Among them is a complete and irrational fear of re-usable manned launch vehicles for Earth to LEO spaceflight.
The point of re-usability is cost savings (and the Space Shuttle was sold to the public on that basis). Does it really matter if parts are not re-usable if overall the launches are cheaper? People tend to naturally equate re-usability with cost effectiveness, as if it was a given, and I think that the Space Shuttle very clearly demonstrated that re-usable is not necessarily cheaper. There is something to be said for the sturdiness and robustness of Soyuz (even if it was achieved through trial and error with a few deaths involved). If anything, re-usability vastly complicated the Space Shuttle by introducing the variables (which occurs in all modern aircraft as well) of repeated stresses on the same vehicle and material fatigue that builds up over time necessitating frequent and laborious inspections to insure reliability over time.
I think the problem with the Shuttle program is that it should have been treated like an X-project with the intention to try a series of successively improved spacecraft that built on the predecessor and became better over time.
That, ironically, was one of the main problems of the Shuttle, it was an X-project. Continued operation of the vehicles and attendant accidents have proven that the Space Shuttle was and remains today an experimental vehicle. Even if they had treated the Space Shuttle as such throughout the program, instead of reliable reusable workhorse, modifications and upgrades would have been extremely difficult and costly due to the uniqueness and complexity of the shuttle design and launch profiles. The shuttle was and is inherently more complicated than a single multistage rocket and any vehicle based on the same platforms and concepts was destined to be in the same boat as the Space Shuttle; complex, costly, and difficult to fly and maintain.
I dare any major vehicle manufacturing company to be able to get away with something like that unless they are under a government contract.
The Space Shuttle program was definitely a government operation...oh yeah.
There should have been a Shuttle 2.0 program some time ago, and unfortunately neither the U.S. Presidents over the past 20 years, the NASA administrators, nor Congress have had the will to get something like that built.
The ongoing expense of the Space Shuttle combined with a general public apathy about how "routine" flights of the Space Shuttle were (punctuated by the occasional spectacular accident in which all hands were lost) contributed substantially to the reluctance of Congress to either increase funding for the development of a replacement or even to continue the Space Shuttle program as it was.
And instead we have Apollo 2.0... and a bad rev of that by engineers who weren't even born when the original was under development.
People hold Apollo in very high regard because of the lofty achievements (a man on the moon) and the brilliant save that was Apollo 13 (which burnished and reinforced the gung-ho can-do image of Americans, even under adverse conditions, at that time), but even the vaunted Apollo program had its glitches. I think that the engineers of today could do an adequate job on the Space Shuttle replacement, provided that they are permitted to chose what is best based upon the proposed requirements of the launch system without being forced to re-use the Space Shuttle components or into pre-conceived notions about what is cheaper or better.
We're already used to using two of them in tandem, and it occurs to me that the connector struts would be an easy place to add vibration-dampening bits. 'Zat make any sense?
Maybe, but exposed struts and shock absorbers don't sound very aerodynamic and what about the heavy lift version of the proposed Ares (the one that incorporates the shuttle main fuel tank)? Each modification brings more questions which require further modifications and so on...
Question: Is it possible to adapt the shuttle components to new vehicles as proposed by the Aries program?
Answer: Maybe
Question: Is it better or cheaper to adapt the shuttle components instead of starting with fresh or adapting another existing platform (Delta or Falcon for example) which more closely fits the Ares launch profiles?
Answer: Probably neither better nor, due to likely unforeseen needs for additional modifications as problems crop up, cheaper. The primary shuttle components were very specialized to the shuttle design so I don't think that the shock absorbers on the SRB will be the last of the kludges required to radically modify their mission profiles.
The shuttle program couldn't have taught them that.
They should have known from general solid rocket experience what the well known disadvantages of solid boosters are (i.e. vibrations due to imperfectly molded grains of fuel, high acceleration and force but little control over either...once you light it then it goes all out, etc) before going down that road with Ares. The shuttle designers almost certainly knew about the disadvantages of SRB, but they probably also knew that the disadvantages wouldn't come as much into play because the enormous mass of the shuttle would make a few more relatively minor (compared to the large mass of the shuttle) vibrations moot AND they needed the advantages (high thrust right away) because of the large shuttle mass. In short, the shuttle engineers almost certainly knew that flying the SRB as the first stage in a vehicle besides the shuttle probably wouldn't work (if you had been able to ask them back when they designed the shuttle), but they didn't care because they knew that it would work in the special circumstances of the shuttle (they were designing parts for the shuttle not for re-use in other vehicles decades later).
So, do you have any other evidence that they haven't learned their lessons from the shuttle program?
I am not a shuttle engineer, so I only know what they report in the press and on NASA or JPL public information websites. I strongly suspect that the answer to that question may be "yes" (or more precisely the engineers have learned the lessons, but are being asked by management to re-use the shuttle parts as much as possible for political reasons...it saves money (which is debatable) and it preserves jobs at existing shuttle parts assembly plants), but I cannot prove that of course. I believe that it would be better to make a clean break with the Shuttle, but I know that not everyone else feels that way.
But the final goal, for which Ares-1 is only the first step, is a much larger launch vehicle with a much greater mass, in which case the SRBs may very well be a logical choice.
Yes, but without the Ares-1, which is intended to launch the crew vehicles for Orion (among other things), the larger Ares is not much use (i.e. the Ares program is really a package deal, both versions have to work and work well for the program to be successful).
As stated above, copyright law has nothing to do with whether someone is successful.
Yes, we must guard against the prejudice that the wealthy are always wrong because of their wealth while the working guy is always right because he is working class (i.e. the working class hero myth).
And as the judge states, works like this lexicon are usually protected, except it just copies too much directly
And that is the rub here because the copyright laws are purposely ambiguous on how much is too much leaving the decision up to the judge on a case-by-case basis. The Lexicon people could try to appeal, but there is no guarantee that a different judge is going to feel any differently and probably they will be reluctant to reverse the initial ruling without a really good reason. That is part of the problem with Fair Use, it is potentially very expensive to prove that one's use is fair in court since it has to be proved in each and every specific case. It can cost a fortune, more than licensing the work potentially, to find out whether or not your use is fair.
Because, in the absence of such complaints, reusing the shuttle booster system is incredibly *smart*
It might seem that way at first glance, but remember that the parts of the shuttle were designed to work together when put together as the shuttle. For example, excess vibrations from the solid rocket boosters were negligible when attached to the large mass of the main fuel tank and the orbiter, but they become a problem when one attempts to perch a lighter vehicle in a top-heavy configuration on top of a single SRB. The shuttle designers never intended the SRB to be used in this way so they didn't add anything to the SRB to null out the excess vibrations, probably because they didn't need to in the context of the shuttle launch assembly. Now, there are proposals to add heavy counterweights or shock absorbers to the SRB to make it suitable for an Ares-1 launch as covered in a previous Slashdot article. I too once thought that this was not a big deal, but reading the threads in that article changed my mind.
While it is difficult to be certain in advance I feel that Ares program funding could have been better spent adapting either the Delta built by Boeing or the Falcon being built by Space-X to manned spaceflight standards rather than attempting to adapt shuttle SRBs. This has been done before when NASA adapted the Titan-II ICBM to carry astronauts during the Gemini program, but with just minor improvements (they used the Titan-II design basically intact from the ICBM profile) to improve safety and make it suitable for manned launches. The shuttle SRB, from the recent reports, seems to be less suitable to start out with and requires more extensive modifications to adapt it to the proposed new role in Ares-1.
As far as I know there have never been manned rockets which employ solid boosters exclusively for the first stage (making the Ares a more radical design then either the Delta or Falcon rockets). In fact the shuttle was the first manned space launch vehicle anywhere to use solid rockets during the launch phase for primary thrust (not counting capsule escape systems used by the Russians on Soyuz or the Americans on Apollo). Solid rockets are powerful and accelerate quickly, but they vibrate and generate very high G forces (from the accelerations involved) whereas liquid fueled rockets produce a smoother acceleration and power curve and can be throttled up or down (much more suitable when soft and squishy humans are riding atop them instead of warheads). The SRBs were appropriate on the Shuttle because of the huge liftoff masses and the need for extra power to get the whole thing moving from a stationary start (the proverbial kick in the pants) but they seem to be less so on the Ares-1.
The wikipedia article on the Shuttle solid rocket boosters discusses the proposed re-use of Shuttle components (segmented solid rockets with O-rings in this case) in the Ares program. The article itself has references to external sources where this re-use is discussed. The NASA press release also mentions the re-use:
"This vehicle will be carried into space by Ares I, which uses a single five-segment solid rocket booster, a derivative of the space shuttle's solid rocket booster, for the first stage."
While it just my opinion, a proposal to re-use substantial parts from the Shuttle program exactly or almost exactly the same as their current configuration does not strike me as "learning the lessons" (or at least not the right ones) from the Shuttle program.
interruptions aren't just acceptable, they're EXCITING! and FUN! - go forth and interrupt your friends!
One certainly gets that impression when watching those classic Mentos ads. Heck they could even have a new one where after getting into some random person's car they could drop a few Mentos in the driver's Coke before exiting the vehicle. Then the driver, now dripping with soda could turn and smile as the teenage brat flashes his remaining roll of Mentos to the camera before the scene fades to black.
I also played DAoC right up until the ill-fated Trials of Atlantis (TOA) expansion (Mythic made the mistake with TOA of tying PvP success directly to PvE and by the time they realized their mistake and done something to correct it they had lost too many players and now it is only about 50,000 or so really hard core PvP players left) and it really did have some great features and good ideas. For a while there back in 2001-2003 they really had the best game going in the MMORPG space.
WAR will be more successful if they can successfully differentiate themselves from WoW and Realm vs Realm (RvR) and PvP, which WoW has basically fumbled, is the best way that they can do that. I will probably give WAR a try not because I am huge Warhammer fan, but because I remember the good times in DAoC and hope that Mythic will get it right from the start this time (using the lessons that they learned from DAoC).
Although, personally I would have preferred a more open ended and generic MMORPG type game where pre-conceived storylines and areas (from the Warhammer world in this case) do not intrude upon the gameplay. It would be far more interesting to start with an original world, drawing upon classic fantasy elements but not completely out in left field (i.e. use classic fantasy gaming elements and memes established by LOTR, D&D, and other popular fantasy novels but in a new setting) and let the actions of the players actually build the world as the game progresses.
It is not always necessary to have a pre-existing brand tie-in and it can infact hurt more than it helps (by drawing in lots of Warhammer fanbois who are just playing because its Warhammer and not because they are really interested in a good MMORPG experience). Plus, the publishers (EA\Mythic in this case) have to pay licensing fees or cut in the creator for a share of the profits (Games Workshop in this case) for the use of their copyrights. It seems like every MMORPG is a brand tie-in these days (Star Wars, Warhammer, World of Warcraft, etc) and sometimes (most times? WoW being a notable exception) the brand tie-in actually hurts rather than helps the long term viability of the game.
They are just working out the kinks. The Russians did the exact same thing with their Soyuz program (with real people who met some unfortunate ends while the bugs were worked out) but now they have one of the most reliable launch programs in the world. SpaceX will get there while the Ares is still vibrating itself to pieces in virtual launch simulations.
At the time the space shuttle program was started (January 5, 1972) economists could not study the "launch industry" because the launch industry, as we know it, did not exist.
That is a good and valid point, but now that we can study what went wrong with the Shuttle and what we did well, there is really no excuse to make the same kinds of mistakes and mistaken assumptions with the Ares or any other subsequent launch program. We should learn the lessons, what to do and what NOT to do, that the Shuttle program has to teach instead of repeating the same steps and expecting different results.
If we must spend public money on a new multipurpose rocket (Ares) system to carry future payloads and capsules then why not fund the SpaceX guys, who at least have had some modicum of success thus far and are well on the way to building a reliable and quality launch vehicle, instead of pouring billions of dollars down the drain to build the Ares design which appears, due to political considerations, to be well on the road to suffering the same design setbacks (and the attendant expensive engineering efforts required to correct them) that beguiled the Shuttle program for many years. If NASA really wants to get the most bang for their buck in the space program then they ought to hire some economist(s) to help evaluate their spending and check claims of "this will save money" when in fact it will not. Projects like the Space Shuttle were interesting from an engineering standpoint but one of the main goals, save money with a re-usable vehicle and launch components, turned out to be a dud (and economists might have been able to tell them that by studying the launch industry and giving their advice before NASA just went ahead with the design).
So how much of the Lexicon would have to be verbatim from the original works to be considered infringement? 51%? Perhaps more or is it up to the judge to decide what constitutes a substantial copying without sufficient original elaboration or commentary? There was a case a while back (cannot remember court or case number) involving bloggers commenting on news articles in which the entire article was copied into the commentary and was ruled to be infringement because the judge decided that it was not necessary to copy the original work in its entirety in order to effectively comment or summarize on it.
I have also observed the propensity of coworkers to generate interruptions, via email or IM, in the office environment and have come to the conclusion that it is part of a larger breakdown and slow motion train-wreck that has been building for quite some time in society in general and that is manifest as the collision between increasingly effective communications tools and increasingly hyper-active, self-centered, and demanding consumer culture which makes people ruder, more selfish, and more inconsiderate than at any time in the past or at least more able to express their demands. They assume that whatever it is that they are working on is absolutely more important than anything else that you might be doing, particularly if they are not explicitly lower than you are in the corporate hierarchy, and so see absolutely nothing wrong with interrupting you at their pleasure. Naturally, because they expect and demand prompt replies (as if they were the customer and you were the vendor), they become extremely irritated and annoyed with your apparent lack of attentiveness when you do not respond instantly. I am not sure what the solution is, but I think that it must start with everyone learning to have some minimum level of respect for other people's time. Some things are important, but most things can wait most of the time (the boy who cried wolf comes to mind).
Well, I must confess that I am entirely ignorant of securities disclosure law requirements. Perhaps someone among us who knows a bit more can comment on how likely the investors are to get anything out of this? It was my understanding that investing, particularly in stocks, always entails risk in various forms, including incomplete public information. Did the board specifically make misleading statements at the shareholder meeting, for example, when they had insider knowledge of the flaws (i.e. what did they know and when did they know it)?
How about some LHC@Home?
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I remember seeing a program recently on the History Channel where they were explaining the science behind the LHC along with a tour of the facilities, the major experiments, interviews with the scientists, and (the interesting part for us Slashdot dwellers) the computer facilities. They mentioned that a tremendous amount of processing power with massive computer grids is required to analyze and filter the data from the detectors because there is not enough data storage presently in existence here on Earth to store more than one day's worth of collisions and detector data if they stored everything (i.e. they have to try and decide which collisions are the most interesting and only record those ones to the SAN). It seems that the more computing power they have available the more thorough they can be in their analysis of the data to fish out the interesting bits so I was wondering...How long might it be before we see a LHC@Home project like the Seti and protein folding where those of us who wish to can donate spare CPU cycles to analyze collision detector data can do so?
This seems to be another marginal use of the class action by attorneys looking for an easy payday while the rest of us all get cheques for $0.33 and graphics card prices go up by a couple of dollars to compensate (aka the lawyer tax). It is not as if ALL your data is going to be lost if your graphics card suddenly fails and unless you live out in the boondocks there is probably somewhere not too far away where you can get a replacement the same day. Unless nVidia refuses to replace fried cards or reimburse customers I really do not see the need for a class action lawsuit. Besides, are businessmen (who might want to sue for loss of business) likely to be using GeForce 8800 graphics cards in their workstations? Probably not. It is more likely that this is another example of the Lawyers Full Employment Act (with apologies to Mr. Beckerman and other honest attorneys) than a genuine issue of consumer redress.
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
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Quests
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people will find the most powerful ones and then choose them.
That is part of the fun, but if you have ever played a HERO System campaign then you know that the vast number of possibilities make min/maxing very difficult to do in practice. The great thing about point systems like HERO is that everything, even wildly different types of characters (i.e. the fire mage vs the cybernetic super soldier) balance very well for similar point values because they are all based upon the same underlying skill and power system.
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable?
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Quests
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One interesting angle that has not (to my knowledge anyway) been tried yet in MMORPGs would be to combine the extensive crafting and materials system(s) of the Mythic MMORPGs (Dark Age of Camelot and soon Warhammer Online) and the Neverwinter Nights games with the quest system with no preset limited number of 'recipies' (i.e. every potential combination can produce something, but it depends upon the skill of the crafter and the materials available). This would create a great deal more variety in high level equipment making the MMORPG game potentially much more interesting. At least people wouldn't all have the exact same gear which could contribute to helping individual players to feel a bit more unique. It would be even cooler to introduce something like the GURPS or even better the HERO System character building framework with completely customizable powers, advantages, disadvantages, and more point like builds. They could even take some combat points from Rolemaster so that concepts like 'level' matter less in absolute terms and are more relative (i.e. if the Derik the commoner gets really lucky on his attack roll then he can fell Thaargad the Mighty Orc Warlord in one shot with a broken bottle) and combat is more random and unpredictable. That would really open up the potential for combination type character builds at the risk of possibly affecting balance, but really what would you rather have: A game with tons of possible and varied combinations, all with advantages, disadvantages, and variations, or a perfectly balanced game with only a couple of choices where everyone is pigeon holed into one of a very small set of "choices"?
I sincerely hope that some brave soul among those who filed counter-notices follows through and burns American Rights LLC, the lawyers behind it, and CoS to the ground for this flagrant and utterly abusive use of the DMCA under false pretenses and with complete lack of respect for the law or the legal system in general. There needs to be more sanctions for lawyers who participate in these types of farces whether they work for the MAFIAA, CoS, or any other organization which debases the law for their own narrow-minded, petty, and dishonest gain.
I commend your efforts, truly I do, but are you not concerned about your personal physical safety? The CoS is notorious for its extra and quasi-legal harassment campaigns up to and including physical violence against their opponents. You are brave indeed to take them on publicly.
I really hope that EFF gets involved on this one (it really is right up their alley after all...it is about free speech and it is online), perhaps in founding the class and leading the charge. I have donated money to the EFF for several years now and I would encourage everyone here who has not already done so to please consider giving something if you can. The EFF is in many ways the last and best defense of the anonymous masses against the abuses of the organized and powerful interests who are lined up against our freedom of speech, fair use, right to reverse engineer, and the public domain.
that the complainer is authorized to act on, the complainer might have answer for perjury.
Hence the reason why the complainer in this case was American Rights Counsel LLC, an incorporated entity that probably nobody has ever heard from before now (because they were formed to shield CoS from direct exposure to liability) and probably never will again if they get hit with perjury charges that stick, and NOT the CoS or that RTC that holds all of their patents and copyrights. Remember that LRH himself said that the purpose of legal action was to harass and NOT primarily to win (practically the definition of abuse of the legal system and bad faith).
Double standards in laws violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and equal protection cases have a very rich history of being given sympathetic hearings by Federal appeals courts and even the Supreme Court because equal protection and equal justice are the foundations of lawful society. Without those protections we are no better than any other two-bit dictatorship or oligarchy of the rich and powerful.
The DMCA has turned out to be quite a bugbear and frequently abused in the years since its passage and there is huge interest on all sides in either validating or striking down some or all of the law in the Supreme Court or preventing it from getting there and establishing troublesome precedents. The point is that any DMCA case with interesting questions is likely to attract a lot of briefs and third party attention and be taken as far as possible by people with strong interests in the outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Among them is a complete and irrational fear of re-usable manned launch vehicles for Earth to LEO spaceflight.
The point of re-usability is cost savings (and the Space Shuttle was sold to the public on that basis). Does it really matter if parts are not re-usable if overall the launches are cheaper? People tend to naturally equate re-usability with cost effectiveness, as if it was a given, and I think that the Space Shuttle very clearly demonstrated that re-usable is not necessarily cheaper. There is something to be said for the sturdiness and robustness of Soyuz (even if it was achieved through trial and error with a few deaths involved). If anything, re-usability vastly complicated the Space Shuttle by introducing the variables (which occurs in all modern aircraft as well) of repeated stresses on the same vehicle and material fatigue that builds up over time necessitating frequent and laborious inspections to insure reliability over time.
I think the problem with the Shuttle program is that it should have been treated like an X-project with the intention to try a series of successively improved spacecraft that built on the predecessor and became better over time.
That, ironically, was one of the main problems of the Shuttle, it was an X-project. Continued operation of the vehicles and attendant accidents have proven that the Space Shuttle was and remains today an experimental vehicle. Even if they had treated the Space Shuttle as such throughout the program, instead of reliable reusable workhorse, modifications and upgrades would have been extremely difficult and costly due to the uniqueness and complexity of the shuttle design and launch profiles. The shuttle was and is inherently more complicated than a single multistage rocket and any vehicle based on the same platforms and concepts was destined to be in the same boat as the Space Shuttle; complex, costly, and difficult to fly and maintain.
I dare any major vehicle manufacturing company to be able to get away with something like that unless they are under a government contract.
The Space Shuttle program was definitely a government operation...oh yeah.
There should have been a Shuttle 2.0 program some time ago, and unfortunately neither the U.S. Presidents over the past 20 years, the NASA administrators, nor Congress have had the will to get something like that built.
The ongoing expense of the Space Shuttle combined with a general public apathy about how "routine" flights of the Space Shuttle were (punctuated by the occasional spectacular accident in which all hands were lost) contributed substantially to the reluctance of Congress to either increase funding for the development of a replacement or even to continue the Space Shuttle program as it was.
And instead we have Apollo 2.0... and a bad rev of that by engineers who weren't even born when the original was under development.
People hold Apollo in very high regard because of the lofty achievements (a man on the moon) and the brilliant save that was Apollo 13 (which burnished and reinforced the gung-ho can-do image of Americans, even under adverse conditions, at that time), but even the vaunted Apollo program had its glitches. I think that the engineers of today could do an adequate job on the Space Shuttle replacement, provided that they are permitted to chose what is best based upon the proposed requirements of the launch system without being forced to re-use the Space Shuttle components or into pre-conceived notions about what is cheaper or better.
We're already used to using two of them in tandem, and it occurs to me that the connector struts would be an easy place to add vibration-dampening bits. 'Zat make any sense?
Maybe, but exposed struts and shock absorbers don't sound very aerodynamic and what about the heavy lift version of the proposed Ares (the one that incorporates the shuttle main fuel tank)? Each modification brings more questions which require further modifications and so on...
Let me summarize my thoughts before I respond:
Question: Is it possible to adapt the shuttle components to new vehicles as proposed by the Aries program?
Answer: Maybe
Question: Is it better or cheaper to adapt the shuttle components instead of starting with fresh or adapting another existing platform (Delta or Falcon for example) which more closely fits the Ares launch profiles?
Answer: Probably neither better nor, due to likely unforeseen needs for additional modifications as problems crop up, cheaper. The primary shuttle components were very specialized to the shuttle design so I don't think that the shock absorbers on the SRB will be the last of the kludges required to radically modify their mission profiles.
The shuttle program couldn't have taught them that.
They should have known from general solid rocket experience what the well known disadvantages of solid boosters are (i.e. vibrations due to imperfectly molded grains of fuel, high acceleration and force but little control over either...once you light it then it goes all out, etc) before going down that road with Ares. The shuttle designers almost certainly knew about the disadvantages of SRB, but they probably also knew that the disadvantages wouldn't come as much into play because the enormous mass of the shuttle would make a few more relatively minor (compared to the large mass of the shuttle) vibrations moot AND they needed the advantages (high thrust right away) because of the large shuttle mass. In short, the shuttle engineers almost certainly knew that flying the SRB as the first stage in a vehicle besides the shuttle probably wouldn't work (if you had been able to ask them back when they designed the shuttle), but they didn't care because they knew that it would work in the special circumstances of the shuttle (they were designing parts for the shuttle not for re-use in other vehicles decades later).
So, do you have any other evidence that they haven't learned their lessons from the shuttle program?
I am not a shuttle engineer, so I only know what they report in the press and on NASA or JPL public information websites. I strongly suspect that the answer to that question may be "yes" (or more precisely the engineers have learned the lessons, but are being asked by management to re-use the shuttle parts as much as possible for political reasons...it saves money (which is debatable) and it preserves jobs at existing shuttle parts assembly plants), but I cannot prove that of course. I believe that it would be better to make a clean break with the Shuttle, but I know that not everyone else feels that way.
But the final goal, for which Ares-1 is only the first step, is a much larger launch vehicle with a much greater mass, in which case the SRBs may very well be a logical choice.
Yes, but without the Ares-1, which is intended to launch the crew vehicles for Orion (among other things), the larger Ares is not much use (i.e. the Ares program is really a package deal, both versions have to work and work well for the program to be successful).
As stated above, copyright law has nothing to do with whether someone is successful.
Yes, we must guard against the prejudice that the wealthy are always wrong because of their wealth while the working guy is always right because he is working class (i.e. the working class hero myth).
And as the judge states, works like this lexicon are usually protected, except it just copies too much directly
And that is the rub here because the copyright laws are purposely ambiguous on how much is too much leaving the decision up to the judge on a case-by-case basis. The Lexicon people could try to appeal, but there is no guarantee that a different judge is going to feel any differently and probably they will be reluctant to reverse the initial ruling without a really good reason. That is part of the problem with Fair Use, it is potentially very expensive to prove that one's use is fair in court since it has to be proved in each and every specific case. It can cost a fortune, more than licensing the work potentially, to find out whether or not your use is fair.
Because, in the absence of such complaints, reusing the shuttle booster system is incredibly *smart*
It might seem that way at first glance, but remember that the parts of the shuttle were designed to work together when put together as the shuttle. For example, excess vibrations from the solid rocket boosters were negligible when attached to the large mass of the main fuel tank and the orbiter, but they become a problem when one attempts to perch a lighter vehicle in a top-heavy configuration on top of a single SRB. The shuttle designers never intended the SRB to be used in this way so they didn't add anything to the SRB to null out the excess vibrations, probably because they didn't need to in the context of the shuttle launch assembly. Now, there are proposals to add heavy counterweights or shock absorbers to the SRB to make it suitable for an Ares-1 launch as covered in a previous Slashdot article. I too once thought that this was not a big deal, but reading the threads in that article changed my mind.
While it is difficult to be certain in advance I feel that Ares program funding could have been better spent adapting either the Delta built by Boeing or the Falcon being built by Space-X to manned spaceflight standards rather than attempting to adapt shuttle SRBs. This has been done before when NASA adapted the Titan-II ICBM to carry astronauts during the Gemini program, but with just minor improvements (they used the Titan-II design basically intact from the ICBM profile) to improve safety and make it suitable for manned launches. The shuttle SRB, from the recent reports, seems to be less suitable to start out with and requires more extensive modifications to adapt it to the proposed new role in Ares-1.
As far as I know there have never been manned rockets which employ solid boosters exclusively for the first stage (making the Ares a more radical design then either the Delta or Falcon rockets). In fact the shuttle was the first manned space launch vehicle anywhere to use solid rockets during the launch phase for primary thrust (not counting capsule escape systems used by the Russians on Soyuz or the Americans on Apollo). Solid rockets are powerful and accelerate quickly, but they vibrate and generate very high G forces (from the accelerations involved) whereas liquid fueled rockets produce a smoother acceleration and power curve and can be throttled up or down (much more suitable when soft and squishy humans are riding atop them instead of warheads). The SRBs were appropriate on the Shuttle because of the huge liftoff masses and the need for extra power to get the whole thing moving from a stationary start (the proverbial kick in the pants) but they seem to be less so on the Ares-1.
The wikipedia article on the Shuttle solid rocket boosters discusses the proposed re-use of Shuttle components (segmented solid rockets with O-rings in this case) in the Ares program. The article itself has references to external sources where this re-use is discussed. The NASA press release also mentions the re-use:
"This vehicle will be carried into space by Ares I, which uses a single five-segment solid rocket booster, a derivative of the space shuttle's solid rocket booster, for the first stage."
While it just my opinion, a proposal to re-use substantial parts from the Shuttle program exactly or almost exactly the same as their current configuration does not strike me as "learning the lessons" (or at least not the right ones) from the Shuttle program.
interruptions aren't just acceptable, they're EXCITING! and FUN! - go forth and interrupt your friends!
One certainly gets that impression when watching those classic Mentos ads. Heck they could even have a new one where after getting into some random person's car they could drop a few Mentos in the driver's Coke before exiting the vehicle. Then the driver, now dripping with soda could turn and smile as the teenage brat flashes his remaining roll of Mentos to the camera before the scene fades to black.
Please MOD the parent up.
I also played DAoC right up until the ill-fated Trials of Atlantis (TOA) expansion (Mythic made the mistake with TOA of tying PvP success directly to PvE and by the time they realized their mistake and done something to correct it they had lost too many players and now it is only about 50,000 or so really hard core PvP players left) and it really did have some great features and good ideas. For a while there back in 2001-2003 they really had the best game going in the MMORPG space.
WAR will be more successful if they can successfully differentiate themselves from WoW and Realm vs Realm (RvR) and PvP, which WoW has basically fumbled, is the best way that they can do that. I will probably give WAR a try not because I am huge Warhammer fan, but because I remember the good times in DAoC and hope that Mythic will get it right from the start this time (using the lessons that they learned from DAoC).
Although, personally I would have preferred a more open ended and generic MMORPG type game where pre-conceived storylines and areas (from the Warhammer world in this case) do not intrude upon the gameplay. It would be far more interesting to start with an original world, drawing upon classic fantasy elements but not completely out in left field (i.e. use classic fantasy gaming elements and memes established by LOTR, D&D, and other popular fantasy novels but in a new setting) and let the actions of the players actually build the world as the game progresses.
It is not always necessary to have a pre-existing brand tie-in and it can infact hurt more than it helps (by drawing in lots of Warhammer fanbois who are just playing because its Warhammer and not because they are really interested in a good MMORPG experience). Plus, the publishers (EA\Mythic in this case) have to pay licensing fees or cut in the creator for a share of the profits (Games Workshop in this case) for the use of their copyrights. It seems like every MMORPG is a brand tie-in these days (Star Wars, Warhammer, World of Warcraft, etc) and sometimes (most times? WoW being a notable exception) the brand tie-in actually hurts rather than helps the long term viability of the game.
They are just working out the kinks. The Russians did the exact same thing with their Soyuz program (with real people who met some unfortunate ends while the bugs were worked out) but now they have one of the most reliable launch programs in the world. SpaceX will get there while the Ares is still vibrating itself to pieces in virtual launch simulations.
At the time the space shuttle program was started (January 5, 1972) economists could not study the "launch industry" because the launch industry, as we know it, did not exist.
That is a good and valid point, but now that we can study what went wrong with the Shuttle and what we did well, there is really no excuse to make the same kinds of mistakes and mistaken assumptions with the Ares or any other subsequent launch program. We should learn the lessons, what to do and what NOT to do, that the Shuttle program has to teach instead of repeating the same steps and expecting different results.
Please pay attention, because this is very important: economist IS NOT EQUAL TO accountant
If we must spend public money on a new multipurpose rocket (Ares) system to carry future payloads and capsules then why not fund the SpaceX guys, who at least have had some modicum of success thus far and are well on the way to building a reliable and quality launch vehicle, instead of pouring billions of dollars down the drain to build the Ares design which appears, due to political considerations, to be well on the road to suffering the same design setbacks (and the attendant expensive engineering efforts required to correct them) that beguiled the Shuttle program for many years. If NASA really wants to get the most bang for their buck in the space program then they ought to hire some economist(s) to help evaluate their spending and check claims of "this will save money" when in fact it will not. Projects like the Space Shuttle were interesting from an engineering standpoint but one of the main goals, save money with a re-usable vehicle and launch components, turned out to be a dud (and economists might have been able to tell them that by studying the launch industry and giving their advice before NASA just went ahead with the design).
So how much of the Lexicon would have to be verbatim from the original works to be considered infringement? 51%? Perhaps more or is it up to the judge to decide what constitutes a substantial copying without sufficient original elaboration or commentary? There was a case a while back (cannot remember court or case number) involving bloggers commenting on news articles in which the entire article was copied into the commentary and was ruled to be infringement because the judge decided that it was not necessary to copy the original work in its entirety in order to effectively comment or summarize on it.
I have also observed the propensity of coworkers to generate interruptions, via email or IM, in the office environment and have come to the conclusion that it is part of a larger breakdown and slow motion train-wreck that has been building for quite some time in society in general and that is manifest as the collision between increasingly effective communications tools and increasingly hyper-active, self-centered, and demanding consumer culture which makes people ruder, more selfish, and more inconsiderate than at any time in the past or at least more able to express their demands. They assume that whatever it is that they are working on is absolutely more important than anything else that you might be doing, particularly if they are not explicitly lower than you are in the corporate hierarchy, and so see absolutely nothing wrong with interrupting you at their pleasure. Naturally, because they expect and demand prompt replies (as if they were the customer and you were the vendor), they become extremely irritated and annoyed with your apparent lack of attentiveness when you do not respond instantly. I am not sure what the solution is, but I think that it must start with everyone learning to have some minimum level of respect for other people's time. Some things are important, but most things can wait most of the time (the boy who cried wolf comes to mind).
Well, I must confess that I am entirely ignorant of securities disclosure law requirements. Perhaps someone among us who knows a bit more can comment on how likely the investors are to get anything out of this? It was my understanding that investing, particularly in stocks, always entails risk in various forms, including incomplete public information. Did the board specifically make misleading statements at the shareholder meeting, for example, when they had insider knowledge of the flaws (i.e. what did they know and when did they know it)?
I remember seeing a program recently on the History Channel where they were explaining the science behind the LHC along with a tour of the facilities, the major experiments, interviews with the scientists, and (the interesting part for us Slashdot dwellers) the computer facilities. They mentioned that a tremendous amount of processing power with massive computer grids is required to analyze and filter the data from the detectors because there is not enough data storage presently in existence here on Earth to store more than one day's worth of collisions and detector data if they stored everything (i.e. they have to try and decide which collisions are the most interesting and only record those ones to the SAN). It seems that the more computing power they have available the more thorough they can be in their analysis of the data to fish out the interesting bits so I was wondering...How long might it be before we see a LHC@Home project like the Seti and protein folding where those of us who wish to can donate spare CPU cycles to analyze collision detector data can do so?
This seems to be another marginal use of the class action by attorneys looking for an easy payday while the rest of us all get cheques for $0.33 and graphics card prices go up by a couple of dollars to compensate (aka the lawyer tax). It is not as if ALL your data is going to be lost if your graphics card suddenly fails and unless you live out in the boondocks there is probably somewhere not too far away where you can get a replacement the same day. Unless nVidia refuses to replace fried cards or reimburse customers I really do not see the need for a class action lawsuit. Besides, are businessmen (who might want to sue for loss of business) likely to be using GeForce 8800 graphics cards in their workstations? Probably not. It is more likely that this is another example of the Lawyers Full Employment Act (with apologies to Mr. Beckerman and other honest attorneys) than a genuine issue of consumer redress.
people will find the most powerful ones and then choose them.
That is part of the fun, but if you have ever played a HERO System campaign then you know that the vast number of possibilities make min/maxing very difficult to do in practice. The great thing about point systems like HERO is that everything, even wildly different types of characters (i.e. the fire mage vs the cybernetic super soldier) balance very well for similar point values because they are all based upon the same underlying skill and power system.
One interesting angle that has not (to my knowledge anyway) been tried yet in MMORPGs would be to combine the extensive crafting and materials system(s) of the Mythic MMORPGs (Dark Age of Camelot and soon Warhammer Online) and the Neverwinter Nights games with the quest system with no preset limited number of 'recipies' (i.e. every potential combination can produce something, but it depends upon the skill of the crafter and the materials available). This would create a great deal more variety in high level equipment making the MMORPG game potentially much more interesting. At least people wouldn't all have the exact same gear which could contribute to helping individual players to feel a bit more unique. It would be even cooler to introduce something like the GURPS or even better the HERO System character building framework with completely customizable powers, advantages, disadvantages, and more point like builds. They could even take some combat points from Rolemaster so that concepts like 'level' matter less in absolute terms and are more relative (i.e. if the Derik the commoner gets really lucky on his attack roll then he can fell Thaargad the Mighty Orc Warlord in one shot with a broken bottle) and combat is more random and unpredictable. That would really open up the potential for combination type character builds at the risk of possibly affecting balance, but really what would you rather have: A game with tons of possible and varied combinations, all with advantages, disadvantages, and variations, or a perfectly balanced game with only a couple of choices where everyone is pigeon holed into one of a very small set of "choices"?
I sincerely hope that some brave soul among those who filed counter-notices follows through and burns American Rights LLC, the lawyers behind it, and CoS to the ground for this flagrant and utterly abusive use of the DMCA under false pretenses and with complete lack of respect for the law or the legal system in general. There needs to be more sanctions for lawyers who participate in these types of farces whether they work for the MAFIAA, CoS, or any other organization which debases the law for their own narrow-minded, petty, and dishonest gain.
the cult of google might unfortunately be less of a joke than it should be.
It would not be the first time that CoS has infiltrated and attempted to control or undermine organizations perceived by them as enemies.
I commend your efforts, truly I do, but are you not concerned about your personal physical safety? The CoS is notorious for its extra and quasi-legal harassment campaigns up to and including physical violence against their opponents. You are brave indeed to take them on publicly.
I really hope that EFF gets involved on this one (it really is right up their alley after all...it is about free speech and it is online), perhaps in founding the class and leading the charge. I have donated money to the EFF for several years now and I would encourage everyone here who has not already done so to please consider giving something if you can. The EFF is in many ways the last and best defense of the anonymous masses against the abuses of the organized and powerful interests who are lined up against our freedom of speech, fair use, right to reverse engineer, and the public domain.
that the complainer is authorized to act on, the complainer might have answer for perjury.
Hence the reason why the complainer in this case was American Rights Counsel LLC, an incorporated entity that probably nobody has ever heard from before now (because they were formed to shield CoS from direct exposure to liability) and probably never will again if they get hit with perjury charges that stick, and NOT the CoS or that RTC that holds all of their patents and copyrights. Remember that LRH himself said that the purpose of legal action was to harass and NOT primarily to win (practically the definition of abuse of the legal system and bad faith).
This double standard isn't by accident.
Double standards in laws violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and equal protection cases have a very rich history of being given sympathetic hearings by Federal appeals courts and even the Supreme Court because equal protection and equal justice are the foundations of lawful society. Without those protections we are no better than any other two-bit dictatorship or oligarchy of the rich and powerful.
The DMCA has turned out to be quite a bugbear and frequently abused in the years since its passage and there is huge interest on all sides in either validating or striking down some or all of the law in the Supreme Court or preventing it from getting there and establishing troublesome precedents. The point is that any DMCA case with interesting questions is likely to attract a lot of briefs and third party attention and be taken as far as possible by people with strong interests in the outcome.