Funny story about that. Leland Stanford and his wife went to Massachusetts hoping they could make a fairly substantial donation to Harvard University, on the order of a major new building or something along that line (he was part-owner of Union Pacific Railroad, among other business interests that got him a fairly large pot of money). Apparently their son was a Harvard alumnus and had an unfortunate accident that ended his life prematurely, so the donation was going to be in the name of their son.
Perhaps because they had to travel cross-country in order to make the donation or some other issue, when they show up on campus they were dressed in rather ordinary clothes and the folks in Massachusetts had never heard of the guy (in spite of his being the former governor of California at the time). The president of Harvard basically let Stanford and his wife wait at the entrance of his office all day, putting the guy off and not wanting to really deal with what he thought was a couple of hicks.
When they finally met with the president of Harvard, they explained the proposition to donate enough money to buy a new building. Thinking this couple was of more humble means, he tried to put them off by explaining the price of a new building and what it would cost to build one. After hearing the amount, Mrs. Stanford turned to her husband and said essentially "Is that all dear? Why don't we just build a whole new university instead?"
1) Did he use any third party GPL code in his project? 2) Was the project done 'for hire', and if it was, was the contract free of any licensing restrictions? (e.g. the company didn't ask for ownership of the code produced)
If the answer to any of the above questions is "yes", then he has a case, and he should seriously consider getting a lawyer (and/or the EFF?) to take a look at it.
Even if there wasn't a contract, it still becomes murky as there is a presumption that the employer would own any software produced by its employees, or at least have rights to distribute that software under any terms they desire including relicensing that software. That doesn't prohibit the former employee from also using that software and having unlimited rights to use and distribute that software (even perhaps to a competitor under proprietary licenses) but I don't see how you can prohibit the former employer from using the software or distributing it, at least not without setting a huge precedent that would get many "friend of the court" briefs from major software development houses if it got to a precedent setting level like an appellate court of some kind. The deck is stacked against a would-be former employee to prohibit distribution of this software by the former employer and any such precedent would be seen as "dangerous" to most software companies.
The point about the GPL'd software from 3rd parties is a more valid point, and one that while it won't stop the former employer from distributing the software on their own as a fork, it might put a monkey wrench into relicensing the software. It is precisely for this reason that many software companies don't like GPL'd software as "contamination" of their proprietary projects can happen. Some development houses simply won't hire developers who have worked in open source projects explicitly because they are "tainted" and through some paranoia feel anything they write has been touched by somebody else's GPL'd code.
It's scary when we use the word author to describe an author who has no rights over what he has produced.
Welcome to the world of works-for-hire. It stinks as there are some software projects I would love to release into the world and do things that currently are unavailable.... simply because I don't have the right to release that software. I even have the source code and the compilers to make the software work, but I don't have the copyright authority to release the stuff.
What is being suggested by the OP is that this guy wants to "force" his former employer to relinquish any copyright claim upon the software he wrote while he was employed by them. Unless there is an explicit disclaimer made by the former employer, I really don't see how any such claim can be refuted.... which really is the crux of the problem.
The burden of proof is for the employee to prove that he developed this software "off the clock" and that he was paid an hourly wage where strict accounting of when he was "on the clock" and "on the premises" was being kept track by the employer. Most programmers are salaried employees (not all of them) where time cards are not kept and you are presumed to be working for the company 24/7 even if you have some "personal time" to do your own thing.
Being salaried also cuts both ways, where the employer can't expect you to show up at certain times and work certain hours, even though being a prick about that can cost you promotions or be grounds for termination due to insubordination.
Regardless, a typical judge in this case would very likely rule that the employer has the rights to the software, and would consider it to be a reasonable solution in this situation that both the former employee and the employer have unlimited rights to the software. That includes the ability to re-license the software to their own purposes and ends. It would be considered unreasonable to suggest the former employer has no stake in this situation and that the former employer is in violation of copyright.
Again, he needs to check the employment contract to make sure, and he would have to clearly document literally every line and identify the hardware used and make sure that he didn't even scribble down notes about developing that software while on a break or otherwise while on the premises of his employer. If he was allowed to develop code for the developer while at home, it gets even more complicated.
Basically, it doesn't matter if he created the code on his own time and on his own equipment. He was employed by the company at the time and essentially they "own" the software as a work for hire unless he can definitively prove otherwise. As long as he can fork the software for his own purposes, this guy shouldn't get in a tizzy fit over this issue and just ignore his former employer. There is nothing else to worry about unless this employer is claiming that the software should never have been made available under the GPL in the first place.
If the employer in this case is not asserting that the GPL was invalid because it was not authorized (a completely different issue), there still is nothing keeping this "former employee" from creating a fork of the software for his own purposes and maintaining the GPL into the future. The software isn't "lost", and as a matter of fact having the original developer making patches and improving the code might be a good thing so far as the vision for what the software was supposed to do in the first place can be maintained.
The only problem here is trying to get upset over the proprietary branch. As long as your "fork" can't be challenged on a legal basis, why worry about a closed source version? Instead, make the open source version better.... or write the whole thing off as a learning experience and move on with your life. This doesn't violate the GPL as the employer clearly had original copyright claims to the software, and the license (like the GPL) is only about the distribution & reuse of that software by 3rd parties. Even if there wasn't a formal employment contract granting the software copyright to the company, I think you would be hard pressed to get a judge to refuse to recognize the ability of the employer to use that software in any way they saw fit including changing the licensing terms.
If I do something at home it does not belong to my employer. If I build a shed in my backyard, that does not belong to my employer.
An employer that does this is exploiting you. Employers will try to get things from you for free if you let them.
Much of this has to do with your employment contract and the principles of professional labor. It doesn't matter if you are a professional photographer, lawyer, physician, engineer, or even a police officer, you are never really "off the clock". You may have "down time" or "personal time", but you are always working for your employer when you are in one of these professions 24/7.
In the case of engineers, I have and do come up with design ideas for the projects I'm working on during my "off time", usually more so when I'm away from my desk than when I'm "hard at work" grinding stuff out. I also work on side projects, but I keep my supervisor aware of what I'm doing too as it is being done so there are no surprises, as sometimes these side projects done on "my own time" can trigger a solution to something else I'm working on with my "day job".
If you were in construction or civil engineering, you might be able to build a storage shed or a playhouse for your kids, but you might be surprised to find that your employer owns the design for that building you just created. Yes, I'm being serious here too. It isn't nearly so black and white.
As has been said above, what happens is that you limit the range of who can receive that signal. It is pretty much is the same thing, just a matter of scale and distance. If a radio signal at a certain power would go 200 miles before it is so weak it can't be used, millions of these devices might make the signal only go 150 miles instead or perhaps less. Do you think that matters to a broadcaster?
Light going onto solar panels may deprive plants from being able to receive that light. The issue here isn't just one of these devices or doing "experiments" with some ambient radio energy, but what happens when millions or billions of these devices are made and all tapping into that energy. That would be like covering all of the farmland completely with solar panels.... then how will food be grown? One or two of those things in strategic places or placed on rooftops that otherwise don't use that sunlight is one thing. Placing them in more valuable locations is something else completely.
The same goes for these devices where location is everything, and I don't see how even regulating how these are used can stop ordinary consumers from using them in places where their use will be a big deal.
They're going to have NO effect on the interception of radio signals unless you stick a few around your cellphone.
I think you miss the point again. It does impact the reception of radio signals and this energy isn't "free". The proposal here is to be a leech on what somebody else is doing and it will impact the broadcaster.
To note a similar situation, high voltage power lines that connect power plants to major cities also "broadcast" E-M radiation around the towers coming from the transmission of the power itself. Sometimes enterprising individuals living close to these towers can "harness" this energy in several way, not the least of which is to run some wires around or near these towers and then "ground" the wires through some devices that utilize the energy. It is a nice way to tap into the power distribution system, but it also adds resistance to those power lines.
Don't do this, as utility companies do find out eventually (through several methods I won't go into here) as it is a power loss that does show up in terms of the energy being transmitted through the line. Radio broadcasters are really no different in that regard, but instead of expecting a certain amount of power at one end of a distribution line, they just fail to deliver their "product" (aka the programming) to some of their customers.
The reason why RFID devices are a little different is that the transmitter (aka "reader") is explicitly designed to emit some RF power in order to activate the RFID chips, which are in turn tuned to that specific frequency. It doesn't come cheap and there is a loss of power, but it certainly can't be called "green". BTW, these also have an impact on the interception of radio signals. Just one or two... yeah it doesn't make that much difference. Millions of them embedded into every shingle of your house and the houses of all of your neighbors (or some other common piece of construction)? It would have a huge impact. The issue here is how many of these devices would there be, and what would happen if terrestrial radio stations simply shut down because of this issue? It will happen if this becomes widespread.
It is a compelling story and something that has been burning up the blogosphere, and Slashdot is a news aggregator site. There are more than a few other connections with the tech industry here, not to mention that sometimes you have to stop and realize others have a life too. Complaining that this shouldn't have been made a story only means that you should have been going through the firehose and modding this down previously.
From my own experience at sifting through the firehose, this is at least a decent story and worthy of promotion to the front page compared to the rest of the garbage that is typically submitted. If you have a more compelling story and something more "news for nerds" worthy.... submit it! I've had more than a couple stories hit the front page, how about you?
Arguably the Moon (aka "Luna"... which is just another way to say"Moon" in another language) is a dwarf planet, together with Io, Ganymede, Callisto, as well as Ceres and Pluto and a few other outer Solar System object in the Kuiper Belt. The whole orbit clearing thing is pure BS and eventually will have to be dismissed as a horrible idea.
If anything, I think Titan ought to be "promoted" to be considered a terrestrial-type planet together with Earth, Venus, and Mars as having a "thin" (less than 1% of the planetary mass) but substantive atmosphere. That it happens to orbit a very brown dwarf proto-star is irrelevant, or perhaps even proof of the idea.
Really, the whole thing with trying to define planets based on anything but their directly observable physical characteristics is to me pure BS. As planetary systems are discovered around other stars (and some already are starting to be visible with modern telescopes), the variety and magnitude of what might be considered a planets is going to be more diverse than could be thought of with such a heliocentric definition. The very notion that the only thing to be considered a planet must orbit the Sun (as the dominant mass of the orbital system) is already absurd. For that notion alone the IAU ought to take up the whole definition again but this time really consider the long term ramifications for other star systems in that definition too.... or perhaps they aren't called "planets" when they orbit a star other than our Sun?
I'm not too hung up on calling Pluto a "dwarf planet", as I think the definition really is quite appropriate. The issue is what else might fit that definition too. Perhaps even Charon ought to be considered a "dwarf planet" as well? The trick is if Pluto has a substantive atmosphere or if it is more airless like the Moon or the Galilean Moons of Jupiter. Hopefully the New Horizon spacecraft will put that question to rest for once and all, and perhaps show us a bit more in terms of what this astronomical object might be able to display when viewed up close.
I'd be all for saving the ISS too, if the political climate wasn't overwhelmingly against it right now...
Couldn't Argon be used as a thrust medium instead? It would seem like other gasses besides Xenon could be used although I do understand that particular element has some interesting properties that particularly makes it quite suitable for the task. I'm not sure what Dawn is currently using, although I do think they are using Xenon on that spacecraft. They are going to perform a maneuver equivalent to moving from LEO to the equivalent around Mars by going from Vesta to Ceres. That should be quite interesting to see when/if NASA pulls that one off.
A Bussard Ramscoop would be nice, but the fusion reactors necessary to keep it sustained have yet to be invented, not to mention that you need to be traveling at a fairly decent fraction of the speed of light in order to get it to be useful. That has little or nothing to do with moving something out of LEO.
BTW, I agree that even if the finances were in place, the political situation with the ISS is a complicated mess that might just be easier to start from scratch doing something else.
If you are in a publicly traded corporation where nobody has a majority of the shares (worse still, if no single person or group owns more than 10%) those companies live by the fiscal quarter. If it takes more than 3 months to develop, it might as well not exist.
Private companies are a bit different, and I have seen some "10 year plans" work out. It is rare, but they can if leadership in that company is driven and focused. Those tend to be smaller companies with either investors who share the vision or completely owned by one person. SpaceX has been one of those companies, but I'm not sure it will survive that way much longer, especially if Elon lets it "go public" like he plans on doing in the near future.
The most valuable thing that came from the ISS was building the thing in the first place. It demonstrated that very large structures could indeed be built from pieces in space to essentially any arbitrary size, and be built by astronauts or others who are in space. Many of the issues in terms of what items were difficult and how to get all of that accomplished were certainly discovered in the course of its construction. In that sense, the ISS has paid for itself already and now that the station is "complete" (more or less), this particular "need" is no longer there.
If you want to get into how the money could have been better spent, I'd suggest you do that to the entire federal budget and not just single out the ISS. This isn't a zero sum game and cutting back on manned spaceflight won't necessarily translate into more money for robotic missions or big science in general.
NASA always said that it was going to be de-orbited 10 years after completion. Unless they have changed it, it will be a European Cargo ship that will perform the burn. Can't see what the problem is, really, it's a joint venture guys.
No they didn't. NASA said, at least during the initial construction, that the ISS was going to be permanent. It wasn't until after somehow the public forgot about all of that "permanent space station" BS that they started to throw around the "10 years after completeion" BS, arguably so Michal Griffin and the Bush Administration could "afford" to build the boondoggle known as Constellation. It does cost a fair amount of money to keep the ISS going in terms of logistical support and manning the ground network which monitors the ISS. They were looking for a convenient way to cut that out, where the original deadline to splash the ISS was going to be 2015. That got pushed back to 2020 by a congress that essentially said "WTF" to NASA over that date.
Expect this current target of 2020 to be raising hell in congress, or at least a strong explanation will be expected. This whole "permanent" space station excuse will be brought up too.
Establishing a perminnant presence in space is not a reasonable goal at this time. It would cost too much, and it would not be sustainable as a result.
Excuse me for being cynical here, but I do remember the fact that when the ISS was first started but before astronauts started to inhabit the thing, that it was officially proclaimed by various press releases by both Russia and NASA as "the first permanent space station and outpost of humanity". I suppose that "mission" was lost when the "Space Station Alpha" moniker was lost too.
Yes, I know that changed over the years, but I do wish those guys would have been more honest about the issue back then. In theory it could still be a permanent outpost as it was built in a modular fashion, and more to the point it was proclaimed as being so huge that it could never be sent back to the Earth like Skylab and Mir (as well as the several Almaz stations) all had been. The ISS was supposed to be something different. I really would like to know when that changed.
I wouldn't trust the Chinese to deliver a bottle of water to the ISS. I'm sorry, but the Chinese space program just isn't that good and they are far too overrated. Perhaps in a couple more decades, but not at the moment. I certainly would trust SpaceX over the Chinese, or even the ESA for that matter.
We don't even have a way to reach the station on our own any more, and no plans on building anything to get there in the future. Maybe SpaceX will be able to reach it, but why should they bother unless someone pays them to? It's a business, and needs to make a profit. Since the US government isn't going to pay NASA to go there, why would they pay SpaceX to go there?
Why not simply give the entire space station to SpaceX if they can figure out how to move it somewhere else? I'm pretty certain that Elon Musk or somebody else could make some money off of the station if they cared to. The only think that would keep them from trying is if the cost of operating the ISS would be more than paying Robert Bigelow to build an entire space station from scratch. That may even be the case, but I'm sure that at least some parts of the ISS could be salvaged.
It was politics that killed MIR, as there was at least one company (MIR Corp) who not only had the money but even started to fork it out to save MIR from a similar fate. It was NASA that insisted Russia splash MIR that essentially closed the business opportunity for MIR to be used by private individuals. MIR Corp even paid for a Soyuz mission to refurbish the station and prepare it for tourists that never came, and had at least one paying customer, Dennis Tito, who ended up going to the ISS instead. I'm pretty certain that a similar business model could be worked out for the ISS if the partner countries are willing to simply abandon the station. After all, what good does it do for anybody sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?
One difference is that the ISS is already in orbit and technically in space. You can afford to think differently when you are in space as opposed to trying to launch from the ground resisting a constant 9.8 m/s^2 acceleration pulling the vehicle down plus trying to get past the roughly 100 kPa of atmospheric gasses getting in the way of the vehicle. Yes, to get the ISS off of the ground would have required several Saturn V rockets, and it did take several shuttle missions. But you don't need cryogenic rocket fuels pushing with a huge amount of thrust to move out of LEO once you are up there.
There are several high ISP engines that you can work with, and even a modest thrust that has an acceleration of even 1 m/s^2 or even 0.1 m/s^2 would be sufficient to move the ISS out of LEO and to almost anywhere else in the solar system you cared. Since the ISS has a massive power supply you can tap into (about 100 kW at full capacity, with a generally available power supply of about 10 kW with battery back-up when in the Earth's shadow), there are some really cool things you could do with that sort of energy and some sort of ion propulsion or something like the VASMIR engine. As a result, the size of the engine doesn't have to be all that big and could be carried by a Delta IV-Heavy or a Falcon Heavy.
We are talking years right now before the ISS is going to be splashed. Yes, some of these technologies are experimental, but the ion drive is currently being used by the Dawn spacecraft.... all that is needed is to scale the drive to something that could push the ISS. As long as we get to the ISS and "rescue it" before 2020 with this engine, we could take a year or longer to push it up to a much higher altitude or even to a Lagrangian point. With the right incentives, I don't think the cost would be more than a billion dollars, perhaps less unless you run it through a typical cost-plus procurement model. If I was given a crack at it, I certainly would try and pull together a team to "save the ISS" for that amount of money. Yes, I'm being completely serious here too.
As others have pointed before and probably after me, boosting it out of the decaying orbit it's in is too expensive, while leaving it there to crash is too dangerous. Hence the controlled deorbiting.
I seriously can't believe that pushing the ISS to one of the Lagrangian points would be more expensive than replacing the thing. If you are really trying to come up with a way to pay for moving the ISS to some other place than LEO, I would propose the following legislation:
The first company to come up with a way to move the International Space Station to an altitude of at least 10,000 km above the Earth in one piece will receive simultaneously $1.5 billion USD tax-free and 100% of the salvage rights to the said station with ownership granted in perpetuity, also tax-free.
The price of $1.5 billion is roughly the cost of a typical Space Shuttle mission, just to establish where the amount came from. I certainly think that a single mission by the Space Shuttle would be worth the expense and effort to "save the ISS" if that was indeed a national goal. Certainly saving the Hubble Telescope was worth that price. Opening it up to private individuals would not only have a huge cash payoff, but the salvage rights would be a huge prize in and of itself.
Where would the downside of such a "spacestation prize" be? Please explain to me either why this couldn't work, or why the $1.5 billion would be too expensive?
Why doesn't the US get a say in it? Because the US either agrees to Russia's demands, or they get denied passage on the Soyuz, plain and simple.
*Bzzt* Wrong!
There are several ways for American astronauts to get to the ISS besides the Soyuz spacecraft. The Soyuz is the only one that has any sort of substantial track record and can be relied upon to meet deadlines, but there are other ways to get up there, from the Dragon and Cygnus capsules being developed for CCDEV to the ESA's ATV that could in theory be upgraded and up-rated to manned spaceflight. The Shuttles could in theory be hauled out of mothballs and be flown again (at least in the near short term). Boeing is building their CST-100 vehicle too. And those are just options that could be available within a window of one to two years, especially if there was a major national priority to make sure that the vehicle had to get there.
By 2020 or later? There are a dozen potential vehicles that could in theory make the cut. America isn't nearly so dead in the water as is implied here.
First one to space with an fully armed and operational battle station will rule the entirety of the human race.
Too late!
The Soviet Union with their Almaz space stations were the first fully armed and operational space stations in orbit around the Earth. The guns were a precaution in case the Americans had some sort of idea of trying to board their vehicles. While technically a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, it is one of those things where nobody really cared except for the Russians.
A great many ways, starting with seizing all corporate assets in a given country or even collective countries. Corporations exist at the will of the national sovereign powers through which they are chartered. They may have influence, but once somebody starts to lob weapons of mass destruction from above, they will be treated as "non-persons" and become the enemy of the planet. Treaties be damned, those guys would become public enemy #1 and be part of an organized effort to be destroyed, likely being one of the few ways to militarily unite the nations of the Earth.
While corporations love to help supply weapons to various countries, they don't like having their assets being taken or destroyed. That is the one power that a country can have, and doing something so raw like killing people or threatening countries is the one thing that will unite the countries of the Earth. War is the power of a sovereign and they guard that power jealously.
The reason Al Qaeda has been successful is precisely because they have the support of sovereign governments. That those governments are such wusses that they try to have their cake and eat it too in terms of both supporting and denouncing Al Qaeda simultaneously is merely another problem. If there weren't governments which supported those radicals, they would have disappeared a long, long time ago.
The difference is that many of these companies are essentially sole proprietorships where the founder/owner of the company is making the key decisions here in terms of if these vehicles or programs are going to be built or kept alive. They also have additional sources of income that in theory could help to sustain these companies in the event there is a cash flow problem, not to mention some close friends with similar supplies of personal wealth that also support the goals of the company at the moment.
You are correct that businesses do make decisions that sometimes are arbitrary and they are often more interested in profits than other motives. Still, they don't work on the same four to eight year cycles that seem to infect the NASA budget together with nearly complete change overs of the political leadership due to changes in the ruling political party and thus cancellation of the previous political group's pet projects.
The question is how do you raise tax revenue? A substantial argument is that taxes in America at least are high enough that raising them further has the opposite of the intended result, which is that tax revenue actually decreases due to less economic activity, or that lowering taxes actually increases tax revenue.
This is all based upon the Laffer Curve, where there certainly is an "ideal" tax rate upon which tax revenue can be maximized. The question is which end of the curve is the current tax rate? It may even be at that "ideal" tax level, but it is hard to find out without experimentation or making stuff up out of your behind.
Regardless, even if tax revenue is maximized, there is also the issue in terms of how to spend that money, and if we should be borrowing additional money at the moment to "sustain" the economy at least in terms of government expenditures keeping people busy. There are many (including myself) who feel that the U.S. federal government has likely gone past the point of no return in terms of deficit spending, and that it is just a matter of time before the whole system collapses. In this sense, this push to hold fast to the debt limit is just a way to try and keep the system from collapsing altogether.
Perhaps it would be better to simply push the whole thing over the edge, give the U.S. Treasury a $1 quadrillion credit limit, and then genuinely spend like drunken sailors like there is no tomorrow. The problem with that approach is that tomorrow will come. Which way would you like to see the financial system collapse?
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Funny story about that. Leland Stanford and his wife went to Massachusetts hoping they could make a fairly substantial donation to Harvard University, on the order of a major new building or something along that line (he was part-owner of Union Pacific Railroad, among other business interests that got him a fairly large pot of money). Apparently their son was a Harvard alumnus and had an unfortunate accident that ended his life prematurely, so the donation was going to be in the name of their son.
Perhaps because they had to travel cross-country in order to make the donation or some other issue, when they show up on campus they were dressed in rather ordinary clothes and the folks in Massachusetts had never heard of the guy (in spite of his being the former governor of California at the time). The president of Harvard basically let Stanford and his wife wait at the entrance of his office all day, putting the guy off and not wanting to really deal with what he thought was a couple of hicks.
When they finally met with the president of Harvard, they explained the proposition to donate enough money to buy a new building. Thinking this couple was of more humble means, he tried to put them off by explaining the price of a new building and what it would cost to build one. After hearing the amount, Mrs. Stanford turned to her husband and said essentially "Is that all dear? Why don't we just build a whole new university instead?"
And they did.
1) Did he use any third party GPL code in his project?
2) Was the project done 'for hire', and if it was, was the contract free of any licensing restrictions? (e.g. the company didn't ask for ownership of the code produced)
If the answer to any of the above questions is "yes", then he has a case, and he should seriously consider getting a lawyer (and/or the EFF?) to take a look at it.
Even if there wasn't a contract, it still becomes murky as there is a presumption that the employer would own any software produced by its employees, or at least have rights to distribute that software under any terms they desire including relicensing that software. That doesn't prohibit the former employee from also using that software and having unlimited rights to use and distribute that software (even perhaps to a competitor under proprietary licenses) but I don't see how you can prohibit the former employer from using the software or distributing it, at least not without setting a huge precedent that would get many "friend of the court" briefs from major software development houses if it got to a precedent setting level like an appellate court of some kind. The deck is stacked against a would-be former employee to prohibit distribution of this software by the former employer and any such precedent would be seen as "dangerous" to most software companies.
The point about the GPL'd software from 3rd parties is a more valid point, and one that while it won't stop the former employer from distributing the software on their own as a fork, it might put a monkey wrench into relicensing the software. It is precisely for this reason that many software companies don't like GPL'd software as "contamination" of their proprietary projects can happen. Some development houses simply won't hire developers who have worked in open source projects explicitly because they are "tainted" and through some paranoia feel anything they write has been touched by somebody else's GPL'd code.
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It's scary when we use the word author to describe an author who has no rights over what he has produced.
Welcome to the world of works-for-hire. It stinks as there are some software projects I would love to release into the world and do things that currently are unavailable.... simply because I don't have the right to release that software. I even have the source code and the compilers to make the software work, but I don't have the copyright authority to release the stuff.
What is being suggested by the OP is that this guy wants to "force" his former employer to relinquish any copyright claim upon the software he wrote while he was employed by them. Unless there is an explicit disclaimer made by the former employer, I really don't see how any such claim can be refuted.... which really is the crux of the problem.
The burden of proof is for the employee to prove that he developed this software "off the clock" and that he was paid an hourly wage where strict accounting of when he was "on the clock" and "on the premises" was being kept track by the employer. Most programmers are salaried employees (not all of them) where time cards are not kept and you are presumed to be working for the company 24/7 even if you have some "personal time" to do your own thing.
Being salaried also cuts both ways, where the employer can't expect you to show up at certain times and work certain hours, even though being a prick about that can cost you promotions or be grounds for termination due to insubordination.
Regardless, a typical judge in this case would very likely rule that the employer has the rights to the software, and would consider it to be a reasonable solution in this situation that both the former employee and the employer have unlimited rights to the software. That includes the ability to re-license the software to their own purposes and ends. It would be considered unreasonable to suggest the former employer has no stake in this situation and that the former employer is in violation of copyright.
Again, he needs to check the employment contract to make sure, and he would have to clearly document literally every line and identify the hardware used and make sure that he didn't even scribble down notes about developing that software while on a break or otherwise while on the premises of his employer. If he was allowed to develop code for the developer while at home, it gets even more complicated.
Basically, it doesn't matter if he created the code on his own time and on his own equipment. He was employed by the company at the time and essentially they "own" the software as a work for hire unless he can definitively prove otherwise. As long as he can fork the software for his own purposes, this guy shouldn't get in a tizzy fit over this issue and just ignore his former employer. There is nothing else to worry about unless this employer is claiming that the software should never have been made available under the GPL in the first place.
If the employer in this case is not asserting that the GPL was invalid because it was not authorized (a completely different issue), there still is nothing keeping this "former employee" from creating a fork of the software for his own purposes and maintaining the GPL into the future. The software isn't "lost", and as a matter of fact having the original developer making patches and improving the code might be a good thing so far as the vision for what the software was supposed to do in the first place can be maintained.
The only problem here is trying to get upset over the proprietary branch. As long as your "fork" can't be challenged on a legal basis, why worry about a closed source version? Instead, make the open source version better.... or write the whole thing off as a learning experience and move on with your life. This doesn't violate the GPL as the employer clearly had original copyright claims to the software, and the license (like the GPL) is only about the distribution & reuse of that software by 3rd parties. Even if there wasn't a formal employment contract granting the software copyright to the company, I think you would be hard pressed to get a judge to refuse to recognize the ability of the employer to use that software in any way they saw fit including changing the licensing terms.
If I do something at home it does not belong to my employer. If I build a shed in my backyard, that does not belong to my employer.
An employer that does this is exploiting you. Employers will try to get things from you for free if you let them.
Much of this has to do with your employment contract and the principles of professional labor. It doesn't matter if you are a professional photographer, lawyer, physician, engineer, or even a police officer, you are never really "off the clock". You may have "down time" or "personal time", but you are always working for your employer when you are in one of these professions 24/7.
In the case of engineers, I have and do come up with design ideas for the projects I'm working on during my "off time", usually more so when I'm away from my desk than when I'm "hard at work" grinding stuff out. I also work on side projects, but I keep my supervisor aware of what I'm doing too as it is being done so there are no surprises, as sometimes these side projects done on "my own time" can trigger a solution to something else I'm working on with my "day job".
If you were in construction or civil engineering, you might be able to build a storage shed or a playhouse for your kids, but you might be surprised to find that your employer owns the design for that building you just created. Yes, I'm being serious here too. It isn't nearly so black and white.
As has been said above, what happens is that you limit the range of who can receive that signal. It is pretty much is the same thing, just a matter of scale and distance. If a radio signal at a certain power would go 200 miles before it is so weak it can't be used, millions of these devices might make the signal only go 150 miles instead or perhaps less. Do you think that matters to a broadcaster?
Light going onto solar panels may deprive plants from being able to receive that light. The issue here isn't just one of these devices or doing "experiments" with some ambient radio energy, but what happens when millions or billions of these devices are made and all tapping into that energy. That would be like covering all of the farmland completely with solar panels.... then how will food be grown? One or two of those things in strategic places or placed on rooftops that otherwise don't use that sunlight is one thing. Placing them in more valuable locations is something else completely.
The same goes for these devices where location is everything, and I don't see how even regulating how these are used can stop ordinary consumers from using them in places where their use will be a big deal.
They're going to have NO effect on the interception of radio signals unless you stick a few around your cellphone.
I think you miss the point again. It does impact the reception of radio signals and this energy isn't "free". The proposal here is to be a leech on what somebody else is doing and it will impact the broadcaster.
To note a similar situation, high voltage power lines that connect power plants to major cities also "broadcast" E-M radiation around the towers coming from the transmission of the power itself. Sometimes enterprising individuals living close to these towers can "harness" this energy in several way, not the least of which is to run some wires around or near these towers and then "ground" the wires through some devices that utilize the energy. It is a nice way to tap into the power distribution system, but it also adds resistance to those power lines.
Don't do this, as utility companies do find out eventually (through several methods I won't go into here) as it is a power loss that does show up in terms of the energy being transmitted through the line. Radio broadcasters are really no different in that regard, but instead of expecting a certain amount of power at one end of a distribution line, they just fail to deliver their "product" (aka the programming) to some of their customers.
The reason why RFID devices are a little different is that the transmitter (aka "reader") is explicitly designed to emit some RF power in order to activate the RFID chips, which are in turn tuned to that specific frequency. It doesn't come cheap and there is a loss of power, but it certainly can't be called "green". BTW, these also have an impact on the interception of radio signals. Just one or two... yeah it doesn't make that much difference. Millions of them embedded into every shingle of your house and the houses of all of your neighbors (or some other common piece of construction)? It would have a huge impact. The issue here is how many of these devices would there be, and what would happen if terrestrial radio stations simply shut down because of this issue? It will happen if this becomes widespread.
It is a compelling story and something that has been burning up the blogosphere, and Slashdot is a news aggregator site. There are more than a few other connections with the tech industry here, not to mention that sometimes you have to stop and realize others have a life too. Complaining that this shouldn't have been made a story only means that you should have been going through the firehose and modding this down previously.
From my own experience at sifting through the firehose, this is at least a decent story and worthy of promotion to the front page compared to the rest of the garbage that is typically submitted. If you have a more compelling story and something more "news for nerds" worthy.... submit it! I've had more than a couple stories hit the front page, how about you?
Arguably the Moon (aka "Luna"... which is just another way to say"Moon" in another language) is a dwarf planet, together with Io, Ganymede, Callisto, as well as Ceres and Pluto and a few other outer Solar System object in the Kuiper Belt. The whole orbit clearing thing is pure BS and eventually will have to be dismissed as a horrible idea.
If anything, I think Titan ought to be "promoted" to be considered a terrestrial-type planet together with Earth, Venus, and Mars as having a "thin" (less than 1% of the planetary mass) but substantive atmosphere. That it happens to orbit a very brown dwarf proto-star is irrelevant, or perhaps even proof of the idea.
Really, the whole thing with trying to define planets based on anything but their directly observable physical characteristics is to me pure BS. As planetary systems are discovered around other stars (and some already are starting to be visible with modern telescopes), the variety and magnitude of what might be considered a planets is going to be more diverse than could be thought of with such a heliocentric definition. The very notion that the only thing to be considered a planet must orbit the Sun (as the dominant mass of the orbital system) is already absurd. For that notion alone the IAU ought to take up the whole definition again but this time really consider the long term ramifications for other star systems in that definition too.... or perhaps they aren't called "planets" when they orbit a star other than our Sun?
I'm not too hung up on calling Pluto a "dwarf planet", as I think the definition really is quite appropriate. The issue is what else might fit that definition too. Perhaps even Charon ought to be considered a "dwarf planet" as well? The trick is if Pluto has a substantive atmosphere or if it is more airless like the Moon or the Galilean Moons of Jupiter. Hopefully the New Horizon spacecraft will put that question to rest for once and all, and perhaps show us a bit more in terms of what this astronomical object might be able to display when viewed up close.
I'd be all for saving the ISS too, if the political climate wasn't overwhelmingly against it right now...
Couldn't Argon be used as a thrust medium instead? It would seem like other gasses besides Xenon could be used although I do understand that particular element has some interesting properties that particularly makes it quite suitable for the task. I'm not sure what Dawn is currently using, although I do think they are using Xenon on that spacecraft. They are going to perform a maneuver equivalent to moving from LEO to the equivalent around Mars by going from Vesta to Ceres. That should be quite interesting to see when/if NASA pulls that one off.
A Bussard Ramscoop would be nice, but the fusion reactors necessary to keep it sustained have yet to be invented, not to mention that you need to be traveling at a fairly decent fraction of the speed of light in order to get it to be useful. That has little or nothing to do with moving something out of LEO.
BTW, I agree that even if the finances were in place, the political situation with the ISS is a complicated mess that might just be easier to start from scratch doing something else.
If you are in a publicly traded corporation where nobody has a majority of the shares (worse still, if no single person or group owns more than 10%) those companies live by the fiscal quarter. If it takes more than 3 months to develop, it might as well not exist.
Private companies are a bit different, and I have seen some "10 year plans" work out. It is rare, but they can if leadership in that company is driven and focused. Those tend to be smaller companies with either investors who share the vision or completely owned by one person. SpaceX has been one of those companies, but I'm not sure it will survive that way much longer, especially if Elon lets it "go public" like he plans on doing in the near future.
The most valuable thing that came from the ISS was building the thing in the first place. It demonstrated that very large structures could indeed be built from pieces in space to essentially any arbitrary size, and be built by astronauts or others who are in space. Many of the issues in terms of what items were difficult and how to get all of that accomplished were certainly discovered in the course of its construction. In that sense, the ISS has paid for itself already and now that the station is "complete" (more or less), this particular "need" is no longer there.
If you want to get into how the money could have been better spent, I'd suggest you do that to the entire federal budget and not just single out the ISS. This isn't a zero sum game and cutting back on manned spaceflight won't necessarily translate into more money for robotic missions or big science in general.
NASA always said that it was going to be de-orbited 10 years after completion. Unless they have changed it, it will be a European Cargo ship that will perform the burn. Can't see what the problem is, really, it's a joint venture guys.
No they didn't. NASA said, at least during the initial construction, that the ISS was going to be permanent. It wasn't until after somehow the public forgot about all of that "permanent space station" BS that they started to throw around the "10 years after completeion" BS, arguably so Michal Griffin and the Bush Administration could "afford" to build the boondoggle known as Constellation. It does cost a fair amount of money to keep the ISS going in terms of logistical support and manning the ground network which monitors the ISS. They were looking for a convenient way to cut that out, where the original deadline to splash the ISS was going to be 2015. That got pushed back to 2020 by a congress that essentially said "WTF" to NASA over that date.
Expect this current target of 2020 to be raising hell in congress, or at least a strong explanation will be expected. This whole "permanent" space station excuse will be brought up too.
Establishing a perminnant presence in space is not a reasonable goal at this time. It would cost too much, and it would not be sustainable as a result.
Excuse me for being cynical here, but I do remember the fact that when the ISS was first started but before astronauts started to inhabit the thing, that it was officially proclaimed by various press releases by both Russia and NASA as "the first permanent space station and outpost of humanity". I suppose that "mission" was lost when the "Space Station Alpha" moniker was lost too.
Yes, I know that changed over the years, but I do wish those guys would have been more honest about the issue back then. In theory it could still be a permanent outpost as it was built in a modular fashion, and more to the point it was proclaimed as being so huge that it could never be sent back to the Earth like Skylab and Mir (as well as the several Almaz stations) all had been. The ISS was supposed to be something different. I really would like to know when that changed.
I wouldn't trust the Chinese to deliver a bottle of water to the ISS. I'm sorry, but the Chinese space program just isn't that good and they are far too overrated. Perhaps in a couple more decades, but not at the moment. I certainly would trust SpaceX over the Chinese, or even the ESA for that matter.
We don't even have a way to reach the station on our own any more, and no plans on building anything to get there in the future. Maybe SpaceX will be able to reach it, but why should they bother unless someone pays them to? It's a business, and needs to make a profit. Since the US government isn't going to pay NASA to go there, why would they pay SpaceX to go there?
Why not simply give the entire space station to SpaceX if they can figure out how to move it somewhere else? I'm pretty certain that Elon Musk or somebody else could make some money off of the station if they cared to. The only think that would keep them from trying is if the cost of operating the ISS would be more than paying Robert Bigelow to build an entire space station from scratch. That may even be the case, but I'm sure that at least some parts of the ISS could be salvaged.
It was politics that killed MIR, as there was at least one company (MIR Corp) who not only had the money but even started to fork it out to save MIR from a similar fate. It was NASA that insisted Russia splash MIR that essentially closed the business opportunity for MIR to be used by private individuals. MIR Corp even paid for a Soyuz mission to refurbish the station and prepare it for tourists that never came, and had at least one paying customer, Dennis Tito, who ended up going to the ISS instead. I'm pretty certain that a similar business model could be worked out for the ISS if the partner countries are willing to simply abandon the station. After all, what good does it do for anybody sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?
One difference is that the ISS is already in orbit and technically in space. You can afford to think differently when you are in space as opposed to trying to launch from the ground resisting a constant 9.8 m/s^2 acceleration pulling the vehicle down plus trying to get past the roughly 100 kPa of atmospheric gasses getting in the way of the vehicle. Yes, to get the ISS off of the ground would have required several Saturn V rockets, and it did take several shuttle missions. But you don't need cryogenic rocket fuels pushing with a huge amount of thrust to move out of LEO once you are up there.
There are several high ISP engines that you can work with, and even a modest thrust that has an acceleration of even 1 m/s^2 or even 0.1 m/s^2 would be sufficient to move the ISS out of LEO and to almost anywhere else in the solar system you cared. Since the ISS has a massive power supply you can tap into (about 100 kW at full capacity, with a generally available power supply of about 10 kW with battery back-up when in the Earth's shadow), there are some really cool things you could do with that sort of energy and some sort of ion propulsion or something like the VASMIR engine. As a result, the size of the engine doesn't have to be all that big and could be carried by a Delta IV-Heavy or a Falcon Heavy.
We are talking years right now before the ISS is going to be splashed. Yes, some of these technologies are experimental, but the ion drive is currently being used by the Dawn spacecraft.... all that is needed is to scale the drive to something that could push the ISS. As long as we get to the ISS and "rescue it" before 2020 with this engine, we could take a year or longer to push it up to a much higher altitude or even to a Lagrangian point. With the right incentives, I don't think the cost would be more than a billion dollars, perhaps less unless you run it through a typical cost-plus procurement model. If I was given a crack at it, I certainly would try and pull together a team to "save the ISS" for that amount of money. Yes, I'm being completely serious here too.
As others have pointed before and probably after me, boosting it out of the decaying orbit it's in is too expensive, while leaving it there to crash is too dangerous. Hence the controlled deorbiting.
I seriously can't believe that pushing the ISS to one of the Lagrangian points would be more expensive than replacing the thing. If you are really trying to come up with a way to pay for moving the ISS to some other place than LEO, I would propose the following legislation:
The first company to come up with a way to move the International Space Station to an altitude of at least 10,000 km above the Earth in one piece will receive simultaneously $1.5 billion USD tax-free and 100% of the salvage rights to the said station with ownership granted in perpetuity, also tax-free.
The price of $1.5 billion is roughly the cost of a typical Space Shuttle mission, just to establish where the amount came from. I certainly think that a single mission by the Space Shuttle would be worth the expense and effort to "save the ISS" if that was indeed a national goal. Certainly saving the Hubble Telescope was worth that price. Opening it up to private individuals would not only have a huge cash payoff, but the salvage rights would be a huge prize in and of itself.
Where would the downside of such a "spacestation prize" be? Please explain to me either why this couldn't work, or why the $1.5 billion would be too expensive?
Why doesn't the US get a say in it? Because the US either agrees to Russia's demands, or they get denied passage on the Soyuz, plain and simple.
*Bzzt* Wrong!
There are several ways for American astronauts to get to the ISS besides the Soyuz spacecraft. The Soyuz is the only one that has any sort of substantial track record and can be relied upon to meet deadlines, but there are other ways to get up there, from the Dragon and Cygnus capsules being developed for CCDEV to the ESA's ATV that could in theory be upgraded and up-rated to manned spaceflight. The Shuttles could in theory be hauled out of mothballs and be flown again (at least in the near short term). Boeing is building their CST-100 vehicle too. And those are just options that could be available within a window of one to two years, especially if there was a major national priority to make sure that the vehicle had to get there.
By 2020 or later? There are a dozen potential vehicles that could in theory make the cut. America isn't nearly so dead in the water as is implied here.
First one to space with an fully armed and operational battle station will rule the entirety of the human race.
Too late!
The Soviet Union with their Almaz space stations were the first fully armed and operational space stations in orbit around the Earth. The guns were a precaution in case the Americans had some sort of idea of trying to board their vehicles. While technically a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, it is one of those things where nobody really cared except for the Russians.
How would you stop a private corporation?
A great many ways, starting with seizing all corporate assets in a given country or even collective countries. Corporations exist at the will of the national sovereign powers through which they are chartered. They may have influence, but once somebody starts to lob weapons of mass destruction from above, they will be treated as "non-persons" and become the enemy of the planet. Treaties be damned, those guys would become public enemy #1 and be part of an organized effort to be destroyed, likely being one of the few ways to militarily unite the nations of the Earth.
While corporations love to help supply weapons to various countries, they don't like having their assets being taken or destroyed. That is the one power that a country can have, and doing something so raw like killing people or threatening countries is the one thing that will unite the countries of the Earth. War is the power of a sovereign and they guard that power jealously.
The reason Al Qaeda has been successful is precisely because they have the support of sovereign governments. That those governments are such wusses that they try to have their cake and eat it too in terms of both supporting and denouncing Al Qaeda simultaneously is merely another problem. If there weren't governments which supported those radicals, they would have disappeared a long, long time ago.
The difference is that many of these companies are essentially sole proprietorships where the founder/owner of the company is making the key decisions here in terms of if these vehicles or programs are going to be built or kept alive. They also have additional sources of income that in theory could help to sustain these companies in the event there is a cash flow problem, not to mention some close friends with similar supplies of personal wealth that also support the goals of the company at the moment.
You are correct that businesses do make decisions that sometimes are arbitrary and they are often more interested in profits than other motives. Still, they don't work on the same four to eight year cycles that seem to infect the NASA budget together with nearly complete change overs of the political leadership due to changes in the ruling political party and thus cancellation of the previous political group's pet projects.
The question is how do you raise tax revenue? A substantial argument is that taxes in America at least are high enough that raising them further has the opposite of the intended result, which is that tax revenue actually decreases due to less economic activity, or that lowering taxes actually increases tax revenue.
This is all based upon the Laffer Curve, where there certainly is an "ideal" tax rate upon which tax revenue can be maximized. The question is which end of the curve is the current tax rate? It may even be at that "ideal" tax level, but it is hard to find out without experimentation or making stuff up out of your behind.
Regardless, even if tax revenue is maximized, there is also the issue in terms of how to spend that money, and if we should be borrowing additional money at the moment to "sustain" the economy at least in terms of government expenditures keeping people busy. There are many (including myself) who feel that the U.S. federal government has likely gone past the point of no return in terms of deficit spending, and that it is just a matter of time before the whole system collapses. In this sense, this push to hold fast to the debt limit is just a way to try and keep the system from collapsing altogether.
Perhaps it would be better to simply push the whole thing over the edge, give the U.S. Treasury a $1 quadrillion credit limit, and then genuinely spend like drunken sailors like there is no tomorrow. The problem with that approach is that tomorrow will come. Which way would you like to see the financial system collapse?