If you take a look at the site, it seems to be mostly experimental music. This is stuff that is unlikely to have broad appeal (or large financial value), and is therefore very unlikely to be picked up by a label. Putting it in the public domain is therefore a very appropriate way of getting it out to interested people.
One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.
Skylab was intended for exactly three missions, with no intention of resupply or re-use. The vehicle itself had severe problems -- one solar panel tore off at launch -- which limited its usefulness (the first mission ended up being largely wasted on rescuing the station). Mir was no picnic, either -- there was a major fire, and the collission with a resupply ship. The ISS has, so far, been comparatively problem-free.
Skylab's orbit was not that high -- roughly 270 miles -- in any case it was launched in 1973 and crashed to Earth only six years later, in 1979. The ISS's current altitude is 242 miles. I can't find any orbital data on Mir, but the space shuttle got there, too, and it didn't take more than a few years to crash back to Earth after maintenance ended.
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
I don't know what you mean by "real orbit", but the shuttle deployed Hubble at an altitude of 368 miles and has visited it several times since. No current manned vehicle can go much higher than this; and none can reach geosynchronous orbit. Shuttle deployment is not a good idea for commercial satellites, but it makes sense for large, multi-billion-dollar one-shot spacecraft (like Hubble) because if something goes wrong there is an option to bring it back to Earth or do on-orbit repair.
The safety record sucks.
The claimed accident rate of one-in-400 is clearly off. The demonstrated accident rate of 2-in-113 is not atypical of comparable launch vehicles, such as Soyuz. It's even more impressive given that the shuttle system is intended to be reusable, while Soyuz is launched new each time.
It's a white elephant without a mission
Its mission has been and always will be to service the ISS.
It's very tempting to look at any complicated system that has problems, and say, "Bah, this is useless, let's start over". The reality is that experience gained using the shuttle and the ISS is crucial to the continued exploitation of space.
Space flight is a risky business and will continue to be so. There is no guarantee that a new system with untested hardware will be any safer.
The question is not whether a copyright violation has occurred (because it clearly has), but why it occurred. SCO may argue that it was forced to violate the GPL by IBM, and to comply with the copyright, faced the requirement of withdrawing their linux and thus losing business. They could argue that IBM's action forced them to agree to use the GPL under fraud or duress, so it is not valid.
I agree -- I was simply giving an argument that I expect them to use. They will probably try to portray IBM as the bad guy who trapped them into giving away their own source under the GPL. I expect they will fail.
If I buy that argument, then there's a great way to force any business that sells both closed and GPL software out of business:
1. Steal their closed code and include it in the GPL software. 2. Watch as they lose half their revenue, either by giving up closed source, or by giving up open source.
In the above scenario, there may be merit to an argument that they had to agree to the GPL under duress to keep their business going. I'm not saying this argument is valid in SCO's case, however.
There are scenarios under which a company might not be compelled to stop releasing GPL'd code as soon as it realizes a violation has occurred. Suppose IBM set SCO up by stealing Unix code and then including it in Linux. Because SCO distributes Linux, they would also be releasing the offending code under the GPL. However, because IBM's intent was malicious, you could argue that the GPL cannot apply.
As for the delay in stopping Linux sales, SCO could argue that Linux was central to its business, so forgoing that revenue stream in the interest of ensuring its other IP was protected would be severely harmful. In this scenario, they could argue that they only agreed to the GPL under duress, so they should not be bound by it.
Worst case, it would take anyone with half a clue and subpoena(sp?) power about a day to find out where the email really came from, if that.
Easy... don't send it from either your work or home PC. Go to a busy internet cafe or public library and send it from a public terminal (making sure that nobody is looking over your shoulder).
I have often wondered how many Hotmail or Yahoo accounts are created and used just once to send an anonymous e-mail.
- say, while on a trip to Africa, he was afraid of being boiled alive by the natives; - be photographed shaking hands with a member of the Hell's Angels (then later say he did it out of fear); - make a complete ass out of himself on CNN while he was supposed to be discussing SARS.
The best idea is not electronic vote casting, it's electronic counting. The most recent Toronto mayoral election used a ballot similar to those used in electronic test-scoring, where you use your HB pencil to fill in a blank. The votes were all counted within a couple of hours after the polls closed.
If you wanted to avoid confusing the easily confusable, you could have a touch-screen system that prints a paper ballot, with the blanks ideally positioned for the electronic counters. Efficiency and a paper trail.
You should move to Edmonton, Alberta. The streets are (nearly) all numbered, with "streets" running north-south and increasing in number to the west, and "avenues" running east-west and increasing in number to the north. So, for example, 1st street and 1st avenue is in the extreme southeast corner. 100th street and 100th avenue (where they started the numbering system, giving themselves room to expand) is downtown. Edmonton is large enough now that they have to go with a directional system to expand to the southeast (e.g., 5th street NW, etc.). If you're paying attention, it's virtually impossible to get lost.
While on this topic... and I can say this because I grew up there... this probably happened because Edmonton is utterly bereft of heroes, so there's nobody to name things after. One of the most major traffic arteries in town is Wayne Gretzky Drive, after the hockey player who won four championships with the Edmonton Oilers. (Imagine Chicago changing the name of a major highway to Michael Jordan Boulevard.) Before that, for decades it was called the Capilano Freeway, since Capilano was the name of the construction company that built it. The names of other highways in town are the "Yellowhead" and "Whitemud", which I believe have aboriginal significance.
Is the book banned, or the techniques the book describes? There's a big difference.
Clearly, the book is not banned, since it is being published directly by the author. However, from his site, the book was not picked up by a publisher for fear of lawsuits. That's somewhat alarming, but it's not equivalent to outlawing a book.
Actually, there are plenty of "survival" manuals and whatnot out there that describe all kinds of illegal activities, so I would be surprised if tort law could be used to terminate publication of a book (because if it could, it would have been done already in other contexts). However, this doesn't mean that the threat of lawsuits could not be used as a scare tactic.
You'd think that in such operations, where you only ever get one chance, they would have the most error free systems possible.
They do go to great lengths to remove the errors. In fact the Challenger investigation singled out the methods used for validating the shuttle's software as a model for the other parts of the program to follow in improving safety.
Also, the article said that the backup system kicked in automatically and led to a safe, albeit off-target, landing. So in fact the overall system worked as expected.
And as for the "big mistakes", it's very easy to point fingers afterward and boil a problem down to a catch phrase. However, engineers aren't idiots; almost all accidents involving spacecraft are a result of a long string of seemingly innocuous miscommunications, coincidences, and bad luck. Consider the story of the Ariane 5, which was destroyed because of an overlooked feature in a piece of code reused from a smaller rocket. No software engineer can say that they haven't made a similar mistake.
Frames suck. Especially since your page usually gets fucked up when indexed by search engines -- the engine will normally see your main page and link to it outside of the frame, requiring some pain and suffering to detect and undo.
Frames are also one of those things that has been ruined by idiots using a poor implementation. So many people use bad frames that, for example, render with a scroll bar or something else annoying.
And nobody uses them these days -- I see a site using frames and think, "Six years ago".
I agree that a passenger activating a wireless device is unlikely to cause a problem. If it did, the airlines would not allow the devices in the cabin.
Paranoia is the bedrock of safety in the aerospace industry. Examine any airline accident in the last ten years... they normally involve one-in-a-million fluke convergence of many factors which combine to bring an airplane down. In TWA 800, a fuel tank exploded after a worn wire produced an arc at just the right time during the flight after heat from an air conditioning unit had produced an explosive fuel-air mix in the fuel tank. For the concorde, a piece of metal debris in just the right place on the runway burst a tire in just the right way to fling rubber fragments into a wing fuel tank and start a fire.
It's not impossible that a navigational problem from RF interference could cause an aircraft to be a few hundred meters off course, at the same time as an unrelated problem causes another airliner to be on an intersecting course.
As for transmitter power being much greater from the ground than onboard, are you forgetting the inverse square law? Not to mention the fact that the aluminum skin of an airliner acting like a waveguide to send much of the RF energy straight to the cockpit.
Personally, I'm quite happy to have a paranoid FAA, it makes my flight safer. Furthermore, as other posters have pointed out, I'm quite happy not to have cell phones on planes, as I enjoy peace and quiet, and have no desire to be next to some blathering idiot for four hours on a transcontinental flight.
You do something that could potentially damage the processor (read the article), the company is perfectly well within its legal and moral rights to void the warranty. The warranty is not insurance against malice or stupidity.
Chewie's dad is named Itchy, his wife is named Molla, and his son is named Lumpy, according to the Star Wars Holiday Special -- a disowned piece of the Star Wars universe that aired on TV in 1978. It is so horrible,
George Lucas has said that if he had time and a hammer, he would track down every bootleg copy of the special and smash it.
I dunno... my favorite wookie is Chewbacca's father, Itchy, who appeared in the Star Wars Holiday Special, along with Chewie's wife, Molla, and his son, Lumpy. There was also an appearance by Bea Arthur, but the word is that she was not actually playing a Wookie.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if he called himself a jelly doughnut. Then again, he was in Munich, not Berlin.
Read the article, it says that this is the closest approach in 60,000 years. Unless you count cave art as recorded history, the article is accurate.
If you take a look at the site, it seems to be mostly experimental music. This is stuff that is unlikely to have broad appeal (or large financial value), and is therefore very unlikely to be picked up by a label. Putting it in the public domain is therefore a very appropriate way of getting it out to interested people.
One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.
Skylab was intended for exactly three missions, with no intention of resupply or re-use. The vehicle itself had severe problems -- one solar panel tore off at launch -- which limited its usefulness (the first mission ended up being largely wasted on rescuing the station). Mir was no picnic, either -- there was a major fire, and the collission with a resupply ship. The ISS has, so far, been comparatively problem-free.
Skylab's orbit was not that high -- roughly 270 miles -- in any case it was launched in 1973 and crashed to Earth only six years later, in 1979. The ISS's current altitude is 242 miles. I can't find any orbital data on Mir, but the space shuttle got there, too, and it didn't take more than a few years to crash back to Earth after maintenance ended.
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
I don't know what you mean by "real orbit", but the shuttle deployed Hubble at an altitude of 368 miles and has visited it several times since. No current manned vehicle can go much higher than this; and none can reach geosynchronous orbit. Shuttle deployment is not a good idea for commercial satellites, but it makes sense for large, multi-billion-dollar one-shot spacecraft (like Hubble) because if something goes wrong there is an option to bring it back to Earth or do on-orbit repair.
The safety record sucks.
The claimed accident rate of one-in-400 is clearly off. The demonstrated accident rate of 2-in-113 is not atypical of comparable launch vehicles, such as Soyuz. It's even more impressive given that the shuttle system is intended to be reusable, while Soyuz is launched new each time.
It's a white elephant without a mission
Its mission has been and always will be to service the ISS.
It's very tempting to look at any complicated system that has problems, and say, "Bah, this is useless, let's start over". The reality is that experience gained using the shuttle and the ISS is crucial to the continued exploitation of space.
Space flight is a risky business and will continue to be so. There is no guarantee that a new system with untested hardware will be any safer.
The question is not whether a copyright violation has occurred (because it clearly has), but why it occurred. SCO may argue that it was forced to violate the GPL by IBM, and to comply with the copyright, faced the requirement of withdrawing their linux and thus losing business. They could argue that IBM's action forced them to agree to use the GPL under fraud or duress, so it is not valid.
This is why lawyers make the big bucks.
I agree -- I was simply giving an argument that I expect them to use. They will probably try to portray IBM as the bad guy who trapped them into giving away their own source under the GPL. I expect they will fail.
If I buy that argument, then there's a great way to force any business that sells both closed and GPL software out of business:
1. Steal their closed code and include it in the GPL software.
2. Watch as they lose half their revenue, either by giving up closed source, or by giving up open source.
In the above scenario, there may be merit to an argument that they had to agree to the GPL under duress to keep their business going. I'm not saying this argument is valid in SCO's case, however.
I am not a lawyer, but I can think logically.
There are scenarios under which a company might not be compelled to stop releasing GPL'd code as soon as it realizes a violation has occurred. Suppose IBM set SCO up by stealing Unix code and then including it in Linux. Because SCO distributes Linux, they would also be releasing the offending code under the GPL. However, because IBM's intent was malicious, you could argue that the GPL cannot apply.
As for the delay in stopping Linux sales, SCO could argue that Linux was central to its business, so forgoing that revenue stream in the interest of ensuring its other IP was protected would be severely harmful. In this scenario, they could argue that they only agreed to the GPL under duress, so they should not be bound by it.
Worst case, it would take anyone with half a clue and subpoena(sp?) power about a day to find out where the email really came from, if that.
... don't send it from either your work or home PC. Go to a busy internet cafe or public library and send it from a public terminal (making sure that nobody is looking over your shoulder).
Easy
I have often wondered how many Hotmail or Yahoo accounts are created and used just once to send an anonymous e-mail.
Nothing sucks like an electrolux!
Don't post your questions here. Post them at the link.
Yes, we still have him, but not for much longer.
He was also stupid enough to:
- say, while on a trip to Africa, he was afraid of being boiled alive by the natives;
- be photographed shaking hands with a member of the Hell's Angels (then later say he did it out of fear);
- make a complete ass out of himself on CNN while he was supposed to be discussing SARS.
The best idea is not electronic vote casting, it's electronic counting. The most recent Toronto mayoral election used a ballot similar to those used in electronic test-scoring, where you use your HB pencil to fill in a blank. The votes were all counted within a couple of hours after the polls closed.
If you wanted to avoid confusing the easily confusable, you could have a touch-screen system that prints a paper ballot, with the blanks ideally positioned for the electronic counters. Efficiency and a paper trail.
You should move to Edmonton, Alberta. The streets are (nearly) all numbered, with "streets" running north-south and increasing in number to the west, and "avenues" running east-west and increasing in number to the north. So, for example, 1st street and 1st avenue is in the extreme southeast corner. 100th street and 100th avenue (where they started the numbering system, giving themselves room to expand) is downtown. Edmonton is large enough now that they have to go with a directional system to expand to the southeast (e.g., 5th street NW, etc.). If you're paying attention, it's virtually impossible to get lost.
... and I can say this because I grew up there ... this probably happened because Edmonton is utterly bereft of heroes, so there's nobody to name things after. One of the most major traffic arteries in town is Wayne Gretzky Drive, after the hockey player who won four championships with the Edmonton Oilers. (Imagine Chicago changing the name of a major highway to Michael Jordan Boulevard.) Before that, for decades it was called the Capilano Freeway, since Capilano was the name of the construction company that built it. The names of other highways in town are the "Yellowhead" and "Whitemud", which I believe have aboriginal significance.
While on this topic
Is the book banned, or the techniques the book describes? There's a big difference.
Clearly, the book is not banned, since it is being published directly by the author. However, from his site, the book was not picked up by a publisher for fear of lawsuits. That's somewhat alarming, but it's not equivalent to outlawing a book.
Actually, there are plenty of "survival" manuals and whatnot out there that describe all kinds of illegal activities, so I would be surprised if tort law could be used to terminate publication of a book (because if it could, it would have been done already in other contexts). However, this doesn't mean that the threat of lawsuits could not be used as a scare tactic.
Is WINHEC where you go if you're darned for all eternity after pirating windows?
You'd think that in such operations, where you only ever get one chance, they would have the most error free systems possible.
They do go to great lengths to remove the errors. In fact the Challenger investigation singled out the methods used for validating the shuttle's software as a model for the other parts of the program to follow in improving safety. Also, the article said that the backup system kicked in automatically and led to a safe, albeit off-target, landing. So in fact the overall system worked as expected.
And as for the "big mistakes", it's very easy to point fingers afterward and boil a problem down to a catch phrase. However, engineers aren't idiots; almost all accidents involving spacecraft are a result of a long string of seemingly innocuous miscommunications, coincidences, and bad luck. Consider the story of the Ariane 5, which was destroyed because of an overlooked feature in a piece of code reused from a smaller rocket. No software engineer can say that they haven't made a similar mistake.
Frames suck. Especially since your page usually gets fucked up when indexed by search engines -- the engine will normally see your main page and link to it outside of the frame, requiring some pain and suffering to detect and undo.
Frames are also one of those things that has been ruined by idiots using a poor implementation. So many people use bad frames that, for example, render with a scroll bar or something else annoying.
And nobody uses them these days -- I see a site using frames and think, "Six years ago".
I agree that a passenger activating a wireless device is unlikely to cause a problem. If it did, the airlines would not allow the devices in the cabin.
... they normally involve one-in-a-million fluke convergence of many factors which combine to bring an airplane down. In TWA 800, a fuel tank exploded after a worn wire produced an arc at just the right time during the flight after heat from an air conditioning unit had produced an explosive fuel-air mix in the fuel tank. For the concorde, a piece of metal debris in just the right place on the runway burst a tire in just the right way to fling rubber fragments into a wing fuel tank and start a fire.
Paranoia is the bedrock of safety in the aerospace industry. Examine any airline accident in the last ten years
It's not impossible that a navigational problem from RF interference could cause an aircraft to be a few hundred meters off course, at the same time as an unrelated problem causes another airliner to be on an intersecting course.
As for transmitter power being much greater from the ground than onboard, are you forgetting the inverse square law? Not to mention the fact that the aluminum skin of an airliner acting like a waveguide to send much of the RF energy straight to the cockpit.
Personally, I'm quite happy to have a paranoid FAA, it makes my flight safer. Furthermore, as other posters have pointed out, I'm quite happy not to have cell phones on planes, as I enjoy peace and quiet, and have no desire to be next to some blathering idiot for four hours on a transcontinental flight.
You do something that could potentially damage the processor (read the article), the company is perfectly well within its legal and moral rights to void the warranty. The warranty is not insurance against malice or stupidity.
Chewie's dad is named Itchy, his wife is named Molla, and his son is named Lumpy, according to the Star Wars Holiday Special -- a disowned piece of the Star Wars universe that aired on TV in 1978. It is so horrible, George Lucas has said that if he had time and a hammer, he would track down every bootleg copy of the special and smash it.
I dunno ... my favorite wookie is Chewbacca's father, Itchy, who appeared in the Star Wars Holiday Special, along with Chewie's wife, Molla, and his son, Lumpy. There was also an appearance by Bea Arthur, but the word is that she was not actually playing a Wookie.
Apparently this is for real. A quick Google search turned up:
The Dumpster Lady
Dumpster Diving for Treasure
Dumpster Diving: Treasure and Trash
alt.dumpster
tripe n.
1. Stomach tissue of a ruminant and especially of the ox used as food
2. Something poor, worthless, or offensive
You missed it. That was Good Friday.