Well, considering the proportions of the trip we're actually talking about, let's say: anything that you can then use to traverse all the world's oceans twice, without anchoring. Incorporate storage for all supplies necessary for the trip into your ship design, and stock the ship fully before leaving the camp because you won't be able to make port until the end of your voyage..
So, what raw materials would be found on the moon that wouldn't have to take off from earth in a more primitive form? You'll also have to transport enough supplies to sustain the builders while they assemble the parts on the lunar surface and the tools used to do the assembly. Then you'd have to transport the extra fuel to achieve escape velocity from the moon when you could have had the whole job done with one launch.
There's a lot of structural mass involved in a platform that can sustain the thrust required to get off of our ball of dirt that then becomes superfluous for the entire rest of the trip, and is a maneuvering liability (extra inertia == more reaction mass required for a given vector change). If we had some sort of propulsion method that didn't involve reaction mass this wouldn't matter so much, but as yet that hasn't happened.
Look at it this way: if you were going to build a wooden boat, would you build it at the logging camp 500 miles from the ocean, incorporate wheels and a car engine, and drive it to the ocean?
Yeah, but the reaction mass required to escape the moon's grav pull is a lot lower than that required to achieve escape velocity from Down Here; there's a case to be made that a mission to Mars should start use the moon as a staging area. Picture this: a mars mission module is built in pieces down here, shipped to a moonbase in successive trips along with fuel, and assembled/tested/launched on the moon.
Heck, if there are enough raw materials on the moon, maybe just build the structure there, and manufacture only the stuff that needs complicated fabs down here.
[...]he made the point that IBM sells a very small number of laptops with linux. I believe his statement was "the smaller companies can undercut on price and geeks are thrifty."
They sold one lousy thinkpad with linux, and you really had to be determined to find and order it through their webpages. Great selection. (Huge sample size, too: how many of that model sold with windows compared with their other 'dozepads? Funny, they don't say.)
I wonder how many other people (besides me) said "Gee, I really like this much lighter Txx model, and I can probably get it to work with linux... and since the damn linux preload is more expensive anyway, I might as well!"
Between WMP, Roxio/Adaptec, Nero, MP3CDMaker and others, I don't think there's any one computer task EASIER than creating a CD from MP3s!
Well, I know plenty of people (some of them grad students in computer science -- I work for the CS dept. of a state university) who can produce coasters just as often as CDs.
There's also the point (which I admit I forgot to make explicitly -- mea culpa) that your average 128kbps downloaded MP3 don't sound so good when you pump it through even a low-end component system, even if it's coming from a burned CD in the component CD player rather than a 3.5mm jack plugged into an unshielded OEM soundcard.. (Yes, I did view this story with great interest, being both a geek and an audiophile.:-)
Salon:So far, why do you think people are both purchasing music and downloading it?
Liebowitz:It may be the cost of putting these collections of songs together. Even though it seems low, it's more effort than the typical person is willing to go through. That may be what the salvation of the record industry is -- that it's simply too hard to do on your own what they do for you.
Something I haven't seen anyone (in the press) really correlate directly:
Outside of geekdom, there are not that many people (when compared with the CD-listening population) who can take their MP3 collections and successfully and reliably burn CDs that play in CD players;
again, outside of geekdom, not many folks have their good stereo systems hooked up to their computers;
while people listen to mp3s on their computers, they want to listen to the music that they *like* on their stereos, in their cars, etcetera, and they also want to be able to lend it to friends and be reasonably sure that said friends will be able to listen to it also.
Put those together, and I think you have a more powerful impetus for buying CDs than the "people are honest" and "sample before you buy" theories represent. It's much easier to buy the music than it is to figure out how to get good sound from your MP3 collection.
Now, if the studios partnered with, say, Adaptec or Nero to create an application that could burn traditional CDs from uncompressed (or extremely high-quality MP3) sources bought and downloaded at burn-time from the labels, that provided a way for the average computer owner to burn mixed CDs that would play in her stereo, I think you'd see huge uptake. (You'd also see the death of the much-decried "album" with one decent tune and nine crap filler tracks, which is the pigfeed trough^W^Wbusiness model the RIAA member companies are fighting so hard to maintain...)
Except that the {MP,RI}AA *IS* Big Broadband. Can you say "AOL/Time-Warner"?
Even better:
"Your honor, the plaintiffs claim to be hurt by ``rampant copyright infringement on the Internet'' but their billing records will show that they in fact make a handsome profit from their broadband customers that is directly tied to the very file-sharing they claim to despise. Surely they should not be entitled to an additional blood tax upon the very pound of flesh they seek to excise?"
[...]it could go so far as to HURT the sales of Cable broadband connections[...]
I wonder if a case couldn't be made that, by raising rates in a way that's designed to profit from filesharing, the broadband providers are implicitly approving any copyright infringement that takes place... Perhaps the recent FCC decision could be construed as placing broadband outside the umbra of "common carrier" status? It would be a bittersweet thing to see the {MP,RI}AA take Big Broadband to court for profiting from copyright infringement...
IMHO, IBM makes some of the best mobile hardware out there -- one of the professors I support raves about his ThinkPad 600, that went with him into the Israeli desert for several months and is still running strong, no service required -- but the linux support for that hardware has been, um, erratic at best. Yes, we've been occasionally been able to purchase the odd model with linux preinstalled (usually it's *more* expensive than the comparable model with MicroSoft preinstalled, grr) but an awful lot of the hardware (mini-pci modems, &etc) is rather difficult to drive with a penguin behind the wheel. Why does IBM's linux enthusiasm fade so quickly at the small (physical) end of the hardware scale? Is there momentum underway to change this?
You have to consider the celebrity factor. People love their celebrities and I think most of us (save perhaps for a few slashdotters) won't get a crush on the newest software-star.
What looks cool to us geeks does not look cool to the hot chicks that we try to pick up.
Hah. Tell that to the hot chyk that bought me a thinkgeekT-shirt for my birthday...
Ole
Re:Copyrights and patents
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Blockpoth the quoster:
Better to do something like "for real people life of creator, or spouse or surviving dependants to age 21, for companies or when rights are sold to companies 10 (insert arbitrary number here) years"
This ignores (and/or perpetuates) one of the biggest practical problems with the current system -- it is not possible to determine if copyright on a work has expired simply by looking at the work in question.
It used to be the case that copyrights were granted for a fixed period of time, and that in order for a work to be copyrighted, it had to have the copyright notice affixed. Said notice had to contain the year the work was produced and the titular holder of the copyright. Thus, by looking at the notice and applying simple arithmetic, you could tell instantly whether a work was in the public domain: "Hmm, this was copyrighted in 1950, copyright lasts for 50 years, so now it's in the public domain and I can copy it at will." [note purely hypothetical number.]
Even with the varying lengths of fixed copyright that came into being as a result of the various early extensions passed by congress, it was still relatively easy for the lay researcher to figure out whether something was freely copyable; all one had to do was consult a table that matched year of publication with the then-extant term of copyright. In other words, if in 1918 copyright was 28 years, and in 1939 congress passed an act that extended subsisting and future copyrights by 10 years, then in 1941 a work that had been published in 1918 would still be under copyright, but a work from 1916 would have ascended into the public domain in 1938.
But with things based on the life of the author, it's an absolute mess -- our would-be researcher has to start investigating death records, just to figure out whether it's OK to slap an essay on the photocopier. Have you ever tried to get official records for the date of someone's death? Even for people who've died recently it can be a royal farking pain. For an author who died many years ago, good effing luck!
Copyright terms should be standard lengths, one-size-fits-all regardless of when anyone dies, is born, gets incorporated, or achieves spotted purple enlightenment with bells on.
Shouldn't your local domain be just "localdomain" (without any top-level domain)? Linux installations typically default to localhost.localdomain, and I think that's the standard.
No. (Although using ".localdomain" doesn't suck as badly as naming your private network "slashdot.org" and assuming that your NATbox will prevent anyone from seeing this posturing..) In practice, using ".localdomain" probably won't break anything as a pseudo-TLD for an RFC 1918-conformant private IP space, presuming you're talking about a home network that's not going to have anything complex depending on absolutely strict, standards-compliant DNS behavior, but it's actually defined as a domain "having an A record pointing to the loop back IP address and is reserved for such use. Any other use would conflict with widely deployed code which assumes this use." I.e. for DNS purposes, the only.in-addr.arpa domain that should map into localdomain is 127.in-addr.arpa -- this is the class-A netblock for your loopback interface(s), which all have the form 127.#.#.#.
Hence my comment about 18 usc 1001 as a last resort. ("If nothing else[...]").
ISTR there is something actionable about statements that can be construed as legal advice, particularly when publicly made by an entity that a reasonable person would presume to have knowledge of the relevant area. I just couldn't dig it up in a ~2 minute search through the morass that is our federal code of laws.
Hmm. Well, if you had a reported $36b in the bank, I wonder if I couldn't find an eager-beaver lawyer who'd happily educate you on the legal niceties, in return for any settlement monies that might be extractable...
But since you're just a/. flamer with an apparently advanced case of cranial rectosis, I doubt you're worth pursuing.
"It is a legal requirement that pre-installed operating systems remain with a machine for the life of the machine. If a company or individual donates a machine to your school, it must be donated with the operating system that was installed on the PC."
To my non-lawyerly eyes, that looks a hell of a lot like legal advice that deliberately misstates the law. Isn't there some sort of sanction that can be brought against an entity that knowingly lies about the law? If nothing else, would a cause of action exist under 18 US 1001 (a) (3)?
How long before the CoS claims those documents are copyrighted and sues to have them taken down? My guess is Monday morning, LA time.
IANAL, but ISTR that legal documents are not copyrightable. (Can you imagine the licensing wrangles over citations? "The firm of Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe offers the text of its successful Supreme Court briefs for excerption at the Reprehensible And-yet-technically Non-Discriminatory licensing fee of $1000/word.")
I know that here in MA, the licenses are changing over from a magnetic strip to a bar-code.
Can't run a bar-code over a magnet to kill it.
Yeah, but you can ruin the barcode with a plain old pencil eraser. Try it. (Remember, you don't have to remove the whole code, just remove a complete vertical section. Extra points for
judicious erasure that leaves it still looking like a functional barcode to the naked eye
making it look like wear-and-tear
barcode "editing" that results in valid (but false) data.;->
Frankly, I think we (the US) should take our millitary aid, and leave the Israelies to duke it out with sticks and rocks - just like the palestinians.
Israel might be able to tough it through the loss of American military aid. (Or did you think that the U.S. is the only nuclear nation covertly investigating the idea of small tacnukes?) However, the thing Israel cannot afford to lose is the U.S.'s unwavering veto on the UN Security Council. Absent that, UN sanctions would hit them hard and fast.
Ole
Re:RIP Linux - '1984' achieved through stealth
on
SSSCA Editorials
·
· Score: 1
There was a 1982 hugo award short story that had this scenario in it, in the end Senator Bob Dole (well over 120) decided he wanted copyrights to finish after a few decades.
The story to which you refer is by Spider Robinson and actually won the 1983 Hugo; the title is Melancholy Elephants and it is available for free web perusal on tale.com (well, free as in reading the second half of the story requires you to load pages with ads, but they're banner ads not popups and realtively unobtrusive.)
Melancholy Elephants was also the eponymic of a book of short stories which contains other excellent material, including some "Callahan's Bar" shorts. Check around your local used book store. I highly recommend it.
Robinson is an interesting author. He's not long on "technical" science fiction, but IMHO he excels at exploring human interactions with extrapolations of scientific progress. (By which I mean that he doesn't spend much time trying to come up with a plausible physics for, say, FTL travel -- but his exploration of how working FTL might affect people's lives would be fascinating.)
Ole
Re:We're missing out on revenues!!!
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
Blockpoth the quoster:
Entertainment companies like to keep supply down. Too much music easily distributed scares them.
With good reason, of course. Most of the media industry corps that were solidly behind the Mickey Mouse^W^WSonny Bonehead^H^H^H^H^Ho CTEA -- weren't actually (with perhaps a few minor exceptions) expecting to reap further monetary rewards on existing copyrighted works.
They realized that keeping works out of the public domain reduces competition for the "new" stuff that they're pushing. Despite the resounding proof of Sturgeon's Law inherent in every media subindustry's yearly output (in light of which one might be forgiven for considering Ted Sturgeon to be unreasonably optomistic) they still manage to sell what they shovel, because there's no alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of structural mass involved in a platform that can sustain the thrust required to get off of our ball of dirt that then becomes superfluous for the entire rest of the trip, and is a maneuvering liability (extra inertia == more reaction mass required for a given vector change). If we had some sort of propulsion method that didn't involve reaction mass this wouldn't matter so much, but as yet that hasn't happened.
Look at it this way: if you were going to build a wooden boat, would you build it at the logging camp 500 miles from the ocean, incorporate wheels and a car engine, and drive it to the ocean?
Heck, if there are enough raw materials on the moon, maybe just build the structure there, and manufacture only the stuff that needs complicated fabs down here.
They sold one lousy thinkpad with linux, and you really had to be determined to find and order it through their webpages. Great selection. (Huge sample size, too: how many of that model sold with windows compared with their other 'dozepads? Funny, they don't say.)
I wonder how many other people (besides me) said "Gee, I really like this much lighter Txx model, and I can probably get it to work with linux... and since the damn linux preload is more expensive anyway, I might as well!"
Blockpoth the quoster:
Four words:
Mobile network troubleshooting platform.Blockpoth the quoster:
Well, I know plenty of people (some of them grad students in computer science -- I work for the CS dept. of a state university) who can produce coasters just as often as CDs.
There's also the point (which I admit I forgot to make explicitly -- mea culpa) that your average 128kbps downloaded MP3 don't sound so good when you pump it through even a low-end component system, even if it's coming from a burned CD in the component CD player rather than a 3.5mm jack plugged into an unshielded OEM soundcard.. (Yes, I did view this story with great interest, being both a geek and an audiophile. :-)
Something I haven't seen anyone (in the press) really correlate directly:
Put those together, and I think you have a more powerful impetus for buying CDs than the "people are honest" and "sample before you buy" theories represent. It's much easier to buy the music than it is to figure out how to get good sound from your MP3 collection.
Now, if the studios partnered with, say, Adaptec or Nero to create an application that could burn traditional CDs from uncompressed (or extremely high-quality MP3) sources bought and downloaded at burn-time from the labels, that provided a way for the average computer owner to burn mixed CDs that would play in her stereo, I think you'd see huge uptake. (You'd also see the death of the much-decried "album" with one decent tune and nine crap filler tracks, which is the pigfeed trough^W^Wbusiness model the RIAA member companies are fighting so hard to maintain...)
Blockpoth the quoster:
Even better:
Blockpoth the quoster:
I wonder if a case couldn't be made that, by raising rates in a way that's designed to profit from filesharing, the broadband providers are implicitly approving any copyright infringement that takes place... Perhaps the recent FCC decision could be construed as placing broadband outside the umbra of "common carrier" status? It would be a bittersweet thing to see the {MP,RI}AA take Big Broadband to court for profiting from copyright infringement...
IMHO, IBM makes some of the best mobile hardware out there -- one of the professors I support raves about his ThinkPad 600, that went with him into the Israeli desert for several months and is still running strong, no service required -- but the linux support for that hardware has been, um, erratic at best. Yes, we've been occasionally been able to purchase the odd model with linux preinstalled (usually it's *more* expensive than the comparable model with MicroSoft preinstalled, grr) but an awful lot of the hardware (mini-pci modems, &etc) is rather difficult to drive with a penguin behind the wheel. Why does IBM's linux enthusiasm fade so quickly at the small (physical) end of the hardware scale? Is there momentum underway to change this?
Two words: Jessica Rabbitt.
Hah. Tell that to the hot chyk that bought me a thinkgeekT-shirt for my birthday...
This ignores (and/or perpetuates) one of the biggest practical problems with the current system -- it is not possible to determine if copyright on a work has expired simply by looking at the work in question.
It used to be the case that copyrights were granted for a fixed period of time, and that in order for a work to be copyrighted, it had to have the copyright notice affixed. Said notice had to contain the year the work was produced and the titular holder of the copyright. Thus, by looking at the notice and applying simple arithmetic, you could tell instantly whether a work was in the public domain: "Hmm, this was copyrighted in 1950, copyright lasts for 50 years, so now it's in the public domain and I can copy it at will." [note purely hypothetical number.]
Even with the varying lengths of fixed copyright that came into being as a result of the various early extensions passed by congress, it was still relatively easy for the lay researcher to figure out whether something was freely copyable; all one had to do was consult a table that matched year of publication with the then-extant term of copyright. In other words, if in 1918 copyright was 28 years, and in 1939 congress passed an act that extended subsisting and future copyrights by 10 years, then in 1941 a work that had been published in 1918 would still be under copyright, but a work from 1916 would have ascended into the public domain in 1938.
But with things based on the life of the author, it's an absolute mess -- our would-be researcher has to start investigating death records, just to figure out whether it's OK to slap an essay on the photocopier. Have you ever tried to get official records for the date of someone's death? Even for people who've died recently it can be a royal farking pain. For an author who died many years ago, good effing luck!
Copyright terms should be standard lengths, one-size-fits-all regardless of when anyone dies, is born, gets incorporated, or achieves spotted purple enlightenment with bells on.
Blockpoth the quoster:
No. (Although using ".localdomain" doesn't suck as badly as naming your private network "slashdot.org" and assuming that your NATbox will prevent anyone from seeing this posturing..) In practice, using ".localdomain" probably won't break anything as a pseudo-TLD for an RFC 1918-conformant private IP space, presuming you're talking about a home network that's not going to have anything complex depending on absolutely strict, standards-compliant DNS behavior, but it's actually defined as a domain "having an A record pointing to the loop back IP address and is reserved for such use. Any other use would conflict with widely deployed code which assumes this use." I.e. for DNS purposes, the only .in-addr.arpa domain that should map into localdomain is 127.in-addr.arpa -- this is the class-A netblock for your loopback interface(s), which all have the form 127.#.#.#.
RFC 2606, "Reserved Top Level DNS Names", says that the TLD for a private network space should be one of the following:
- .example
- .test
- .invalid
(Note: there's no (technical) reason the TLD has to have three letters or less.)Hence my comment about 18 usc 1001 as a last resort. ("If nothing else[...]").
ISTR there is something actionable about statements that can be construed as legal advice, particularly when publicly made by an entity that a reasonable person would presume to have knowledge of the relevant area. I just couldn't dig it up in a ~2 minute search through the morass that is our federal code of laws.
Hmm. Well, if you had a reported $36b in the bank, I wonder if I couldn't find an eager-beaver lawyer who'd happily educate you on the legal niceties, in return for any settlement monies that might be extractable...
But since you're just a /. flamer with an apparently advanced case of cranial rectosis, I doubt you're worth pursuing.
To my non-lawyerly eyes, that looks a hell of a lot like legal advice that deliberately misstates the law. Isn't there some sort of sanction that can be brought against an entity that knowingly lies about the law? If nothing else, would a cause of action exist under 18 US 1001 (a) (3)?
I suspect IHBT, but.. Sheesh. I wish moderators could edit the mod tag text. Someone should give this a (-1, Blindingly Frickin' Obvious).
Blockpoth the quoster:
IANAL, but ISTR that legal documents are not copyrightable. (Can you imagine the licensing wrangles over citations? "The firm of Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe offers the text of its successful Supreme Court briefs for excerption at the Reprehensible And-yet-technically Non-Discriminatory licensing fee of $1000/word.")
Yeah, but you can ruin the barcode with a plain old pencil eraser. Try it. (Remember, you don't have to remove the whole code, just remove a complete vertical section. Extra points for
Blockpoth the quoster:
Israel might be able to tough it through the loss of American military aid. (Or did you think that the U.S. is the only nuclear nation covertly investigating the idea of small tacnukes?) However, the thing Israel cannot afford to lose is the U.S.'s unwavering veto on the UN Security Council. Absent that, UN sanctions would hit them hard and fast.
The story to which you refer is by Spider Robinson and actually won the 1983 Hugo; the title is Melancholy Elephants and it is available for free web perusal on tale.com (well, free as in reading the second half of the story requires you to load pages with ads, but they're banner ads not popups and realtively unobtrusive.)
Melancholy Elephants was also the eponymic of a book of short stories which contains other excellent material, including some "Callahan's Bar" shorts. Check around your local used book store. I highly recommend it.
Robinson is an interesting author. He's not long on "technical" science fiction, but IMHO he excels at exploring human interactions with extrapolations of scientific progress. (By which I mean that he doesn't spend much time trying to come up with a plausible physics for, say, FTL travel -- but his exploration of how working FTL might affect people's lives would be fascinating.)
With good reason, of course. Most of the media industry corps that were solidly behind the Mickey Mouse^W^WSonny Bonehead^H^H^H^H^Ho CTEA -- weren't actually (with perhaps a few minor exceptions) expecting to reap further monetary rewards on existing copyrighted works.
They realized that keeping works out of the public domain reduces competition for the "new" stuff that they're pushing. Despite the resounding proof of Sturgeon's Law inherent in every media subindustry's yearly output (in light of which one might be forgiven for considering Ted Sturgeon to be unreasonably optomistic) they still manage to sell what they shovel, because there's no alternative.