Why would they poke the T-Rex that is IBM with a stick, unless they think they can bring it down?
Because judges and juries are often technically ignorant - and for every expert that can be hired to say one thing to sway them there's another expert that can be hired to say the other. They likely believe that IBM will find it easier to buy them or settle for a large fee out of court - indeed it may be easier in the short term immedidate cash department - but IBM didn't get to be the gorilla by taking the easy route - they are just as likely to draw the line and say prove it knowing they can outlast the suit. Having the suit eventually thrown out would be the better long term solution for IBM because of their Linux focus. Once SCO is no mo, IBM can buy whatever pieces of it they want for a song.
A privately held company, if their corporate council had an ounce of brains in preparing the legal agreements that allowed them to sell equity, does have the option to demand the return of shares at a fair market value if the holder of those shares is taking actions the company believes is not in its own best interests. To do otherwise is the insane action - just as they had the choice of deciding who those shareholders were in the first place.
Canopy is taking an action that irritates, and if they are legally successful, will damange the ability for Linux to advance. Every company that is involved with Linux in any fashion needs to recognize this and assess the impact to themselves. Those companies that are involved with Canopy in some fashion are the ones that will be especially sensitive to any damage this suit may do, as their other shareholders realize that this suit poisions the well their customers visit. NO CUSTOMERS MEANS NO COMPANY.
Don't believe me - talk to your corporate counsel.
Canopy owns 5.8% of Trolltech. You're going to attack the other 94.2% of Trolltech shareholders because of an unrelated business's actions happens to have as an investor someone that owns 5.8% of their company?
This is exactly how it is done. Trolltech needs to understand the discomfort that their customers are experiencing due to the actions of one of their shareholders. Trolltech then has the option to 1)ignore it and hope for the best, 2)encourage their shareholder to behave differently, 3)take a stand and buy their shareholder out. If they choose to ignore it, then they have chosen to accept the loss of goodwill, and whatever future financial penalty that entails.
most posters seemed to be arguing that/. should not be liable for/. effect-related charges... Yet when it comes to spam, most posters here are prepared to swing the heaviest hammer they can find
The slashdot effect is short term and exists because the end-users took an interest in what you presented to the world - if you are unprepared for the populairty of what you've presented that is not the world's fault - find and implement some way to limit the admission, and be happy that what you did had an impact.
But, spam irritates forever and only continues to exist because the middlemen have an interest in presenting the material - the end-users have no interest.
Usenet exists because it links multiple smaller networks. If Usenet is to have any value then the middlemen need to react to the end users complaints. Fortunately the UDP works because there is a hierarchal structure - all big ISPs are equal in their vote and all have an interest in their end-users - those big ISPs that don't have that interest because they have been compromised by the soft-money of spammers are cut off from the network and suffer in the only manner they recognize - financially.
There are also consequences to non-action. History is full of examples. Just because some particular decison is unpleasant to consider doesn't mean the alternative is better.
f anybody else would provide better service, why should you want Google still have any lead if it becomes an inferior technology then?
It depends on how you define better. Do you mean more rapidly relevant? If so, then at what "cost"? Google nearly always provides the link I need within a few pages, and the majority of time on the first page. And they do it in a manner quite lacking in other search engines (and web sites in general) - they do so quickly, quietly, and politely.
given how trigger-happy the US is, the last thing the rest of the world wants is large amounts of nuclear power available to the US military from space.
Trigger happy? Exactly who would you trust then with large amounts of nuclear power in space? The US has had nuclear ability for five decades - the sole use in a military fashion was during a world war. Maybe we could entrust the North Koreans with it? Afterall, they are only suspected of having enough for a dirty bomb or two and they are already threatening "total war".
Who would be able to defend against some rogue outfit taking over the nuclear material other than the US? The ex-Soviet Union, with their Enron-quality nuclear bookkeeping? The French, suspected of providing nuclear plans to Saddam Insane?
I know - give it to the EU. The beauracracy involved would prevent anyone from ever making trouble with it - or ever doing anything worthwhile with it either.
it seems to me that finding an epoxy strong enough to hold on to the fibers would require finding a substance with nearly as much strength as the fibers themselves. Otherwise, the epoxy will fail when the load becomes great, and the fibers will just slip out. A strong rope does you no good if you can't hold onto it! Though perhaps there's something about epoxying materials from fibers that I don't understand. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
I think Bueller's out sick today (I always loved the car in that movie).
In composites, specifically carbon-fiber reinforcing an epoxy binder, the load bearing is handled by the fiber, which must exist in sufficient quantity (>10%) that it supports itself at most points, and the binder (the matrix, often epoxy) is used to hold it together. There is an advantage over a solid material in that a flaw in a fiber is limited to just that fiber, especially as the fibers can be woven in particular orientations for increased strength. The matrix is a less critical component in the material when it is used where fibers excell - when put in tension (a'la a cable). When failure occurs, it will almost always be a debonding between the fiber and the matrix - however this debonding doesn't usually occur until the fiber itself breaks, because the matrix is very elastic - the fibers tend to wrap around themselves at sufficient points to provide the tensional strength and the epoxy is "just there".
But when it does fail, it's usually more sudden than in a metal, for example. But there's no metals strong enough (yet) to build this thing. Maybe metallic hydrogen will work, but we can't do that yet.
The strength required can certainly be calculated and the production tested before it's taken aloft. There'd be a great view on the ride up for sure.
Do you know that the shuttle could carry an extra thousand pounds of cargo if it kept its external tank with it until it reached orbit instead of discarding it to fall into the Indian Ocean, blown apart by built-in explosives?
You wanna rethink that statement? The external tank is dead-weight after the fuel is used. Getting rid of it allows the remainder to require less thrust to lift - i.e. more cargo.
I hate to burst your "bubble," but from the standpoint of aerodynamics, air behaves as an incompressible fluid until you get close to the speed of sound.
Ah, no. Air is compressible until approaching the speed of sound - which is why the speed of sound is what it is. That's also why there is a "shock wave" - since the air is not able to get out of its own way, and is also why it was originally believed that one couldn't travel faster than sound (though it was obvious that there were objects doing so, such as meteors, etc.). Approaching the speed of sound the induced drag rises rapidly - flying through that speed and continuing supersonic required gaining an understanding of how to reduce that drag (the "Coke bottle" shape of some aircraft designed during the 50's was one technique), and also gaining an understanding that the lift characteristics and center-of-lift point would shift - attention to design insured that this point did not deviate farther from the center-of-gravity than the flight control abilities of the time (i.e. - the pilot) could reasonably handle - think about the moment arm becoming greater as the difference between those two points increases. Also, it got much easier as we learned to build engines that could provide greater thrust.
I happen to know the owner of US Subs. One of the neater projects he's involved in is the development of an underwater resort hotel. There will be multiple transparent acrylic suites that are designed in a way to provide privacy from each other biut allow unobstructed viewing of the coral reefs wherever it is placed. It's a very neat project, not requiring a tremendous amount of investment money, and he has some knowledgeable advisors involved. You can find a small amount of public info at
Underwater Hotel.
Many a motorcyclist will disagree. The breaking control possible with a hand far exceeds the control possible with ones foot.
That's because the hand-lever-operated brake on a motorcycle actuates the front brake and the foot-pedal-operated brake operates the rear brake. There is significantly more stopping ability in the front brake of a motorcyle because the weight shift when braking lifts the rear wheel slightly.
Optimally, one brakes on a motorcycle by using the large majority (90%?) of the work with the front brakes and a very small amount with the rear brake - I believe the latest BMW motorcycles have auto-coupled the braking system to do that for you.
Dogs can hear the resulting 31.5kHz scan frequency, and while humans can't, I guess in some rare cases, the ultrasonic noise causes headaches.
It depends on how we define the word hear - some people can detect such frequencies but not with any ability to discern any information that might be in the modulaiton at that carrier freq. I (and my son) have difficulty with such high-frequency sounds - it's even painful sometimes. The cash registers they used in Sears some years ago would drive me batty - in fact I haven't been to a Sears store in years now that I think about it and that's probably why. I have the same problem walking by jewelry stores using ultrasonic cleaners. The sound isn't so much as heard in the ears but is picked up directly by the small bones in the ear - at least that's what it "feels" like to me. CRTs give me the same problems. I don't have any difficulty with LCD screens that I've noticed, though I do tend to hear some kind of leakage from the cheap memory in my laptop, but I don't think that's as unusual.
Sensitivity to high frequencies is not something most companies bother to care about engineering for. I appreciate and purchase products from those companies that do seem to do a good job (such as my Thinkpad).
he [McCain] has integrity, but his beliefs are not those of the republican base
No - and the majority of people in this country are believers in neither what the Republican nor the Democratic party stands for - look at the voting record over the last few decades. Fewer and fewer people vote because most of the time they feel they are having to choose "the evil of two lessers".
When the military of Bush Sr was handed off to Clinton it was at least twice the strength it is now, and three times it in some areas. The USAF had 35 fighter wings in '91 - now it has 20 - and lest you think that is bad enough, the number of aircraft that make up a wing has been reduced in many places, so we may have 20 wings, but there's even less aircraft than that number alludes to.
The US Army can only field 1/3 of the tank and cavalry units it did during Desert Storm. Their manning is even harder hit than the USAF.
The US Navy had 180 ships decommissioned under the Clinton years, and is hurting for experienced aviators worse than any other service - do you think a fighter pilot with 10 years of experience is grown overnight? Duh - it takes 10 years - and he needs quality equipment and flight time.
Where do you think that false sense of a good economy came from anyway other than the encouragement for Americans to reduce their savings to the lowest points in history and the great reductions in military spending?
Go look at the reduction in intelligence gathering and assesment capabilities if you really want to get angry at the harm done to the US under the Clinton administration. There's 3000 people that were murdered on US soil that might be alive today if we'd kept our guard up.
We will go to war with what we've got - you don't build a military capability overnight. The only hope now is that the forces we have, which are being run ragged to prepare for the coming engagements (and that's just the planned ones - we'll have to worry about N. Korea some other time) will be sufficient to the task.
I think the solution might be to modify the nullplugin that comes with Mozilla.
What I believe would work well is to build a wrapper for the plugin. This wrapper would add several non-blaockable right-click options to the animation. One option would be to not load this specific animation again. The other option would be to not load animations from a particular domain again (perhaps a third option restricting it to a particular machine at a domain is needed too). The result would be that on initial visits to annoying, but frequented for other valuable reasons, sites, a little right-click work would need to be done.
Hmm, fourth and fifth options could be to not download any animations from third parties, and to not download any flash animations at all when visiting a particular website.
MS is interested in making money. They make money on thier Mac units. Why would they take a product that is making money and destroy it?
You had the beginning of an answer to your own question. What product has Ballmer acknowledged as his greatest threat? Since actually buying Linux and other open source is not possible, and actually outlawing it is difficult, even while discouraging its use with policy makers, then the way to protect his revenue stream is to bring under Microsoft control those packages that are not presently open source yet are widely deployed. Macromedia's products are a good start - Adobe's would be a reasonable next step - there's probably a handful of other "outside the OS" products that others can also think of.
Once owned it can be "extended" for incompatibility - perhaps making ActiveX an integral part of it while announcing the "rich multimedia capabilities now offered" as an example. Imagine the marketing effort that could be put behind "read your PDF documents with embedded WMV and Flash".
Look at the amount of effort it's taken for the Samba team to build and try to stay up with the continuous undocumented changes to the SMB protocol that Microsoft put out constantly. Such a tremendous effort is not trivial, and "costs" the open source community by tying up resources. Well placed money, such as in India, or outright purchase, in areas that are slightly removed from the Windows OS but are used by most of its customers will pay off for Microsoft. Do you think they developed and give away IE for the fun of it? Do they give away the necessary information to make it easy to use something other than Windows Media Viewer? Office? Exchange? Any place they can spend a relatively small amount of money to encourage staying with their own core platform, and to make it harder for the competition to operate, they will. They have to - as open source products gain more market share the risk disproportionally increases for Microsoft - losing entire organizations to open source products means there is an ever growing threat to their revenue stream.
Re:ABOVE commercial traffic?
on
Wi-Fi From The Sky
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If cell phones were really dangerous in ANY way to an airplane in flight, do you think they'd be allowed?
The use of cell phones in flight is not allowed. It's not that they're known to be dangerous - it's that they're not known to be safe.
The risk of introduction of small stray currents into the instrumentation used for flight is not worth it when there are 400 lives at stake. The last thing an airline pilot needs to worry about is whether the instrumentation that he carefully checked at a known point on the ground is now lying to him in the air because some bozo that is pissed because he didn't get the free upgrade is chatting on his cellphone in Row 39B.
Testing could be done to determine the risk of cellphone use inflight - but it'd be expensive to test all the known configurations with various quantities of transmitters of various unkownn qualities in various positions throughout the flight, and it's a much more controlled situation to provide an alternate service using tested transmitters.
Turn your cell phone off in an airliner and read a book for a few hours.
It'll be interesting integrating wireless access, since we can't use SNMP to determine what room you're in (and therefore who to bill), but hey, we'll *find* a way to make it work!
On the initial screen give the customer a phone number to dial and an extension that uniquely identifies the session he just initiated. Determine the room the phone call came from. Bill that customer.
True reform would be allowing any contribution recorded for the public record to be allowed from anybody.
So with that approach ultra-rich multi-national corporation could create a few hundred subsidiaries with obscure names that no citizen would ever notice and had owners that are legally hidden by the myriad of state laws that each would contribute the maximum allowed to a favored candidate that would then vote for the laws that would greatly favor the parent corporation.
This is what you want?
If not, then the only solution to limiting the influence of money is to limit the recipients in what and how much they are allowed to receive. There's far fewer of them than there are "creative solutions" to get around hiding the sources of funds.
Weightlessness is something nearly everyone can get used to with a little practice. It's the feeling that you get in your stomach when you go fairly fast over a steep drop in the road - in orbit that feeling persists. Most people get used to weightlessness fairly quickly if it's experienced frequently. Some lose the stomach sensation entirely - that is they don't sense it there at all anymore. Many uninitiated do get ill at first, but by far that seems to be more from nervousness than anything else - the environment to produce weightlessness is rather radical to most. However, even those well experienced in weightlessness can occassionally get ill from the effect, especially if they haven't experienced it in some time, and there are the usual other factors, such as abrupt and significantly greater than 1g to get to the less than 1g environment, varying hot and cold, lack of rest, that third bean burrito for dinner, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Because judges and juries are often technically ignorant - and for every expert that can be hired to say one thing to sway them there's another expert that can be hired to say the other. They likely believe that IBM will find it easier to buy them or settle for a large fee out of court - indeed it may be easier in the short term immedidate cash department - but IBM didn't get to be the gorilla by taking the easy route - they are just as likely to draw the line and say prove it knowing they can outlast the suit. Having the suit eventually thrown out would be the better long term solution for IBM because of their Linux focus. Once SCO is no mo, IBM can buy whatever pieces of it they want for a song.
A privately held company, if their corporate council had an ounce of brains in preparing the legal agreements that allowed them to sell equity, does have the option to demand the return of shares at a fair market value if the holder of those shares is taking actions the company believes is not in its own best interests. To do otherwise is the insane action - just as they had the choice of deciding who those shareholders were in the first place.
Canopy is taking an action that irritates, and if they are legally successful, will damange the ability for Linux to advance. Every company that is involved with Linux in any fashion needs to recognize this and assess the impact to themselves. Those companies that are involved with Canopy in some fashion are the ones that will be especially sensitive to any damage this suit may do, as their other shareholders realize that this suit poisions the well their customers visit. NO CUSTOMERS MEANS NO COMPANY.
Don't believe me - talk to your corporate counsel.
This is exactly how it is done. Trolltech needs to understand the discomfort that their customers are experiencing due to the actions of one of their shareholders. Trolltech then has the option to 1)ignore it and hope for the best, 2)encourage their shareholder to behave differently, 3)take a stand and buy their shareholder out. If they choose to ignore it, then they have chosen to accept the loss of goodwill, and whatever future financial penalty that entails.
The slashdot effect is short term and exists because the end-users took an interest in what you presented to the world - if you are unprepared for the populairty of what you've presented that is not the world's fault - find and implement some way to limit the admission, and be happy that what you did had an impact.
But, spam irritates forever and only continues to exist because the middlemen have an interest in presenting the material - the end-users have no interest.
Usenet exists because it links multiple smaller networks. If Usenet is to have any value then the middlemen need to react to the end users complaints. Fortunately the UDP works because there is a hierarchal structure - all big ISPs are equal in their vote and all have an interest in their end-users - those big ISPs that don't have that interest because they have been compromised by the soft-money of spammers are cut off from the network and suffer in the only manner they recognize - financially.
There are also consequences to non-action. History is full of examples. Just because some particular decison is unpleasant to consider doesn't mean the alternative is better.
APL is the only way to fly.
Ah ... now I see ... it was secure as long as no one tried to use it in an insecure manner.
It depends on how you define better. Do you mean more rapidly relevant? If so, then at what "cost"? Google nearly always provides the link I need within a few pages, and the majority of time on the first page. And they do it in a manner quite lacking in other search engines (and web sites in general) - they do so quickly, quietly, and politely.
It's going to be quite hard to be better.
Trigger happy? Exactly who would you trust then with large amounts of nuclear power in space? The US has had nuclear ability for five decades - the sole use in a military fashion was during a world war. Maybe we could entrust the North Koreans with it? Afterall, they are only suspected of having enough for a dirty bomb or two and they are already threatening "total war".
Who would be able to defend against some rogue outfit taking over the nuclear material other than the US? The ex-Soviet Union, with their Enron-quality nuclear bookkeeping? The French, suspected of providing nuclear plans to Saddam Insane?
I know - give it to the EU. The beauracracy involved would prevent anyone from ever making trouble with it - or ever doing anything worthwhile with it either.
I think Bueller's out sick today (I always loved the car in that movie).
In composites, specifically carbon-fiber reinforcing an epoxy binder, the load bearing is handled by the fiber, which must exist in sufficient quantity (>10%) that it supports itself at most points, and the binder (the matrix, often epoxy) is used to hold it together. There is an advantage over a solid material in that a flaw in a fiber is limited to just that fiber, especially as the fibers can be woven in particular orientations for increased strength. The matrix is a less critical component in the material when it is used where fibers excell - when put in tension (a'la a cable). When failure occurs, it will almost always be a debonding between the fiber and the matrix - however this debonding doesn't usually occur until the fiber itself breaks, because the matrix is very elastic - the fibers tend to wrap around themselves at sufficient points to provide the tensional strength and the epoxy is "just there".
But when it does fail, it's usually more sudden than in a metal, for example. But there's no metals strong enough (yet) to build this thing. Maybe metallic hydrogen will work, but we can't do that yet.
The strength required can certainly be calculated and the production tested before it's taken aloft. There'd be a great view on the ride up for sure.
You wanna rethink that statement? The external tank is dead-weight after the fuel is used. Getting rid of it allows the remainder to require less thrust to lift - i.e. more cargo.
Oh, I dunno - some of us really like those sort of uptime numbers ...
Yes, that's right - the only insults allowed on Slashdot are against Americans.
Ah, no. Air is compressible until approaching the speed of sound - which is why the speed of sound is what it is. That's also why there is a "shock wave" - since the air is not able to get out of its own way, and is also why it was originally believed that one couldn't travel faster than sound (though it was obvious that there were objects doing so, such as meteors, etc.). Approaching the speed of sound the induced drag rises rapidly - flying through that speed and continuing supersonic required gaining an understanding of how to reduce that drag (the "Coke bottle" shape of some aircraft designed during the 50's was one technique), and also gaining an understanding that the lift characteristics and center-of-lift point would shift - attention to design insured that this point did not deviate farther from the center-of-gravity than the flight control abilities of the time (i.e. - the pilot) could reasonably handle - think about the moment arm becoming greater as the difference between those two points increases. Also, it got much easier as we learned to build engines that could provide greater thrust.
I happen to know the owner of US Subs. One of the neater projects he's involved in is the development of an underwater resort hotel. There will be multiple transparent acrylic suites that are designed in a way to provide privacy from each other biut allow unobstructed viewing of the coral reefs wherever it is placed. It's a very neat project, not requiring a tremendous amount of investment money, and he has some knowledgeable advisors involved. You can find a small amount of public info at Underwater Hotel.
That's because the hand-lever-operated brake on a motorcycle actuates the front brake and the foot-pedal-operated brake operates the rear brake. There is significantly more stopping ability in the front brake of a motorcyle because the weight shift when braking lifts the rear wheel slightly.
Optimally, one brakes on a motorcycle by using the large majority (90%?) of the work with the front brakes and a very small amount with the rear brake - I believe the latest BMW motorcycles have auto-coupled the braking system to do that for you.
It depends on how we define the word hear - some people can detect such frequencies but not with any ability to discern any information that might be in the modulaiton at that carrier freq. I (and my son) have difficulty with such high-frequency sounds - it's even painful sometimes. The cash registers they used in Sears some years ago would drive me batty - in fact I haven't been to a Sears store in years now that I think about it and that's probably why. I have the same problem walking by jewelry stores using ultrasonic cleaners. The sound isn't so much as heard in the ears but is picked up directly by the small bones in the ear - at least that's what it "feels" like to me. CRTs give me the same problems. I don't have any difficulty with LCD screens that I've noticed, though I do tend to hear some kind of leakage from the cheap memory in my laptop, but I don't think that's as unusual.
Sensitivity to high frequencies is not something most companies bother to care about engineering for. I appreciate and purchase products from those companies that do seem to do a good job (such as my Thinkpad).
No - and the majority of people in this country are believers in neither what the Republican nor the Democratic party stands for - look at the voting record over the last few decades. Fewer and fewer people vote because most of the time they feel they are having to choose "the evil of two lessers".
That's completely wrong.
When the military of Bush Sr was handed off to Clinton it was at least twice the strength it is now, and three times it in some areas. The USAF had 35 fighter wings in '91 - now it has 20 - and lest you think that is bad enough, the number of aircraft that make up a wing has been reduced in many places, so we may have 20 wings, but there's even less aircraft than that number alludes to.
The US Army can only field 1/3 of the tank and cavalry units it did during Desert Storm. Their manning is even harder hit than the USAF.
The US Navy had 180 ships decommissioned under the Clinton years, and is hurting for experienced aviators worse than any other service - do you think a fighter pilot with 10 years of experience is grown overnight? Duh - it takes 10 years - and he needs quality equipment and flight time.
Where do you think that false sense of a good economy came from anyway other than the encouragement for Americans to reduce their savings to the lowest points in history and the great reductions in military spending?
Go look at the reduction in intelligence gathering and assesment capabilities if you really want to get angry at the harm done to the US under the Clinton administration. There's 3000 people that were murdered on US soil that might be alive today if we'd kept our guard up.
We will go to war with what we've got - you don't build a military capability overnight. The only hope now is that the forces we have, which are being run ragged to prepare for the coming engagements (and that's just the planned ones - we'll have to worry about N. Korea some other time) will be sufficient to the task.
Biggest military ever? Please - get a grip.
What I believe would work well is to build a wrapper for the plugin. This wrapper would add several non-blaockable right-click options to the animation. One option would be to not load this specific animation again. The other option would be to not load animations from a particular domain again (perhaps a third option restricting it to a particular machine at a domain is needed too). The result would be that on initial visits to annoying, but frequented for other valuable reasons, sites, a little right-click work would need to be done.
Hmm, fourth and fifth options could be to not download any animations from third parties, and to not download any flash animations at all when visiting a particular website.
You had the beginning of an answer to your own question. What product has Ballmer acknowledged as his greatest threat? Since actually buying Linux and other open source is not possible, and actually outlawing it is difficult, even while discouraging its use with policy makers, then the way to protect his revenue stream is to bring under Microsoft control those packages that are not presently open source yet are widely deployed. Macromedia's products are a good start - Adobe's would be a reasonable next step - there's probably a handful of other "outside the OS" products that others can also think of.
Once owned it can be "extended" for incompatibility - perhaps making ActiveX an integral part of it while announcing the "rich multimedia capabilities now offered" as an example. Imagine the marketing effort that could be put behind "read your PDF documents with embedded WMV and Flash".
Look at the amount of effort it's taken for the Samba team to build and try to stay up with the continuous undocumented changes to the SMB protocol that Microsoft put out constantly. Such a tremendous effort is not trivial, and "costs" the open source community by tying up resources. Well placed money, such as in India, or outright purchase, in areas that are slightly removed from the Windows OS but are used by most of its customers will pay off for Microsoft. Do you think they developed and give away IE for the fun of it? Do they give away the necessary information to make it easy to use something other than Windows Media Viewer? Office? Exchange? Any place they can spend a relatively small amount of money to encourage staying with their own core platform, and to make it harder for the competition to operate, they will. They have to - as open source products gain more market share the risk disproportionally increases for Microsoft - losing entire organizations to open source products means there is an ever growing threat to their revenue stream.
The use of cell phones in flight is not allowed. It's not that they're known to be dangerous - it's that they're not known to be safe.
The risk of introduction of small stray currents into the instrumentation used for flight is not worth it when there are 400 lives at stake. The last thing an airline pilot needs to worry about is whether the instrumentation that he carefully checked at a known point on the ground is now lying to him in the air because some bozo that is pissed because he didn't get the free upgrade is chatting on his cellphone in Row 39B.
Testing could be done to determine the risk of cellphone use inflight - but it'd be expensive to test all the known configurations with various quantities of transmitters of various unkownn qualities in various positions throughout the flight, and it's a much more controlled situation to provide an alternate service using tested transmitters.
Turn your cell phone off in an airliner and read a book for a few hours.
On the initial screen give the customer a phone number to dial and an extension that uniquely identifies the session he just initiated. Determine the room the phone call came from. Bill that customer.
So with that approach ultra-rich multi-national corporation could create a few hundred subsidiaries with obscure names that no citizen would ever notice and had owners that are legally hidden by the myriad of state laws that each would contribute the maximum allowed to a favored candidate that would then vote for the laws that would greatly favor the parent corporation.
This is what you want?
If not, then the only solution to limiting the influence of money is to limit the recipients in what and how much they are allowed to receive. There's far fewer of them than there are "creative solutions" to get around hiding the sources of funds.
Weightlessness is something nearly everyone can get used to with a little practice. It's the feeling that you get in your stomach when you go fairly fast over a steep drop in the road - in orbit that feeling persists. Most people get used to weightlessness fairly quickly if it's experienced frequently. Some lose the stomach sensation entirely - that is they don't sense it there at all anymore. Many uninitiated do get ill at first, but by far that seems to be more from nervousness than anything else - the environment to produce weightlessness is rather radical to most. However, even those well experienced in weightlessness can occassionally get ill from the effect, especially if they haven't experienced it in some time, and there are the usual other factors, such as abrupt and significantly greater than 1g to get to the less than 1g environment, varying hot and cold, lack of rest, that third bean burrito for dinner, etc.