I disagree with the slant of the article that this is a scandal. Have the Chicago Bulls been just as good without Jordan? Of course not. Special people are special. You are lucky when you get them, but most of the time you have to work around not having them.
When you don't have those special people because they were driven out without good cause... then yes, it's scandal.
No, it couldn't -- if you force insurance companies to accept people with preexisting conditions without making any other changes, you put them out of business; folks just won't get insured in that case until they get sick.
Republicans were presenting limited change, one bill at a time, that were very much non-sausage.
I don't accept the truth of that statement, particularly inasmuch as it implies that the "limited change" presented would have achieved the required result. Unless you're looking to make an extended defense of that implied claim, however, let's agree to disagree at least somewhat and move on to the meat.
As a political reality, important and essential elements of the bill could not have been passed in bite-sized pieces.
You can't provide universal access without regard to preexisting conditions without an individual mandate. Splitting apart the components that cost money from the components that pay for them is also a loser -- the inevitable result being the bread-and-circuses components passing easily and the parts that actually fund them being endlessly mired in controversy over whether that funding should have been done differently. At that point, you've got a massive piece of legislation regardless, and all massive legislation is sausage regardless of the party in power by the time it gets passed. Remember the amount of pork in the initial stimulus bill passed by a Republican government and signed by a Republican president, or for that matter the pork in the Patriot Act?
(It's an interesting factoid that the origin of the comparison between legislation and sausage dates back to Otto von Bismarck -- a staunch conservative who, among other things, was responsible for introducing Germany's Health Insurance Act of 1883 as a measure designed to reduce the public appeal of socialism; it's also notable that Germany's system has both public and private insurance funds available, and that the public ones have neither driven the private ones out of business nor bankrupted the country).
And again -- without the Republicans willing to get into the fray and agree to compromise on less-unacceptable legislation, the only folks the Democratic leadership had to compromise with to get it passed were... *drumroll* other Democrats. No wonder that the concessions made it passed were ones that Republicans didn't much care for -- if they'd been willing to play, the market for votes would presumably have had some "less expensive" compromises on the table simply by virtue of the set of available votes being less scarce. Simple economics -- by virtue of the Republicans staying out of the sellers' market for compromises, the price went up, and it's being paid for by we the people. Moreover, by going as far as they did in campaigning against the bill (flatly lying to the public on "socialist takeovers", death panels, roads to fascism and such), they made even the compromises needed to get even Democratic votes more expensive than would have been the case otherwise.
I still think this bill is worth it, even as it is... but it would have been better, perhaps considerably better, if the Republicans had been willing to play ball. Maybe we'd have tort reform instead of a few individual states getting sweetheart deals. Maybe we'd be paying for it differently. We don't know, because the Republicans decided to play the role the Dems have been caricaturing them in, as the "Party of No".
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or - more exactly - with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?
Without a "loyal opposition" willing and able to actually engage and do their best to make majority-party proposals more acceptable, how do you expect this process to happen? If the opposition party digs in its heels and insists that that everyone who disagrees with them is Hitler, then anything will either (1) not happen at all, or (2) happen despite them as if they hadn't been there. That second option is no better than having a single-party government, and it's the opposition's own fault; we need an opposition, but one that's willing to genuinely engage and work in good faith.
Preventative care is a myth. Patients don't want it and will not use it. Those that do use it are going to experience a cost far greater than the benefit due to all the overhead and false-positives. They will soon stop using it, unless there's some kind of anticipated need for it.
Mmm. I find that I make use of preventative care all the time now that it's conveniently accessible (my current very-large employer has an in-house clinic next door to the company cafeteria), but let me recount some of my personal history, such that you can perhaps better understand why I'm gung-ho about health care reform. Admittedly, it's pretty disjoint from the economic arguments I gave earlier.
When my wife and I married, I was working for a tiny startup that couldn't afford health insurance, and she was recently unemployed. The company started doing better, after a while, and began offering benefits. Within a few months after this, she gets severe abdominal pain. Her first instinct was to stay at home and try to wait it out -- same way she was accustomed to dealing with everything, having no or very poor insurance. But hey -- we had benefits now -- so I took her to the doctor, who sent her directly to the medical imaging center, which sent her directly to the hospital to go into surgery, as she had an appendix that was about to rupture.
If the timing had been just a little different -- if she'd tried to do the stoic wait-it-out thing for even another half-day -- there's a very good chance I'd be a widower right now.
A few years pass, I find blood in my urine, and eventually have a benign tumor removed from my bladder. I think about leaving that still-struggling small startup to join a still-smaller venture some friends are running, and find that I'm effectively uninsurable except as part of a large company's risk pool... which is part of why today, I'm working at a very big company with very good benefits, despite having had a few good ideas in the interim that might have been something worth starting a new venture over. Republicans talk about representing the best interests of small business owners? I might be a small-business owner right now if I were able to buy decent health coverage on my own.
I don't expect any kind of resurgence of the bladder tumor issue -- heck, I'd gladly allow an insurance company to disclaim responsibility for any further bladder problems if that's what it would take to be able to buy individual coverage -- but I'm still stuck where I am right now, forced by financial necessity to work for whatever form of Da Man is willing to put me in a large enough risk pool to make me insurable. The no-preexisting-condition-denial + individual-mandate system means I can buy my way into a larger pool on the exchange, decoupling my ability to purchase insurance from whom I happen to work for at the time.
So -- there's my personal stake in the issue. Sure, making legislation is like making sausage -- there's lots that's not pleasant to know about involved in the process -- but I find it hard to see what was recently passed as anything other than a massive win for the public as a whole.
Especially when the people in question are busy not buying health care on their own (as most uninsured young adults choose not to buy it).
That's a problem, though -- having the young adults out of the risk pool makes health insurance more expensive for everyone else! Instead of having them mostly having no problems at all (and thus missing their payments into the pool lacking corresponding payouts) and then having massive externalized expenses every time one of them ends up in the hospital for something that could have been handled more affordably if they were seeing a doctor regularly (or, worse, developing a chronic condition -- which then later ends up as a shared cost once they join a big employer and end up in a risk pool regardless), getting them into the system early means that (1) when they're healthy, they're making everyone else's bills lower by paying into the system without many payments going out, and (2) when something that could be a major problem later is caught because they're getting regular preventative care, massive bills down the line can be avoided.
(On a related note -- I don't recall that being much of a "choice" back when I was an uninsured young adult; I'd use the words "financial necessity" instead. Being able to stay on my parents' insurance longer, as this bill allows, would have been a major benefit -- and would have meant that my health insurance would have still been paid for by, ya know, private individuals, not off a public subsidy).
Unfortunately, they're actually getting approval for at least some of this from the bankruptcy court. (The mobile business they claimed would eventually keep them afloat even with the UNIX business sinking? Selling it to Darl for $50K, and with the court's approval).
You have a chicken/egg problem here. The problem is that no one has any use for finished goods in space. No one lives there, remember?
Consumer goods, certainly.
On the other hand -- equipment and infrastructure for asteroid mining, large-scale solar power collection systems (for beaming to Earth, or powering light-sail-based probes, or generating antimatter [see analysis by Robert Forward on feasibility of this one -- he makes a strong case that antimatter generation could become a productive activity if treated as a profit-driven engineering problem rather than strictly the domain of "big science"]) are rather different activities.
You mean, aside from where I pointed out that colonizing the moon costs a ridiculous amount of money and doesn't get you anything? And you haven't even addressed the main objection, which is that colonizing Mars is just as useless as colonizing the moon, only even more ludicrously expensive due to the great distance involved.
No doubt that's true, but that doesn't stop people (including, for some reason, the most recent US president hailing from the supposedly anti-big-government political party) from setting it as a goal regardless. If we take it as given that going to Mars is a goal (never mind the rationality thereof), then using the moon as a waypoint makes sense.
But we could manufacture stuff on the moon and sell it
If you're manufacturing things on the moon for use on Earth, it's harder to justify, yes. If you're manufacturing things on the moon for use outside the gravity well, that's a different story; ship your production equipment out of the gravity well once, and then you don't need to continually lift your finished goods.
Even if we did, why not just go straight to Mars and learn there? It would be cheaper in the long run.
Kill your colonists even once for something which could have been salvageable if it weren't for the distances involved, and never mind the funding and engineering problems involved in trying the more ambitious project from the get-go -- you've lost massive amounts of public support as well.
Do you have any analysis to point to to the effect that using the moon as a lower-risk, lower-cost testbed environment is counterproductive in this case?
As with any interesting challenge, finding reasons it can't be done is easy. Finding ways it could be done is much more interesting. Consider taking the other approach, eh? I'm not saying that either I or Heinlein have come anywhere near to proposing solutions to the challenges at hand, but let's start with what we've got:
land (plus air, plus a dome to hold the air in)
Underground. No need for a dome to hold in air. Less concern about radiation. Far smaller exposed surfaces where holding air is an issue.
water (that you have to pipe from the poles to the equatorial regions where the sun actually shines)
Or you can pipe the electricity from the areas where the sun shines, since you're doing your farming underground. Or you can use a nuclear power source. Wasteful, sure -- but electricity is cheap.
fertilizer (that you have to ship from earth, as the moon is not particularly rich in fixed nitrogen)
May well be a showstopper; I haven't done research on the subject. Keep in mind that we're looking at a timescale where -- even if there aren't major technical improvements in lift vehicles -- privatization will have brought costs down substantially.
tractors (that have to be shipped up from earth)
If we're running a penal colony, substituting manual labor for machines is not necessarily a blocker. Keep in mind that our manual labor force is a profit center -- we're not paying them for their work, we're getting paid to keep them confined. Yes, this means we need to spend some time re-engineering solutions for which fast project completion and safety were picked as the priorities to instead have low cost as their primary driver. Engineering problems exist to be solved.
farmers (that have to be shipped up from earth, and require an enormous amount of life support equipment)
Not so much individual (as opposed to strictly large-scale) life support equipment required for folks who spend their lives underground. If one only transports folks with life sentences, that also reduces the care needed to ensure their ability to eventually re-acclimate to full gravity.
grain elevators (that have to be assembled on site from materials shipped up from earth)
See above again about not needing to use modern farming techniques if we have (effectively) slave labor on hand.
rockets for distribution
Chemical rockets for bringing things down? Seems excessively wasteful, when just giving a shove with a mass driver and letting gravity handle the rest would do. Shipping things down the gravity well, particularly when they don't need to stay within human-survivable G levels or to use a particularly fast or direct route home, is a much easier problem than shipping things up.
Again -- fiction, sure... but I find it far more interesting and entertaining to look at the ideas which are salvageable or plausible rather than those that aren't.
But the prisoners are resistant to having all the water extracted from them, so you have an unsustainable, open system.
Why would you need to extract water from the prisoners? You're getting labor out of them, so they have far more value alive. When they die, certainly, there's much to reuse -- but "returning to the soil" (as water and fertilizer) has a great deal of precedence, so I hardly see why it would be objectionable.
As for it being an open system, quite true -- the discovery that the readily available water would run out and they'd find themselves starving in less than a decade was a key factor in Heinlein's prisoners' revolt.
And assuming you get over that hurdle, wouldn't you have to ship up more kg of prisoners than you ship down kg of wheat?
Pardon? Set up a self-sustaining economy (water and energy being the two ongoing inputs -- the former being a limited natural resource on the moon and the latter being easy to generate) and the prisoners can feed themselves using the food they grow and water they mine, raise families, build more tunnels as-needed for additional living space, and otherwise provide for themselves. There's a bit of handwaving here regarding availability of other plant nutrients -- would need to do research on composition of moon rocks and cost to import any materials which aren't locally available -- but inasmuch as we're limiting our discussion to water, I don't see the feasibility concerns.
If they're going all the way to the moon and back just for water
Water is one of the key things you'd need to run a settlement for other purposes -- a great deal of it is required to maintain an ecosystem (remember, you want plants for both food and air), it's extremely expensive to lift out of the gravity well, and it can be trivially broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are useful on their own. No, ice is worth far more up there than down here; why would you ship it down (at least, without first producing a useful product out of it, thus increasing its value)?
said arbitrator being paid by the insurance company.
They're rarely that obvious.
No, the arbiters are chosen by a fair-sounding process, and paid for out of both parties' pockets or by the loser... but it just so happens that there's a confidentiality clause in the contract, so you as an individual can't find out how the arbitrators have ruled with respect to other consumers in the past, whereas the company knows exactly how each arbitrator has ruled with respect to it as an individual organization in the past, and is able to determine which it will accept on that basis.
Sure, it's leading to a place you happen to disagree with going to -- but going up against all the congresscritters getting jobs (and thus votes) off the Constellation program is unquestionably a gutsy move.
Moreover, I think it's the right one. Getting private investment into the business of shuttling things in and out of orbit and freeing up NASA's resources for "leaner, meaner" scientific work is exactly the right place to be going. Look at what kind of ROI we've gotten on the rovers; if NASA is going to be doing science, let them do science rather than being forever in the overpriced transport business.
Of course, "stealing confidential data" (from a non-government source), where the confidentiality is self-defined by the owner, is exactly the kind of DMCA type violation we regularly decry here. What you (and TFA) are suggesting is that the act of acquiring the data is a crime in and of itself, rather than the criminal use of the data.
These are trivially distinguishable, even in concept.
In the case of hacking into an external system, one is (a) making false representations to a third party (via their computer systems), and/or (b) putting expense and/or damages onto a third party (ie. time spent by staff analyzing and responding to an attempted attack).
In the case of cracking a protection layer around a piece of software or data which an individual "owns", by contrast, there is no interaction with any third-party (presuming that the work is being done within an isolated sandbox); thus, no false representations, and no ability to incur 3rd-party expense.
While other points of distinction are certainly possible, I believe this is sufficient to explain why a reasonable individual can consider laws against hacking into 3rd-party systems just while simultaneously considering laws such as those aspects of the DMCA which can prohibit tinkering with one's own property unjust.
No, because the government does not pay you back for money you donate; rather, they simply don't tax you on that money.
So -- you donate $100, your tax rate is 30%, you save $30 on your taxes, you come out in the exact same situation you would have been in if you hadn't earned that $100 in the first place.
Make sense? Other taxpayers aren't paying for your donation -- you just aren't paying in with the labor you spent earning the money you donated.
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
Vendors selling knock-off print cartridges have been allowed to use code copied outright from legitimate cartridges in order to fulfill a "security protocol" between the cartridge and printer -- a finding which has held up on appeal.
You might also find Groklaw's analysis of whether the set of values found in the SysV UNIX headers (not the comments, but the functional portions) are copyrightable interesting. Hint: they're not; this is because there's no artistic choice in making them what they are -- their form is precisely dictated by their function.
In the same way, the minimal necessary set of similarities between a 3rd-party MySQL driver and the official one compromises the MySQL protocol, and that protocol (as opposed to documentation describing it or code implementing it at an abstract enough level that the implementer has choices to make in the process) is uncopyrightable for the reason given above.
This is about scanning library books, not collecting PDFs -- but if this settlement passes, you'll be able to do the same thing as Google.
However, doing the same thing as Google will require that you collect revenues for any purchases of these scans (and remit them to the copyright holders should they be identified), and recognize and exclude any commercially available books, and likewise obey a huge number of other restrictions and limitations.
I'm not convinced of the legality of this settlement -- but it's outstanding public policy, and so I hope that the legality gets worked out (through act of Congress if need be, though that seems unlikely in the near future).
Slashdot Mirror
When you don't have those special people because they were driven out without good cause... then yes, it's scandal.
If they were tied to a single computing device, or a single company's computing device, you might have a point.
You can run Linux on paper and pencil if you have enough time. :)
If it's tied to a paid product (Windows), it ain't free.
Maybe, or maybe not; Yelp's filter always shows reviews to their authors, even if hiding them from everyone else.
No, it couldn't -- if you force insurance companies to accept people with preexisting conditions without making any other changes, you put them out of business; folks just won't get insured in that case until they get sick.
I don't accept the truth of that statement, particularly inasmuch as it implies that the "limited change" presented would have achieved the required result. Unless you're looking to make an extended defense of that implied claim, however, let's agree to disagree at least somewhat and move on to the meat.
As a political reality, important and essential elements of the bill could not have been passed in bite-sized pieces.
You can't provide universal access without regard to preexisting conditions without an individual mandate. Splitting apart the components that cost money from the components that pay for them is also a loser -- the inevitable result being the bread-and-circuses components passing easily and the parts that actually fund them being endlessly mired in controversy over whether that funding should have been done differently. At that point, you've got a massive piece of legislation regardless, and all massive legislation is sausage regardless of the party in power by the time it gets passed. Remember the amount of pork in the initial stimulus bill passed by a Republican government and signed by a Republican president, or for that matter the pork in the Patriot Act?
(It's an interesting factoid that the origin of the comparison between legislation and sausage dates back to Otto von Bismarck -- a staunch conservative who, among other things, was responsible for introducing Germany's Health Insurance Act of 1883 as a measure designed to reduce the public appeal of socialism; it's also notable that Germany's system has both public and private insurance funds available, and that the public ones have neither driven the private ones out of business nor bankrupted the country).
And again -- without the Republicans willing to get into the fray and agree to compromise on less-unacceptable legislation, the only folks the Democratic leadership had to compromise with to get it passed were... *drumroll* other Democrats. No wonder that the concessions made it passed were ones that Republicans didn't much care for -- if they'd been willing to play, the market for votes would presumably have had some "less expensive" compromises on the table simply by virtue of the set of available votes being less scarce. Simple economics -- by virtue of the Republicans staying out of the sellers' market for compromises, the price went up, and it's being paid for by we the people. Moreover, by going as far as they did in campaigning against the bill (flatly lying to the public on "socialist takeovers", death panels, roads to fascism and such), they made even the compromises needed to get even Democratic votes more expensive than would have been the case otherwise.
I still think this bill is worth it, even as it is... but it would have been better, perhaps considerably better, if the Republicans had been willing to play ball. Maybe we'd have tort reform instead of a few individual states getting sweetheart deals. Maybe we'd be paying for it differently. We don't know, because the Republicans decided to play the role the Dems have been caricaturing them in, as the "Party of No".
Wasn't desired by whom? Let me quote Bush Sr's former speechwriter:
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or - more exactly - with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?
Without a "loyal opposition" willing and able to actually engage and do their best to make majority-party proposals more acceptable, how do you expect this process to happen? If the opposition party digs in its heels and insists that that everyone who disagrees with them is Hitler, then anything will either (1) not happen at all, or (2) happen despite them as if they hadn't been there. That second option is no better than having a single-party government, and it's the opposition's own fault; we need an opposition, but one that's willing to genuinely engage and work in good faith.
Mmm. I find that I make use of preventative care all the time now that it's conveniently accessible (my current very-large employer has an in-house clinic next door to the company cafeteria), but let me recount some of my personal history, such that you can perhaps better understand why I'm gung-ho about health care reform. Admittedly, it's pretty disjoint from the economic arguments I gave earlier.
When my wife and I married, I was working for a tiny startup that couldn't afford health insurance, and she was recently unemployed. The company started doing better, after a while, and began offering benefits. Within a few months after this, she gets severe abdominal pain. Her first instinct was to stay at home and try to wait it out -- same way she was accustomed to dealing with everything, having no or very poor insurance. But hey -- we had benefits now -- so I took her to the doctor, who sent her directly to the medical imaging center, which sent her directly to the hospital to go into surgery, as she had an appendix that was about to rupture.
If the timing had been just a little different -- if she'd tried to do the stoic wait-it-out thing for even another half-day -- there's a very good chance I'd be a widower right now.
A few years pass, I find blood in my urine, and eventually have a benign tumor removed from my bladder. I think about leaving that still-struggling small startup to join a still-smaller venture some friends are running, and find that I'm effectively uninsurable except as part of a large company's risk pool... which is part of why today, I'm working at a very big company with very good benefits, despite having had a few good ideas in the interim that might have been something worth starting a new venture over. Republicans talk about representing the best interests of small business owners? I might be a small-business owner right now if I were able to buy decent health coverage on my own.
I don't expect any kind of resurgence of the bladder tumor issue -- heck, I'd gladly allow an insurance company to disclaim responsibility for any further bladder problems if that's what it would take to be able to buy individual coverage -- but I'm still stuck where I am right now, forced by financial necessity to work for whatever form of Da Man is willing to put me in a large enough risk pool to make me insurable. The no-preexisting-condition-denial + individual-mandate system means I can buy my way into a larger pool on the exchange, decoupling my ability to purchase insurance from whom I happen to work for at the time.
So -- there's my personal stake in the issue. Sure, making legislation is like making sausage -- there's lots that's not pleasant to know about involved in the process -- but I find it hard to see what was recently passed as anything other than a massive win for the public as a whole.
That's a problem, though -- having the young adults out of the risk pool makes health insurance more expensive for everyone else! Instead of having them mostly having no problems at all (and thus missing their payments into the pool lacking corresponding payouts) and then having massive externalized expenses every time one of them ends up in the hospital for something that could have been handled more affordably if they were seeing a doctor regularly (or, worse, developing a chronic condition -- which then later ends up as a shared cost once they join a big employer and end up in a risk pool regardless), getting them into the system early means that (1) when they're healthy, they're making everyone else's bills lower by paying into the system without many payments going out, and (2) when something that could be a major problem later is caught because they're getting regular preventative care, massive bills down the line can be avoided.
(On a related note -- I don't recall that being much of a "choice" back when I was an uninsured young adult; I'd use the words "financial necessity" instead. Being able to stay on my parents' insurance longer, as this bill allows, would have been a major benefit -- and would have meant that my health insurance would have still been paid for by, ya know, private individuals, not off a public subsidy).
Unfortunately, they're actually getting approval for at least some of this from the bankruptcy court. (The mobile business they claimed would eventually keep them afloat even with the UNIX business sinking? Selling it to Darl for $50K, and with the court's approval).
Consumer goods, certainly.
On the other hand -- equipment and infrastructure for asteroid mining, large-scale solar power collection systems (for beaming to Earth, or powering light-sail-based probes, or generating antimatter [see analysis by Robert Forward on feasibility of this one -- he makes a strong case that antimatter generation could become a productive activity if treated as a profit-driven engineering problem rather than strictly the domain of "big science"]) are rather different activities.
No doubt that's true, but that doesn't stop people (including, for some reason, the most recent US president hailing from the supposedly anti-big-government political party) from setting it as a goal regardless. If we take it as given that going to Mars is a goal (never mind the rationality thereof), then using the moon as a waypoint makes sense.
If you're manufacturing things on the moon for use on Earth, it's harder to justify, yes. If you're manufacturing things on the moon for use outside the gravity well, that's a different story; ship your production equipment out of the gravity well once, and then you don't need to continually lift your finished goods.
Kill your colonists even once for something which could have been salvageable if it weren't for the distances involved, and never mind the funding and engineering problems involved in trying the more ambitious project from the get-go -- you've lost massive amounts of public support as well.
Do you have any analysis to point to to the effect that using the moon as a lower-risk, lower-cost testbed environment is counterproductive in this case?
As with any interesting challenge, finding reasons it can't be done is easy. Finding ways it could be done is much more interesting. Consider taking the other approach, eh? I'm not saying that either I or Heinlein have come anywhere near to proposing solutions to the challenges at hand, but let's start with what we've got:
Underground. No need for a dome to hold in air. Less concern about radiation. Far smaller exposed surfaces where holding air is an issue.
Or you can pipe the electricity from the areas where the sun shines, since you're doing your farming underground. Or you can use a nuclear power source. Wasteful, sure -- but electricity is cheap.
May well be a showstopper; I haven't done research on the subject. Keep in mind that we're looking at a timescale where -- even if there aren't major technical improvements in lift vehicles -- privatization will have brought costs down substantially.
If we're running a penal colony, substituting manual labor for machines is not necessarily a blocker. Keep in mind that our manual labor force is a profit center -- we're not paying them for their work, we're getting paid to keep them confined. Yes, this means we need to spend some time re-engineering solutions for which fast project completion and safety were picked as the priorities to instead have low cost as their primary driver. Engineering problems exist to be solved.
Not so much individual (as opposed to strictly large-scale) life support equipment required for folks who spend their lives underground. If one only transports folks with life sentences, that also reduces the care needed to ensure their ability to eventually re-acclimate to full gravity.
See above again about not needing to use modern farming techniques if we have (effectively) slave labor on hand.
Chemical rockets for bringing things down? Seems excessively wasteful, when just giving a shove with a mass driver and letting gravity handle the rest would do. Shipping things down the gravity well, particularly when they don't need to stay within human-survivable G levels or to use a particularly fast or direct route home, is a much easier problem than shipping things up.
Again -- fiction, sure... but I find it far more interesting and entertaining to look at the ideas which are salvageable or plausible rather than those that aren't.
Why would you need to extract water from the prisoners? You're getting labor out of them, so they have far more value alive. When they die, certainly, there's much to reuse -- but "returning to the soil" (as water and fertilizer) has a great deal of precedence, so I hardly see why it would be objectionable.
As for it being an open system, quite true -- the discovery that the readily available water would run out and they'd find themselves starving in less than a decade was a key factor in Heinlein's prisoners' revolt.
Pardon? Set up a self-sustaining economy (water and energy being the two ongoing inputs -- the former being a limited natural resource on the moon and the latter being easy to generate) and the prisoners can feed themselves using the food they grow and water they mine, raise families, build more tunnels as-needed for additional living space, and otherwise provide for themselves. There's a bit of handwaving here regarding availability of other plant nutrients -- would need to do research on composition of moon rocks and cost to import any materials which aren't locally available -- but inasmuch as we're limiting our discussion to water, I don't see the feasibility concerns.
Water is one of the key things you'd need to run a settlement for other purposes -- a great deal of it is required to maintain an ecosystem (remember, you want plants for both food and air), it's extremely expensive to lift out of the gravity well, and it can be trivially broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are useful on their own. No, ice is worth far more up there than down here; why would you ship it down (at least, without first producing a useful product out of it, thus increasing its value)?
Slandering Heinlein... *shakes head*.
They're rarely that obvious.
No, the arbiters are chosen by a fair-sounding process, and paid for out of both parties' pockets or by the loser... but it just so happens that there's a confidentiality clause in the contract, so you as an individual can't find out how the arbitrators have ruled with respect to other consumers in the past, whereas the company knows exactly how each arbitrator has ruled with respect to it as an individual organization in the past, and is able to determine which it will accept on that basis.
Sure, it's leading to a place you happen to disagree with going to -- but going up against all the congresscritters getting jobs (and thus votes) off the Constellation program is unquestionably a gutsy move.
Moreover, I think it's the right one. Getting private investment into the business of shuttling things in and out of orbit and freeing up NASA's resources for "leaner, meaner" scientific work is exactly the right place to be going. Look at what kind of ROI we've gotten on the rovers; if NASA is going to be doing science, let them do science rather than being forever in the overpriced transport business.
These are trivially distinguishable, even in concept.
In the case of hacking into an external system, one is (a) making false representations to a third party (via their computer systems), and/or (b) putting expense and/or damages onto a third party (ie. time spent by staff analyzing and responding to an attempted attack).
In the case of cracking a protection layer around a piece of software or data which an individual "owns", by contrast, there is no interaction with any third-party (presuming that the work is being done within an isolated sandbox); thus, no false representations, and no ability to incur 3rd-party expense.
While other points of distinction are certainly possible, I believe this is sufficient to explain why a reasonable individual can consider laws against hacking into 3rd-party systems just while simultaneously considering laws such as those aspects of the DMCA which can prohibit tinkering with one's own property unjust.
No, because the government does not pay you back for money you donate; rather, they simply don't tax you on that money.
So -- you donate $100, your tax rate is 30%, you save $30 on your taxes, you come out in the exact same situation you would have been in if you hadn't earned that $100 in the first place.
Make sense? Other taxpayers aren't paying for your donation -- you just aren't paying in with the labor you spent earning the money you donated.
I gave you everything you needed to look up some on-point rulings elsewhere, but to make it more explicit, here's the print cartridge case, and . See also section 1201(f)(3) of the DMCA, which explicitly permits reverse engineering for purposes of interoperability. To make it even more clear, see Title 17, Circular 92, Chapter 1, Section 102, which lays it out explicitly:
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
Clear enough?
Vendors selling knock-off print cartridges have been allowed to use code copied outright from legitimate cartridges in order to fulfill a "security protocol" between the cartridge and printer -- a finding which has held up on appeal.
You might also find Groklaw's analysis of whether the set of values found in the SysV UNIX headers (not the comments, but the functional portions) are copyrightable interesting. Hint: they're not; this is because there's no artistic choice in making them what they are -- their form is precisely dictated by their function.
In the same way, the minimal necessary set of similarities between a 3rd-party MySQL driver and the official one compromises the MySQL protocol, and that protocol (as opposed to documentation describing it or code implementing it at an abstract enough level that the implementer has choices to make in the process) is uncopyrightable for the reason given above.
This is about scanning library books, not collecting PDFs -- but if this settlement passes, you'll be able to do the same thing as Google.
However, doing the same thing as Google will require that you collect revenues for any purchases of these scans (and remit them to the copyright holders should they be identified), and recognize and exclude any commercially available books, and likewise obey a huge number of other restrictions and limitations.
I'm not convinced of the legality of this settlement -- but it's outstanding public policy, and so I hope that the legality gets worked out (through act of Congress if need be, though that seems unlikely in the near future).
Because media reports are directly contrary to that speculation?