" these authors spent on their creations and use it in a novel of your own?
None of the authors involved here invented their universe from scratch (nor did Rowling for that matter)...
If you're right about how "derivative works" is interpreted as regards copyright law, then I have to ask: who the fuck came up with the brilliant notion that characters, settings, etc., which are all ideas and not specific expressions, are protected under copyright law instead of trademark law?
In some cases people do attempt to apply trademarks to fictional characters. The most extreme case being Paramont which at one time appeared to be attempting to trademark any proper noun associated with Star Trek(tm).
Put another way: I should be able to write a brand spanking new novel set in the Star Wars universe and involving some of the characters within it, without that novel being declared a "derivative work" and thus a violation of copyright. Why? Because I didn't copy anything except ideas.
You could still get in trouble just for using the same "universe" even if all your characters were original. The only exception would be if your work was some kind of parody of the original.
There are two things which have come together to create problems, one is copyrights which last longer than human lifetimes. The other is the ability for information to be sent anywhere at a trivial cost. (Even something like a book can be shipped anywhere on the planet within a day at a price affordable to hundreds of millions of people.) The likes of "fanfiction" simply could not exist in a world where the fastest way to diseminate information is the speed of a horse.
At the rate we're going, Ford won't be allowed to take apart Chevys to see how they work... McDonald's employees will be jailed when they eat at Burger King... and software engineers who look at competitor's interfaces will be blinded with hot irons.
Not exactly funny since there actually is a case of a Coke delivery driver being sacked after being caught drinking a Pepsi. (Or possibly vice versa.)
I'm responsible for all IT support contracts for my company (no we are not a tiny startup). After seeing how people struggle just to successfully communicate problems to support techs who are usually only 1/10 as intelligent, not to mention familiar with the products, I've mostly stopped buying software support. I'll still buy hardware support, so we can get replacement hardware when it breaks, but otherwise it's just a waste. I don't think I've yet seen a case where a software support contract helped us solve a single problem - that applies to Microsoft, Compaq, Dell, Cisco, and Avaya at least. These are top companies in their fields, and we have expensive support contracts, but nothing comes of it. Even talking to tier 3 techs is usually useless.
Sounds like you are thinking of "support" in the "techie way". As something to fix it when it goes wrong or to stop it going wrong in the first place.
I can't understand why anyone thinks software support is vital. I consider it a waste of money by managers who just want to cover their asses.
These people appear to see "support" as meaning something to help with finger pointing and passing on blame when things go wrong. With actually fixing the problem being of secondary importance.
In this economy, it's much more cost-effective to hire excellent staff on your own team than to pay premium prices for incompentent vendor support.
As well as avoiding paying out for expensive proprietary licences for programs which duplicate the functions of freely available software.
In other words, the barrier to adoption may be support, but if your stuff is simpler to use then the need for support is reduced. The *NIX crowds (Linux, BSD, etc) need to take note of how relatively simple it is to set up and run a Windows or Mac OS X system, and start realizing that ease-of-use and consistent graphic interfaces are something real people care about.
One of the biggest problems with Windows is the deliberate bluring of user and administration tasks. Thus describing "set up" as being "ease of use". Which leads to people who think they know what they are doing not realising they are completly out of their depth until the whole thing falls over in an untidy heap.
To actually administer Windows properly takes a great deal of skill. Not helped by most configurations being stored in a machine friendly "registry" and the way various different components are intertwined with each other.
Who do you call for trouble with Windows? Microsoft.
At least in theory. In practice people use search engines and usenet with Windows just as much as anything else.
And what happens when the support company goes out of business?
They don't even need to go out of business to cease supporting a specific product.
Organisations absolutely, positively hate this. "Single point of failure". They piss you off, you quit and get a better job, you get killed in a bizarre gardening act, and they are up shit creek
An external vendor could easily be just as bad. Possibly worst, since if they only person who knows how XYZ piece of proprietary software works were to suddenly disappear they are more likely to keep taking your money than actually bother to tell you.
You will find they were just as popular before anyone ever announced that movies were going to be made of the books. And note that WB has not committed yet to movies past book 3 (someone correct me on this if I'm wrong). So there is no guarantee that books 4 and 5 will ever make it to a screenwriter.
There is also quite a bit of fear about what might happen to them should they be turned into movies.
But I doubt if the children get even a quarter of the stuff she talked about (the phoenix is a symbol of rebirth and Jesus Christ
The phoenix predates Christianity anyway only a Christian would see an analogy. One interesting thing about the entire series is that virtually no character is assigned any kind of religious faith.
it's named Fawkes after Guy Fawkes etc.).
British kids would get this quite easily.
A better example of some of the more obscure references would be that Hagrid bought Fluffy from a Greek man...
As for the comparison between old literature to modern literature: Of course old literature is harder to read! It was written in a vernacular that is no longer used. People write and speak differently now, and so modern literature looks easier simply because thats how you speak. Old prose being harder to read does not increase its literary merit.
Old prose which is still available is however likely to be amongst the best from it's time. Simply because anything from the same time which is poor is likely to be long forgotten. A similar thing applies to classical music.