Right, because the government-run TSA is doing a much better job than the private security firms were. I don't know if you've been following the news at all, but you may have noticed that there have been a large number of documented cases of TSA guards letting all sorts of "risky" items through, being asleep on the job, etc. The most well-known example is probably the kid that hid various "dangerous" items on a bunch of different aircraft, just to test security, and only got caught when he reported what he'd done so that they could fix the security holes.
Uh, JPL is an FFRDC. Which is what the commission is apparently recommending should be done with the other NASA centers.
That said, I agree that more Whitehouse oversight is probably a bad idea. Having worked at an FFRDC (not JPL) involved in the DoD side of the space game, I've witnessed first hand what happens when the idiots at the executive level try to make trench-level decisions. The folks at the executive level should be making strategic decisions, and evaluating the results of trade studies and analyses to make those decisions. Instead, they had a tendency to try to make decisions at the level of individual projects (often overriding those they had appointed to run the project in the first place), and to mandate their pet designs instead of looking at what the results of the trade studies actually showed. I'd hate to see NASA get stuck in the same kind of mess.
As it happens, JPL runs as an FFRDC, and as a result is, IMHO, the best of the NASA centers (they pay real money instead of the paltry GS salaries, and thus are able to get some of the sharpest engineers).
I was sarcastically attempting to point out the fundamental hypocrisy involved in simultaneously complaining about the unfairness of other industries that have protected themselves, while also whining that the industry we are in needs protection (which presumably would be just as "unfair" to those outside the newly protected industry).
Personally, I'm in favor of eliminating "protections", since I happen to believe that so-called "protections" cause economic stagnation (and that lack of protection is not equivalent to allowing careers to be destroyed). YMMV though - my own personal experience living in societies with strong unions has been that they lead to stagnant industries and a sense of entitlement. If you have had a different experience you may believe differently.
Eventually. But that doesn't bring back the mother and daughter, does it? Nor does it help the many other people trapped in abusive situations, and conditioned by their religion to accept those abusive conditions.
It conveniently glosses over the fact that its legally impossible for an american employee of any skill level to accept a full time job for less than many outsourcers are accepting in their own country.
Perhaps the US should eliminate its minimum wage laws then, and "level the playing field" for American workers.
People suggesting that we become plumbers and electricians conveniently forget to remind us that nationwide these trades are protected by unions, and nearly everywhere, an apprenticeship is required to enter these trades.
Yeah, how selfish of those plumbers and electricians to protect their jobs, and prevent cheap unskilled labor (aka ex-programmers trying to make a living) from flooding the market and causing them to lose their jobs. It's a good thing the American tech sector isn't full of such selfish jerks...
if only I could enjoy the fruits of these cheap overseas laborers. Alas, while "importing" overseas labor into the US is basically free, actual goods are taxed to prevent the common people from enjoying exactly this.
That taxation is in place due to the last round of protectionist bleatings from the American manufacturers who couldn't compete with those cheap overseas goods. And if the US tech sector gets its way with all the protectionist policies it is demanding to prevent off-shoring then the rest of the American public will be harmed, just as you are by the tariffs on imported goods.
I used to work down the road from Boeing Satellite Systems (what used to be Hughes Space and Comm). About 2 years back BSS laid off several thousand people as a result of a downturn in the commercial commsat market and the loss of a few governemnt contracts. You know what happened to all of those laid off engineers? Pretty much anyone that was competent walked about 3 blocks down the road to TRW (now Northrop Grumman Space Technologies) and was hired in a heartbeat. TRW had just won several big contracts, and was hiring like mad. That's the way things tend to work in the aerospace industry - contracts tend to be multi-year (sometimes multi-decade), high-dollar value events. The jobs flow from one contractor to another, depending on who has won a contract recently. So looking at just one side of the picture (Boeing in your case) really doesn't tell us anything useful at all.
So I'm guessing from this comment that you haven't actually read Krakauer's book, or even have any idea of what its content is. So how about you ditch the knee-jerk reaction and take a minute to understand what the actual issue here is.
Krakauer's book is not about separation of church and state, the ACLU, or freedom of or from religion. It is about what happens when faith gets carried to radical extremes, and its point is that the US has extremists that are as bad or worse than the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Specifically, it explores the roots of a cold-blooded murder (mother and infant daughter) carried out by a pair of fundamentalists from one of America's "fastest growing religions" because "God commanded them to do it", and also takes a look at some of the other disturbing practices (rape, incest, child molestation, and so on) perpetrated in the name of faith. It isn't a condemnation of all faith or all religion, but it does point out the dangers of taking any faith to extremes. The US needs to deal with the problems it has internally with extremists, as well as the problems it faces with external extremists. Most people in the US are apparently not even aware that such internal extremists even exist - "Under the Banner of Heaven" helps to correct that problem. Again, I highly recommend it.
Aside: I don't support the current actions in LA. The crosses are on the seal for historical, not religious reasons, and fit within the context of the rest of the seal. Will they campaign to change the name "Los Angeles" next, because it's "too religious"? I hope not. It's actions like the LA County seal issue that give atheists a bad name.
I highly recommend that you pick up Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven" (came out last year) for a truly scary look at what the religious extremists that live in America are up to. And a scary look at how little outrage it appears to generate among the "moderates".
I personally do not understand why anyone would argue against the benefits of a union.
Having grown up in a country with extremely strong unions I personally can't understand why anyone would argue for the unions. Unionized jobs were notoriously overpaid (making every product or service associated with them overly expensive), and infested with lazy incompetents who did little or no work. I still remember the strikes that were called by the transportation unions at Christmas almost every year - the best time to inconvenience the most people and thereby get their demands met. I mean, seriously, what kind of people hold Christmas hostage? I'm just thankful that the government finally saw the light and put through legielation that broke the stranglehold that the unions had on the economy.
As an aside, did you ever stop to consider that a union is essentially just a big corporation with a monopoly on a certain kind of labor? (And tends to act just like a big, monopolistic corporation)
...this is overwelmingly because the standard of living is lower in their country
It's not so much the standard of living as the cost of living. For example, the film industry has started doing lots of low-cost production in Australia and New Zealand. Now, the standard of living in those countries is comparable to (and arguably better than) the standard of living in the US. But the cost of living is much lower, so the labor is cheaper. From what I understand of the situation in India the standard of living for Indian tech workers is simialr to that of their American counterparts, but again, their cost of living is much lower.
Maybe American companies can't, but the US government sure can. You aren't even allowed enter an officer training program unless you will be "under 27 at the date of commissioning", or something along those lines.
I can't really get especially mad if companies outsource to better workers
Better in this case equates to "same capability for less cost". Lower wages do not necessarily mean worse working conditions. In fact, from talking to Indian friends who have worked both in the US and in India the actual working conditions are equivalent. So why are you mad exactly?
It's not just the factual errors, it's the fact that Moore has a documented tendency to take quotes out of context, splice together footage from multiple different places and times to make them appear as if they all occurred at the same place and time, and to otherwise selectively distort his source material to portray the story he wants. I'm no fan of the Bush administration, and I trust very little of their PR. But Michael Moore's PR is as bad or worse. Moore's films are on a par with the pre-Iraq WMD propaganda that we got flooded with - deliberately cherry-picked evidence designed to produce an emotional response rather than a fact-based and reasoned understanding of the real situation.
The transistor didn't exist.. The idea of how to build one did..
And Bell labs were quite free to play with that idea, and then to pay royalties on any products that they developed based on that idea. Who knows, maybe the patent would have expired by the time they actually managed to develop a real product. Then we would have had the transistor 5 years eailer than we did and would have achieved Nirvana by now.
What I meant to imply, is that researchers use *gasp* computers to aid them. Perhaps having developed computers sooner, they would have been able to use computer aided research sooner, and perhaps, and I mean PERHAPS, found something before now.
And what I meant to imply is that *gasp* it's not clear at all that any kind of computer-aided anything would help find the cure for cancer (assuming that one exists). Computers may help, or they may not. Your speculation is agreat emotional appeal, but it's essentially meaningless. We might also have had the cure for cancer by now if we'd banned professional sports (so that researchers would more time doing research instead of watching TV), or stopped all research into computers (so that more people would work on the cancer problem), or encouraged research into mathematics (so that researchers would have better tools for mathematically modelling cancer).
There's a lot more that computers do besides compute long equations you know.
No! Really? And here I thought they were just glorified calculators.
Can you imagine where the computer world might be if we'd gotten the transistor 5 years earlier or even more?
Uh... Bell had to wait for the patent on one kind of transistor (the FET) to expire before they could (inadvertently) invent another kind of transistor (the BJT). Given that the transistor apparently already existed (since it was patented) there was no "5 year wait for the transistor" before we could have a computer. Perhaps there was a "5 year wait for the royalty-free transistor", but that wouldn't prevent people from building computers from transistors if they'd been willing to pay the fees. More importantly, Bell Labs could presumably freely experiment with FET fabrication (and thus inadvertently develop the BJT), they just wouldn't be allowed to freely sell the fruits of that labor before the patent expired.
Perhaps we could have cured cancer with that extra computing power
Or perhaps not. This kind of speculation is useless. Curing cancer isn't like brute-forcing an encryption scheme - it's not a matter of pure computational power.
Why should you have to pay for a wheel? Imagine if everyone alive contributed to the decendants of the guy who first invented the wheel!
You seem to be forgetting the part where patents are secured "for a limited time". I suspect that the wheel has been around long enough for the patent to have expired.
I think that the real problme with patents is not that they are granted for inane things (although that is a problem), but that govern independent discoveries that just happen to be similar. It's on ething to shamelessly rip off an inventor. It's something else to do a bunch of work to invent something, only to find that some other guy got there 3 days before you, and so now your work is worthless since they own the rights to the idea. That scenario strikes me as wrong.
they want to become IPO insiders to put his soul to rest
Uh... ignoring for a moment that raw cynicism inherent in that statement, isn't Google running a Dutch Auction IPO partly as a way of eliminating the whole insider/outsider dichotomy? (and partly has a way to make much more money) So the family can't become "insiders" because there won't be any insiders.
Hmmm... perhaps they just mean they want to be given shares of the company pre-IPO (not an "insider" in the traditional IPO sense). That seems even more greedy and cynical to me - there's no gamble involved at all on their part.
Interestingly enough, Roland appears to have become a/. subscriber...well...today. Either that or he just happened to make his very first comment(s) today, even though he's been submitting articles for about a year (that id looks suspiciously high too). Funnily enough, he appears to have made the contributors to this particular little thread his "friends" now (wonder if I'll make the cut too;-) Guess you at least managed to get his attention...
When bits can only be measured by positive or negative voltage levels, how can you transmit "Hello World" without manipulating the information? Would transmitting over ethernet then count as encryption? In standard usage it does not. Encryption requires an extra step in which the content of the message (regardless of its physical layer representation) is manipulated in order to obscure the true message. Think plaintext Usenet post vs ROT13 Usenet post (a weak encryption scheme, but that's not the point). Both undergo the same processes in order to move the message from one screen to another. But the ROT13 message includes an additional, purely logical step not required for message transmission but intended to obscure message content.
The quantum communication channel may be (arguably) considered a "secure" channel (I say arguably because the message can be intercepted, but the interception will be detected), but it is not an encrypted channel (the two are not synonymous).
Encryption implies manipulating the information content of a message in order to obscure its meaning, not altering the physical representation of said message. To give an analogy: Writing my secret letter using a substitution cipher would count as encryption, since I have manipulated the information (which could be represented in any number of ways). Writing my secret letter in my patented disappearing-reappearing ink does not count as encryption, because I have merely manipulated the physical form of the message, not the information contained in the message.
Blogs or plogs are all well and good, but the problem is that getting anyone to write any kind of documentation is hard. There will always be design decisions that get made but never recorded. Personally, I think that the method of extracting design rationales from an analysis of a project email archive that was proposed in this paper would be more useful than a plog, in that it captures the actual consensus and decision-making process, rather than relying on people to go out of their way to write extra information down after the fact. Admittedly, it misses decisions made in verbal interchanges, but it does catch a lot of stuff that would otherwise be missed (I know that many of the projects I've worked on recently have resolved many design issues via email exchanges).
As an aside: who is Roland Piquepaille, and how does he manage to get an article in/. every other day?
Why not make space, or at least the space around the earth, the same as the air
As several other posters have pointed out, the physics of orbiting the Earth pretty much makes this a idea no-go. There was some talk about this in the pre-Sputnik days, and the US was quite worried about how to handle the resulting jurisdictional mess. Luckily for them the USSR launched Sputnik, which then provided a precedent for orbital space being managed differently than airspace, and we ended up with the current system.
As I was writing in my blog, as it is now, space seems a bit like the wild west - noone cares who they fly over, or what's orbiting above them, or whatever.
This is fundamentally untrue. For starters, the geostationary belt (aka Clarke orbit, or 35,786 km), which is the only orbit that can be reasonably tied to geographical location, is very tightly managed. Different countries have assigned "slots" in GEO, and can use them or sell them as they see fit. Missions in other orbits require a certain amount of coordination in order to ensure that collisions don't take place, and the RF transmission don't interfere with each other.
Or better yet put them all under the total control of the UN, as things too big for one nation to claim for itself.
Which is in fact roughly what was done. You may want to look at the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and then remove your foot from your mouth.
but just because the US is powerful right now doesn't mean it should have total rights to everything it finds in space
It doesn't. See above.
Personally I wish there were more collaborative space exploration. Instead of 3 countries/consortiums sending a probe each to Mars, we could have a probe to Mars, one to Europa, and one to Venus.
The recent Mars Exploration Rover carried a German (IIRC) spectrometer. It was also going to be doing some communications via the European Mars Express mission (don't know if it actually did or not). Also, note that MER, Mars Express, and the Japanese Mars mission were all carrying different instruments and had different goals. In that sense, they were all performing part of a collaborative exploration of the planet Mars.
Martha Stewart (convicted, but sentenced to a minimum security prison that seems to have been the inspiration for the no-security facility Sideshow Bob was sentenced to do time in)
Martha Stewart didn't do anything illegal financially. In fact, the government dropped the charges of financial wrong-doing because there simply was no evidence that she did anything wrong. What Martha Stewart was actually eventually convicted of was attempting to cover up the alleged wrongdoing - in other words they convicted of trying to "cover up" something that was not illegal. And even that "cover-up" was mostly based on hearsay and innuendo. If you actually read statements by jury members made after the trial you'll see that they mostly convicted her of being white, wealthy, and successful.
The real crime in the Martha Stewart case is that she got hounded by the government even though she didn't do anything illegal, but Sam Waksal and members of his family (who did make illegal trades) either got a slap on the wrist or got off scott-free.
Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of Martha Stewart. I've never watched her show. From all I've heard she is a ruthless control-freak. But being a ruthless control-freak isn't illegal, and doesn't change the fact that she got screwed by the legal system. Why should you care? Because if they can screw someone as wealthy and powerful as Martha Stewart, imagine what they could do to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because the government-run TSA is doing a much better job than the private security firms were. I don't know if you've been following the news at all, but you may have noticed that there have been a large number of documented cases of TSA guards letting all sorts of "risky" items through, being asleep on the job, etc. The most well-known example is probably the kid that hid various "dangerous" items on a bunch of different aircraft, just to test security, and only got caught when he reported what he'd done so that they could fix the security holes.
That said, I agree that more Whitehouse oversight is probably a bad idea. Having worked at an FFRDC (not JPL) involved in the DoD side of the space game, I've witnessed first hand what happens when the idiots at the executive level try to make trench-level decisions. The folks at the executive level should be making strategic decisions, and evaluating the results of trade studies and analyses to make those decisions. Instead, they had a tendency to try to make decisions at the level of individual projects (often overriding those they had appointed to run the project in the first place), and to mandate their pet designs instead of looking at what the results of the trade studies actually showed. I'd hate to see NASA get stuck in the same kind of mess.
As it happens, JPL runs as an FFRDC, and as a result is, IMHO, the best of the NASA centers (they pay real money instead of the paltry GS salaries, and thus are able to get some of the sharpest engineers).
Personally, I'm in favor of eliminating "protections", since I happen to believe that so-called "protections" cause economic stagnation (and that lack of protection is not equivalent to allowing careers to be destroyed). YMMV though - my own personal experience living in societies with strong unions has been that they lead to stagnant industries and a sense of entitlement. If you have had a different experience you may believe differently.
Eventually. But that doesn't bring back the mother and daughter, does it? Nor does it help the many other people trapped in abusive situations, and conditioned by their religion to accept those abusive conditions.
Perhaps the US should eliminate its minimum wage laws then, and "level the playing field" for American workers.
People suggesting that we become plumbers and electricians conveniently forget to remind us that nationwide these trades are protected by unions, and nearly everywhere, an apprenticeship is required to enter these trades.
Yeah, how selfish of those plumbers and electricians to protect their jobs, and prevent cheap unskilled labor (aka ex-programmers trying to make a living) from flooding the market and causing them to lose their jobs. It's a good thing the American tech sector isn't full of such selfish jerks...
if only I could enjoy the fruits of these cheap overseas laborers. Alas, while "importing" overseas labor into the US is basically free, actual goods are taxed to prevent the common people from enjoying exactly this.
That taxation is in place due to the last round of protectionist bleatings from the American manufacturers who couldn't compete with those cheap overseas goods. And if the US tech sector gets its way with all the protectionist policies it is demanding to prevent off-shoring then the rest of the American public will be harmed, just as you are by the tariffs on imported goods.
I used to work down the road from Boeing Satellite Systems (what used to be Hughes Space and Comm). About 2 years back BSS laid off several thousand people as a result of a downturn in the commercial commsat market and the loss of a few governemnt contracts. You know what happened to all of those laid off engineers? Pretty much anyone that was competent walked about 3 blocks down the road to TRW (now Northrop Grumman Space Technologies) and was hired in a heartbeat. TRW had just won several big contracts, and was hiring like mad. That's the way things tend to work in the aerospace industry - contracts tend to be multi-year (sometimes multi-decade), high-dollar value events. The jobs flow from one contractor to another, depending on who has won a contract recently. So looking at just one side of the picture (Boeing in your case) really doesn't tell us anything useful at all.
Krakauer's book is not about separation of church and state, the ACLU, or freedom of or from religion. It is about what happens when faith gets carried to radical extremes, and its point is that the US has extremists that are as bad or worse than the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Specifically, it explores the roots of a cold-blooded murder (mother and infant daughter) carried out by a pair of fundamentalists from one of America's "fastest growing religions" because "God commanded them to do it", and also takes a look at some of the other disturbing practices (rape, incest, child molestation, and so on) perpetrated in the name of faith. It isn't a condemnation of all faith or all religion, but it does point out the dangers of taking any faith to extremes. The US needs to deal with the problems it has internally with extremists, as well as the problems it faces with external extremists. Most people in the US are apparently not even aware that such internal extremists even exist - "Under the Banner of Heaven" helps to correct that problem. Again, I highly recommend it.
Aside: I don't support the current actions in LA. The crosses are on the seal for historical, not religious reasons, and fit within the context of the rest of the seal. Will they campaign to change the name "Los Angeles" next, because it's "too religious"? I hope not. It's actions like the LA County seal issue that give atheists a bad name.
I highly recommend that you pick up Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven" (came out last year) for a truly scary look at what the religious extremists that live in America are up to. And a scary look at how little outrage it appears to generate among the "moderates".
Having grown up in a country with extremely strong unions I personally can't understand why anyone would argue for the unions. Unionized jobs were notoriously overpaid (making every product or service associated with them overly expensive), and infested with lazy incompetents who did little or no work. I still remember the strikes that were called by the transportation unions at Christmas almost every year - the best time to inconvenience the most people and thereby get their demands met. I mean, seriously, what kind of people hold Christmas hostage? I'm just thankful that the government finally saw the light and put through legielation that broke the stranglehold that the unions had on the economy.
As an aside, did you ever stop to consider that a union is essentially just a big corporation with a monopoly on a certain kind of labor? (And tends to act just like a big, monopolistic corporation)
It's not so much the standard of living as the cost of living. For example, the film industry has started doing lots of low-cost production in Australia and New Zealand. Now, the standard of living in those countries is comparable to (and arguably better than) the standard of living in the US. But the cost of living is much lower, so the labor is cheaper. From what I understand of the situation in India the standard of living for Indian tech workers is simialr to that of their American counterparts, but again, their cost of living is much lower.
Maybe American companies can't, but the US government sure can. You aren't even allowed enter an officer training program unless you will be "under 27 at the date of commissioning", or something along those lines.
Better in this case equates to "same capability for less cost". Lower wages do not necessarily mean worse working conditions. In fact, from talking to Indian friends who have worked both in the US and in India the actual working conditions are equivalent. So why are you mad exactly?
It's not just the factual errors, it's the fact that Moore has a documented tendency to take quotes out of context, splice together footage from multiple different places and times to make them appear as if they all occurred at the same place and time, and to otherwise selectively distort his source material to portray the story he wants. I'm no fan of the Bush administration, and I trust very little of their PR. But Michael Moore's PR is as bad or worse. Moore's films are on a par with the pre-Iraq WMD propaganda that we got flooded with - deliberately cherry-picked evidence designed to produce an emotional response rather than a fact-based and reasoned understanding of the real situation.
And Bell labs were quite free to play with that idea, and then to pay royalties on any products that they developed based on that idea. Who knows, maybe the patent would have expired by the time they actually managed to develop a real product. Then we would have had the transistor 5 years eailer than we did and would have achieved Nirvana by now.
What I meant to imply, is that researchers use *gasp* computers to aid them. Perhaps having developed computers sooner, they would have been able to use computer aided research sooner, and perhaps, and I mean PERHAPS, found something before now.
And what I meant to imply is that *gasp* it's not clear at all that any kind of computer-aided anything would help find the cure for cancer (assuming that one exists). Computers may help, or they may not. Your speculation is agreat emotional appeal, but it's essentially meaningless. We might also have had the cure for cancer by now if we'd banned professional sports (so that researchers would more time doing research instead of watching TV), or stopped all research into computers (so that more people would work on the cancer problem), or encouraged research into mathematics (so that researchers would have better tools for mathematically modelling cancer).
There's a lot more that computers do besides compute long equations you know.
No! Really? And here I thought they were just glorified calculators.
Uh... Bell had to wait for the patent on one kind of transistor (the FET) to expire before they could (inadvertently) invent another kind of transistor (the BJT). Given that the transistor apparently already existed (since it was patented) there was no "5 year wait for the transistor" before we could have a computer. Perhaps there was a "5 year wait for the royalty-free transistor", but that wouldn't prevent people from building computers from transistors if they'd been willing to pay the fees. More importantly, Bell Labs could presumably freely experiment with FET fabrication (and thus inadvertently develop the BJT), they just wouldn't be allowed to freely sell the fruits of that labor before the patent expired.
Perhaps we could have cured cancer with that extra computing power
Or perhaps not. This kind of speculation is useless. Curing cancer isn't like brute-forcing an encryption scheme - it's not a matter of pure computational power.
You seem to be forgetting the part where patents are secured "for a limited time". I suspect that the wheel has been around long enough for the patent to have expired.
I think that the real problme with patents is not that they are granted for inane things (although that is a problem), but that govern independent discoveries that just happen to be similar. It's on ething to shamelessly rip off an inventor. It's something else to do a bunch of work to invent something, only to find that some other guy got there 3 days before you, and so now your work is worthless since they own the rights to the idea. That scenario strikes me as wrong.
Oh...wait... did you mean heroin? ;-)
Uh... ignoring for a moment that raw cynicism inherent in that statement, isn't Google running a Dutch Auction IPO partly as a way of eliminating the whole insider/outsider dichotomy? (and partly has a way to make much more money) So the family can't become "insiders" because there won't be any insiders.
Hmmm... perhaps they just mean they want to be given shares of the company pre-IPO (not an "insider" in the traditional IPO sense). That seems even more greedy and cynical to me - there's no gamble involved at all on their part.
Interestingly enough, Roland appears to have become a /. subscriber...well...today. Either that or he just happened to make his very first comment(s) today, even though he's been submitting articles for about a year (that id looks suspiciously high too). Funnily enough, he appears to have made the contributors to this particular little thread his "friends" now (wonder if I'll make the cut too ;-) Guess you at least managed to get his attention...
The quantum communication channel may be (arguably) considered a "secure" channel (I say arguably because the message can be intercepted, but the interception will be detected), but it is not an encrypted channel (the two are not synonymous).
Encryption implies manipulating the information content of a message in order to obscure its meaning, not altering the physical representation of said message. To give an analogy: Writing my secret letter using a substitution cipher would count as encryption, since I have manipulated the information (which could be represented in any number of ways). Writing my secret letter in my patented disappearing-reappearing ink does not count as encryption, because I have merely manipulated the physical form of the message, not the information contained in the message.
As an aside: who is Roland Piquepaille, and how does he manage to get an article in /. every other day?
As several other posters have pointed out, the physics of orbiting the Earth pretty much makes this a idea no-go. There was some talk about this in the pre-Sputnik days, and the US was quite worried about how to handle the resulting jurisdictional mess. Luckily for them the USSR launched Sputnik, which then provided a precedent for orbital space being managed differently than airspace, and we ended up with the current system.
As I was writing in my blog, as it is now, space seems a bit like the wild west - noone cares who they fly over, or what's orbiting above them, or whatever.
This is fundamentally untrue. For starters, the geostationary belt (aka Clarke orbit, or 35,786 km), which is the only orbit that can be reasonably tied to geographical location, is very tightly managed. Different countries have assigned "slots" in GEO, and can use them or sell them as they see fit. Missions in other orbits require a certain amount of coordination in order to ensure that collisions don't take place, and the RF transmission don't interfere with each other.
Or better yet put them all under the total control of the UN, as things too big for one nation to claim for itself.
Which is in fact roughly what was done. You may want to look at the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and then remove your foot from your mouth.
but just because the US is powerful right now doesn't mean it should have total rights to everything it finds in space
It doesn't. See above.
Personally I wish there were more collaborative space exploration. Instead of 3 countries/consortiums sending a probe each to Mars, we could have a probe to Mars, one to Europa, and one to Venus.
The recent Mars Exploration Rover carried a German (IIRC) spectrometer. It was also going to be doing some communications via the European Mars Express mission (don't know if it actually did or not). Also, note that MER, Mars Express, and the Japanese Mars mission were all carrying different instruments and had different goals. In that sense, they were all performing part of a collaborative exploration of the planet Mars.
Martha Stewart didn't do anything illegal financially. In fact, the government dropped the charges of financial wrong-doing because there simply was no evidence that she did anything wrong. What Martha Stewart was actually eventually convicted of was attempting to cover up the alleged wrongdoing - in other words they convicted of trying to "cover up" something that was not illegal. And even that "cover-up" was mostly based on hearsay and innuendo. If you actually read statements by jury members made after the trial you'll see that they mostly convicted her of being white, wealthy, and successful.
The real crime in the Martha Stewart case is that she got hounded by the government even though she didn't do anything illegal, but Sam Waksal and members of his family (who did make illegal trades) either got a slap on the wrist or got off scott-free.
Disclaimer: I'm not a fan of Martha Stewart. I've never watched her show. From all I've heard she is a ruthless control-freak. But being a ruthless control-freak isn't illegal, and doesn't change the fact that she got screwed by the legal system. Why should you care? Because if they can screw someone as wealthy and powerful as Martha Stewart, imagine what they could do to you.