As long as you don't come back what can they do about it? Once you're ON the Moon there's no laws but what you make. This is the classic case that Gundam always plays with. Just like North America, for the first 100 years or so space colonies will need support and supplies from Earth to continue operations. If they don't get spare parts or emergency help they'll die. Earth governments will continue to manipulate them as long as possible (much like England manipulated the USA) until they rebel.. it will be 1776 all over again. Those that have don't want to lose it and those that go and do want their lives for their own.. so the cycle repeats!
It doesn't matter if we DID it then, what matters is that nobody is there right now, the Moon is up for grabs to whoever can land on it. The USA believe it's ours... when we get around to it... We aren't there right now so maybe somebody else will get there and use those resources before we do!!!
China is where the USA was in 1890... We were stealing stuff from British inventors blind so the millionaires then could sell their wares here. IP was a joke and quality was non-existant (think of a world with NO formal practice of pharmacy,no FDA, no rule on making or selling ANYTHING!!! or even liability if you bought some new device and it killed you) That's where China is right now. Witness the tainted food scares much like the "patent medicine" of the late 19th century and for much the same reasons.
I would think the focus on robots is to have the robots mining and building habitat and energy production facilities before people arrive. One thing we haven't mentioned is that resources have to be found and harvested before we can build anything. To build the simplest machines we need half the periodic table in fairly big quantities. That means finding something like and Iron mine and taking all the equipment to dig it out AND make steel alloys with you to build the next thing. Also Remember, half our technology is based on organic compounds... oils, wood, carbon compounds... and water based processes for chemical reactions and processing materials and generating power. The goal of a moon base would be to build and assemble factories and more spaceships but that's a ton of work that hasn't remotely been explored. I agree people could use the machines sent there first but it's a huge chicken-egg problem to get things usable.
but China has no problems sacrificing millions of people to starvation or bad quality resources if they need them for something more important to the furthering of China. They've had disasters of flooding that dwarf New Orleans... where they simply didn't bother to even try to evacuate cities and just let their people take their chances. When the US had it's "golden age" in the 50's and 60's we had vast untapped potential with both human and natural resources and plenty of security both food and military to allow us to persue them. We didn't divert funds from anywhere for things line the A-bomb or Moon landing. It was just use of resources lying around untapped. China is much different, they will have to fight for everything as they don't have vast natural resources untapped, but in their case people are cheap so they will get into space but be much more reckless and they'll kill (thru accidents from rushing or removing resources) a lot of people in the process. With the stuff they make for the USA they have more than enough technology, they don't have experience in space travel... but that's nothing recklessly launching rockets until they work can't fix. They don't have attention to detail in manufacturing, to get things precise every time, but then again the USA spends far to much time worrying about "safety" and budgets instead of launching rockets and reaching as far as we can because we are in front and not pushed to reach.
space travel, especially to the moon is OUR GIG... that's something the USA did that nobody else has done. It's a marvel as big as the Great Wall or discovering the Western Hemisphere. I think it will be GOOD if somebody else gets to the Moon before the USA does... it will put our politicians in their place to do Big Things for the sake of doing them.. not company profits.
but people don't USE internet that way. Most users, especially those in the country, aren't going to Youtube or downloading torrents all day. They are part of the click-and-read group. The want one page at a time to load quickly then sit and read it or whatever. You can share a LOT of clicks on a T1 line if nobody abuses it. (note: that's also why ISPs are being killed by video traffic as even when you're "online" under normal usage you only are downloading something 1/10 of the time you are connected)
he should be able to buy an ISDN link. They are horribly expensive for 128K but should work at just about any location with a phone line. Speed and stability is guaranteed.. but it is very expensive.
but originally, Microsoft was going to cut everybody off from XP completely. In my workplace, we'd LIKE Vista, but practically we need computers NOW and don't want to waste weeks proving out software for one PC. Paying for Vista now and getting XP also in the box is win-win for everybody. Win that M$ gets the credit for a Vista shipment so ISVs will develop faster. Customers are happy because they can use their PCs now... except for OEMs having to support and write drivers for hardware they were trying to upsell.
Public mischief is about intent, there was no intent there, and a good chunk of MIT and DOD contractors can vouch for that. That makes it "all or nothing" so they'll threaten her with "terrorism" to get her to plead. The best thing for the DA would be to walk away knowing she won't do it again.
Except after the fact the cops are saying to reporters she's lucky they didn't kill her. That is unprofessional and boarder line illegal. That makes any use of force over negotiation tainted by ill intent on their part. A smart lawyer will hold that against them later.
NO people should not have to be afraid of scaring other people. So her head is stuck so far in the clouds solving tricky engineering problems she forgets what other people thing... that's what AMERICA is all about!!!! She made a mistake taking a toy to the airport that scared the little sheeple but it's clearly not wrongdoing by any sense. By all accounts she wore the device for several weeks all over the place. She sounds like a true geek, into everything from welding to advanced vision programming.
People shouldn't have to be attacked with guns for being "eclectic" and not worrying about what other people think. She made no threats and followed all the directions... which probably did NOT involve asking her to simply turn the shirt over to security at the first counter she stopped at. You know that ASKING somebody what they're doing without pointing an ACTUAL deadly weapon at them. Now these narrow minded cops are going to deprive the troops of somebody brilliant that can HELP them in their missions!! So who's the terrorist here?
Consider the LICENSE you get when you listen to the radio or watch broadcast TV. That is how the GPL would work. In short, the author holds all the cards. Lawyers keep trying to trip over the "free" part of GPL that it somehow makes a contract like other software EULAs which are really contracts exchanging use for money. GPL is like a radio performance or public show. You don't loose exclusive copyrights just because you perform your copyrighted song in a park for free? That would be silly. But that's what the lawyers in that one case tried to say about GPL. Or how about Adobe making PDF reader for free or Microsoft making Internet Explorer for free... they didn't receive any money so I can break the "contract" not to distribute the software and it's not copyright infringement? That wouldn't work.
a license is by definition one sided. There is no negotiation. The person receiving code is not given a choice to follow the license or not. That's why after sports games on TV they put the tag about the game footage being LICENSED for you to watch and not contracted. You already watched it, you can't not refuse the rest of the license terms later, they are just reminding you of the terms of their performance, which you didn't compensate them for, so there is no contract. There are two licenses in GPL. The first for USE of the code for free, the second for distribution of the code. By merely having the code you don't trigger the distribution requirement. That is only triggered when you distribute... and you don't compensate them in any way for this distribution so it's a LICENSE, not a contract.
I agree, patents and copyrights held by "dead" corporations should expire with the company. There should be no transfer of ownership of government "grants". There is a huge problem with zombie corporations. Look at the SCO case, they were built by people that buy up rights to sue other people from dead companies and do nothing. Making corporations DIE and the non-cash, non-physical assets go back to the public domain would go a long way to purging information from corporate control.
the 17 year term was from date of GRANT backdated to the time of filing and date of invention. That allowed all sorts of abuse by keeping the application in limbo for years then getting the patent when other people actually market devices. The alternative was to mimic the European and Japanese systems and make them 20 years from date of file. Then the incentive is to get the patent thru the system quickly and into production so you can make money before the clock runs out. The old system benefited waiting for years then pouncing... we're STILL paying for those bad patents with many of the big lawsuits that were kept quiet for years then sprung. In theory that should stop happening soon, but not soon enough.
the problem is that while algorithms are patentable, they are not required to be disclosed. That leads to "black box" that allows silly suits and no independent discovery. Think of the software problem this way: Instead of the thousands of mouse trap inventions imagine being allowed to hide the patent in a box that nobody can see inside... so you'd have a patent on "catching mice with a box" and that's what the software situation is. If an algorithm is patented, then the executable source code should be part of the patent, just like they used to have physical models made that somebody could examine and find a better way... with software their is no arguing as their "theory" covers "catching mice" and not a specific model of mouse trap.
The deal with PAYG is that you can CHOOSE to not pay the $30 if you're poor that month and just not talk on the phone as much. It's not a better deal per call, but a more flexible for your wallet on limited funds. Best part is that you can't go huge amounts OVER and get slapped with even more money you can't pay down. Because then they tack on late charges and if you take more than 2 months to pay they disconnect you and charge the contract at $200. With PAYG if you run out of money, you just don't get any calls.. no hidden charges or contract violations to slap you with $100's in overage. The cell phone companies BANK on people going over and missing payments for $20-$30 extra dollars a month.. that's why terms are so crazy and billing so awkward and error prone.
SUN has "converstions" where the community asks for things and Sun shoots them down because they conflict with Sun's plans for their PROPRIETARY distribution of StarOffice. What people want is an independent OpenOffice group that has it's mission to make the best product possible. Much like Mozilla and Eclipse they can grant SUN 100% first dibs on all the code they want. The problem is that people that might want to help out don't want their code going all to SUN first only to get canned into SUN's product and not the OSS project. It's a problem SUN needs to address. For instance there was a push to put pull out all the Java hooks and rewrite Python methods that the user could substitute instead so there wouldn't be the reliance on Java and the system could have a more common, unix-y feel... that seems to have gone away in favor of silly attempts to emulate Visual Basic.
seriously, why would he expect an iPod to work..that was baiting from the start. I stopped taking anything he said seriously after that. It shows he doesn't understand HOW iPods work and that they don't work at all without their special software. Why would they work under Linux if Apple clearly doesn't support it? That's like complaining that IE7 doesn't work on Mac OSX when Microsoft stopped shipping it! Yes, I understand the camera issue, but several cameras have issue following standards properly. I know my Kodak is easier to just pull the card out of than to sync as it's one of those cool SD/USB combo cards so its easier than finding the cord.
I understand Walt is the kind of user expecting to "buy" his way (or get fancy review systems loaded with software he's to cheap to buy handed to him) to computing bliss and not expect to learn anything he doesn't want to... that's fine, but his review of the Linux laptop was nothing more than a throw away to get people to stop asking with an "i told you so" attitude. The criticism was not useful, accurate, or constructive. Journalisticly, I've seen Slashdot trolls against Linux more thought out and better written.
This is similar to the situation wiht Mozilla when it was still owned by AOL and Netscape. All of the code has to be "owned" by SUN and that turns some people off, especially when SUN slows the direction of OO.org to further it's Java or StarOffice agenda rather than letting it go on it's own. I think people would like to see OpenOffice spun off to it's own organization like IBM did with ellipse or Netscape did with Mozilla. That way the community has "assurance" that the needs of the Open product are being meet first, and then Sun, IBM, etc can "mooch" with "first dibs" off that code... Much how Mozilla offers the Open version, but retains rights on the code to hire it out for proprietary purposes if people pay them money. The "core" would always be open and SUN would still have stake in StarOffice.
it's not a one-time thing. You have to pay per copy... other free software can't do that either. It's not about paying their bills, it's about legal requirements that certain parts of your software have to be secured, closed source to legally license things like CSS. The programs exist completely free and legal of COPYRIGHT. It's the combination of DMCA and Patents that make Linux extra difficult to implement in the USA. If the patent holder adds strings to use their code you can't even reverse engineer it legally anymore.
doesn't the problem come from the fact that the drivers are non-GPL friendly. The USER can use GNU sofware however they want so being GPL happy is not a concern if YOU download the drivers, but if you distribute a system with Nvidia drivers already installed the OEM gets into GPL trouble... or something like that. Also, I though that none of the dells included Nvidia cards, they were all Intel only even if the model included Nvidia as an option.
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As long as you don't come back what can they do about it? Once you're ON the Moon there's no laws but what you make. This is the classic case that Gundam always plays with. Just like North America, for the first 100 years or so space colonies will need support and supplies from Earth to continue operations. If they don't get spare parts or emergency help they'll die. Earth governments will continue to manipulate them as long as possible (much like England manipulated the USA) until they rebel.. it will be 1776 all over again. Those that have don't want to lose it and those that go and do want their lives for their own.. so the cycle repeats!
It doesn't matter if we DID it then, what matters is that nobody is there right now, the Moon is up for grabs to whoever can land on it. The USA believe it's ours... when we get around to it... We aren't there right now so maybe somebody else will get there and use those resources before we do!!!
China is where the USA was in 1890... We were stealing stuff from British inventors blind so the millionaires then could sell their wares here. IP was a joke and quality was non-existant (think of a world with NO formal practice of pharmacy,no FDA, no rule on making or selling ANYTHING!!! or even liability if you bought some new device and it killed you) That's where China is right now. Witness the tainted food scares much like the "patent medicine" of the late 19th century and for much the same reasons.
They'll send monks to make a nice little rock garden and rake out pretty patterns in the moon sand!!! Then they'll build a theme park!
I would think the focus on robots is to have the robots mining and building habitat and energy production facilities before people arrive. One thing we haven't mentioned is that resources have to be found and harvested before we can build anything. To build the simplest machines we need half the periodic table in fairly big quantities. That means finding something like and Iron mine and taking all the equipment to dig it out AND make steel alloys with you to build the next thing. Also Remember, half our technology is based on organic compounds... oils, wood, carbon compounds... and water based processes for chemical reactions and processing materials and generating power. The goal of a moon base would be to build and assemble factories and more spaceships but that's a ton of work that hasn't remotely been explored. I agree people could use the machines sent there first but it's a huge chicken-egg problem to get things usable.
but China has no problems sacrificing millions of people to starvation or bad quality resources if they need them for something more important to the furthering of China. They've had disasters of flooding that dwarf New Orleans... where they simply didn't bother to even try to evacuate cities and just let their people take their chances. When the US had it's "golden age" in the 50's and 60's we had vast untapped potential with both human and natural resources and plenty of security both food and military to allow us to persue them. We didn't divert funds from anywhere for things line the A-bomb or Moon landing. It was just use of resources lying around untapped. China is much different, they will have to fight for everything as they don't have vast natural resources untapped, but in their case people are cheap so they will get into space but be much more reckless and they'll kill (thru accidents from rushing or removing resources) a lot of people in the process. With the stuff they make for the USA they have more than enough technology, they don't have experience in space travel... but that's nothing recklessly launching rockets until they work can't fix. They don't have attention to detail in manufacturing, to get things precise every time, but then again the USA spends far to much time worrying about "safety" and budgets instead of launching rockets and reaching as far as we can because we are in front and not pushed to reach.
space travel, especially to the moon is OUR GIG... that's something the USA did that nobody else has done. It's a marvel as big as the Great Wall or discovering the Western Hemisphere. I think it will be GOOD if somebody else gets to the Moon before the USA does... it will put our politicians in their place to do Big Things for the sake of doing them.. not company profits.
but people don't USE internet that way. Most users, especially those in the country, aren't going to Youtube or downloading torrents all day. They are part of the click-and-read group. The want one page at a time to load quickly then sit and read it or whatever. You can share a LOT of clicks on a T1 line if nobody abuses it. (note: that's also why ISPs are being killed by video traffic as even when you're "online" under normal usage you only are downloading something 1/10 of the time you are connected)
he should be able to buy an ISDN link. They are horribly expensive for 128K but should work at just about any location with a phone line. Speed and stability is guaranteed.. but it is very expensive.
but originally, Microsoft was going to cut everybody off from XP completely. In my workplace, we'd LIKE Vista, but practically we need computers NOW and don't want to waste weeks proving out software for one PC. Paying for Vista now and getting XP also in the box is win-win for everybody. Win that M$ gets the credit for a Vista shipment so ISVs will develop faster. Customers are happy because they can use their PCs now... except for OEMs having to support and write drivers for hardware they were trying to upsell.
Public mischief is about intent, there was no intent there, and a good chunk of MIT and DOD contractors can vouch for that. That makes it "all or nothing" so they'll threaten her with "terrorism" to get her to plead. The best thing for the DA would be to walk away knowing she won't do it again.
Except after the fact the cops are saying to reporters she's lucky they didn't kill her. That is unprofessional and boarder line illegal. That makes any use of force over negotiation tainted by ill intent on their part. A smart lawyer will hold that against them later.
NO people should not have to be afraid of scaring other people. So her head is stuck so far in the clouds solving tricky engineering problems she forgets what other people thing... that's what AMERICA is all about!!!! She made a mistake taking a toy to the airport that scared the little sheeple but it's clearly not wrongdoing by any sense. By all accounts she wore the device for several weeks all over the place. She sounds like a true geek, into everything from welding to advanced vision programming.
People shouldn't have to be attacked with guns for being "eclectic" and not worrying about what other people think. She made no threats and followed all the directions... which probably did NOT involve asking her to simply turn the shirt over to security at the first counter she stopped at. You know that ASKING somebody what they're doing without pointing an ACTUAL deadly weapon at them. Now these narrow minded cops are going to deprive the troops of somebody brilliant that can HELP them in their missions!! So who's the terrorist here?
Consider the LICENSE you get when you listen to the radio or watch broadcast TV. That is how the GPL would work. In short, the author holds all the cards. Lawyers keep trying to trip over the "free" part of GPL that it somehow makes a contract like other software EULAs which are really contracts exchanging use for money. GPL is like a radio performance or public show. You don't loose exclusive copyrights just because you perform your copyrighted song in a park for free? That would be silly. But that's what the lawyers in that one case tried to say about GPL. Or how about Adobe making PDF reader for free or Microsoft making Internet Explorer for free... they didn't receive any money so I can break the "contract" not to distribute the software and it's not copyright infringement? That wouldn't work.
a license is by definition one sided. There is no negotiation. The person receiving code is not given a choice to follow the license or not. That's why after sports games on TV they put the tag about the game footage being LICENSED for you to watch and not contracted. You already watched it, you can't not refuse the rest of the license terms later, they are just reminding you of the terms of their performance, which you didn't compensate them for, so there is no contract. There are two licenses in GPL. The first for USE of the code for free, the second for distribution of the code. By merely having the code you don't trigger the distribution requirement. That is only triggered when you distribute... and you don't compensate them in any way for this distribution so it's a LICENSE, not a contract.
I agree, patents and copyrights held by "dead" corporations should expire with the company. There should be no transfer of ownership of government "grants". There is a huge problem with zombie corporations. Look at the SCO case, they were built by people that buy up rights to sue other people from dead companies and do nothing. Making corporations DIE and the non-cash, non-physical assets go back to the public domain would go a long way to purging information from corporate control.
the 17 year term was from date of GRANT backdated to the time of filing and date of invention. That allowed all sorts of abuse by keeping the application in limbo for years then getting the patent when other people actually market devices. The alternative was to mimic the European and Japanese systems and make them 20 years from date of file. Then the incentive is to get the patent thru the system quickly and into production so you can make money before the clock runs out. The old system benefited waiting for years then pouncing... we're STILL paying for those bad patents with many of the big lawsuits that were kept quiet for years then sprung. In theory that should stop happening soon, but not soon enough.
the problem is that while algorithms are patentable, they are not required to be disclosed. That leads to "black box" that allows silly suits and no independent discovery. Think of the software problem this way: Instead of the thousands of mouse trap inventions imagine being allowed to hide the patent in a box that nobody can see inside... so you'd have a patent on "catching mice with a box" and that's what the software situation is. If an algorithm is patented, then the executable source code should be part of the patent, just like they used to have physical models made that somebody could examine and find a better way... with software their is no arguing as their "theory" covers "catching mice" and not a specific model of mouse trap.
The deal with PAYG is that you can CHOOSE to not pay the $30 if you're poor that month and just not talk on the phone as much. It's not a better deal per call, but a more flexible for your wallet on limited funds. Best part is that you can't go huge amounts OVER and get slapped with even more money you can't pay down. Because then they tack on late charges and if you take more than 2 months to pay they disconnect you and charge the contract at $200. With PAYG if you run out of money, you just don't get any calls.. no hidden charges or contract violations to slap you with $100's in overage. The cell phone companies BANK on people going over and missing payments for $20-$30 extra dollars a month.. that's why terms are so crazy and billing so awkward and error prone.
SUN has "converstions" where the community asks for things and Sun shoots them down because they conflict with Sun's plans for their PROPRIETARY distribution of StarOffice. What people want is an independent OpenOffice group that has it's mission to make the best product possible. Much like Mozilla and Eclipse they can grant SUN 100% first dibs on all the code they want. The problem is that people that might want to help out don't want their code going all to SUN first only to get canned into SUN's product and not the OSS project. It's a problem SUN needs to address. For instance there was a push to put pull out all the Java hooks and rewrite Python methods that the user could substitute instead so there wouldn't be the reliance on Java and the system could have a more common, unix-y feel... that seems to have gone away in favor of silly attempts to emulate Visual Basic.
seriously, why would he expect an iPod to work..that was baiting from the start. I stopped taking anything he said seriously after that. It shows he doesn't understand HOW iPods work and that they don't work at all without their special software. Why would they work under Linux if Apple clearly doesn't support it? That's like complaining that IE7 doesn't work on Mac OSX when Microsoft stopped shipping it! Yes, I understand the camera issue, but several cameras have issue following standards properly. I know my Kodak is easier to just pull the card out of than to sync as it's one of those cool SD/USB combo cards so its easier than finding the cord.
I understand Walt is the kind of user expecting to "buy" his way (or get fancy review systems loaded with software he's to cheap to buy handed to him) to computing bliss and not expect to learn anything he doesn't want to... that's fine, but his review of the Linux laptop was nothing more than a throw away to get people to stop asking with an "i told you so" attitude. The criticism was not useful, accurate, or constructive. Journalisticly, I've seen Slashdot trolls against Linux more thought out and better written.
This is similar to the situation wiht Mozilla when it was still owned by AOL and Netscape. All of the code has to be "owned" by SUN and that turns some people off, especially when SUN slows the direction of OO.org to further it's Java or StarOffice agenda rather than letting it go on it's own. I think people would like to see OpenOffice spun off to it's own organization like IBM did with ellipse or Netscape did with Mozilla. That way the community has "assurance" that the needs of the Open product are being meet first, and then Sun, IBM, etc can "mooch" with "first dibs" off that code... Much how Mozilla offers the Open version, but retains rights on the code to hire it out for proprietary purposes if people pay them money. The "core" would always be open and SUN would still have stake in StarOffice.
it's not a one-time thing. You have to pay per copy... other free software can't do that either. It's not about paying their bills, it's about legal requirements that certain parts of your software have to be secured, closed source to legally license things like CSS. The programs exist completely free and legal of COPYRIGHT. It's the combination of DMCA and Patents that make Linux extra difficult to implement in the USA. If the patent holder adds strings to use their code you can't even reverse engineer it legally anymore.
doesn't the problem come from the fact that the drivers are non-GPL friendly. The USER can use GNU sofware however they want so being GPL happy is not a concern if YOU download the drivers, but if you distribute a system with Nvidia drivers already installed the OEM gets into GPL trouble... or something like that. Also, I though that none of the dells included Nvidia cards, they were all Intel only even if the model included Nvidia as an option.
Best RIAA post all day!