Some of this goes into the manufacturing philosophies of Martin Eberhard vs. Elon Musk. Eberhard was a major fan of outsourcing, where he wanted to speed up the whole process of building the original Roadster by only concentrating on the key technologies and then using existing supply chains in the automotive industry to build everything else. Given that Tesla was a brand-new start-up when Eberhard was first trying his ideas out, much of that makes a whole lot of sense too. The problem with outsourcing your components is that you are at the mercy of your suppliers in terms of both price, volume, and quality. Tesla found that out the hard way when they struggled trying to get a decent transmission working, where a simple two-speed transmission (all they were hoping for at the time) simply got thrashed by the electric motor and the engineering team working on the transmission (an outsourced supplier) never could get the job done. Admittedly it was a very tough engineering challenge, but that supplier also didn't have the motivation to get the job done.
Ultimately, it was this transmission problem coupled with spiraling costs going out of control due to the plethora of suppliers on even key components (like the frame and body from Lotus, to give another example) that got Eberhard fired. He is a mighty fine engineer and even engineering manager, but he also bet wrong on how to deal with the suppliers a few too many times.
Elon Musk, particularly with his experience at SpaceX, has become much more sold upon the concept of building everything in-house and reducing the number of external parts suppliers to the absolute bare minimum. He doesn't even mind simply buying a supplier completely and putting the employees of that company on his payroll. Where it makes sense, he also tries to even relocate those supplier subsidiaries so they are even physically located in the same building. That has worked very well for SpaceX and I've seen Musk do that with Tesla as well. Lotus was originally going to be shipping completed cars to America, but later on a "final assembly plant" was set up for the Roadster in California where "gliders" came from the UK (the Lotus plant) and had their batteries along with other parts (wheel, engine, and some other stuff) put into the vehicle for final assembly. The Tesla engine itself has been manfuactured by a wholly owned subsidiary and Elon Musk has been making moves to consolidate even that part of his business.
More to the point, I think this move on the part of Tesla towards the Roadster really shouldn't be a surprise, as the particular parts chain has been an expensive and frankly failed experiment. In that regard perhaps the original parent is correct that the business model has failed, but of course the OP didn't mention what aspect of that business model failed. Roadsters have been only marginally profitable for Tesla and the need to revamp the production line, setting up much more part manufacturing in-house, and backing out of the agreement with Lotus to make the chassis is sufficient that even another high-end model might as well be something completely different as it will essentially have to be completely re-engineered anyway. Why not just have a clean break with the past, call the existing Roadsters to be the "end of the line", and create perhaps a whole new vehicle line for high-end customers in the future?
I don't see that Tesla is going to completely give up on that market segment, and in this sense it may even be something for high performance electric vehicle fans to look forward on. If anything, I'd expect Tesla to come out with another high performance vehicle in the next couple of years trying to target the same market segment, but blowing away the Roadster in nearly every aspect and targeting the $150k-$300k price point for those who can afford the really high end vehicles. If anything, the Roadster could have sold for much more to at least some of the customers who ended up buying the Roadster. Discontinuing the Roadster is therefore going to free up resources for when that happens. I'd also expect that high performance vehicle to happen before their supposed "mass market car" that was originally targeted for around $25k or less.
On the positive side, laws are changed in a legislative process that allows for vested interest to express themselves and to bring up issues that you might not have thought through yourself. When I say "I can't think of a downside", I'm expressing the viewpoint that I have not been able to find a counter argument which would be able to refute my basic premise and hold water.
Have I ever "refactored" code and come up with a bug? Yes. Heck, I've had bugs that I couldn't resolve and the only way to "fix them" was to simply rewrite the whole section or even project from scratch, where a "reimplementation" somehow cleaned up the logic enough to have the bug go away. One particularly nasty bug that I worked on for months was finally resolved.... by upgrading the compiler. Sources of bugs can come from a variety of places so I do know how unintended consequences can have a huge impact.
Yes, I'm a software engineer and I'm particularly upset over software patents. Especially given the fact that software expressions can be protected through other means (like copyright) make it all that much harder for me to support the concept, but my philosophies regarding patent laws in general represent years of deep consideration of patent law and how they impact ordinary people including those who are close to me and that I care about on a personal level. I've seen family fortunes squandered seeking patent protection on ideas to the point that if I mention I want to seek a patent at a family gathering, most of my extended family members groan with disgust or even pull me to the side and try to get me grounded back to normal, meaning that I'll forget the whole concept of patents altogether.
It is a radical philosophy, and I appreciate the "devils advocate" position you are taking here. What I am challenging is trying to find the social good that comes from patent law and I'm questioning why we even have it in the first place. The social good that comes from patents is quite weak, and the supposed benefits that it offers for the most part really don't happen. The benefits claimed by patent law defenders including "protecting the little guy" who comes up with some new idea, as well as preserving technical knowledge for future generations. Unfortunately neither of these "benefits" really happen with current patent law, so what else of social value is it really accomplishing?
Simply outlaw the practice altogether and let trade secrets be the law of the land. By the time a product has gone through testing and has made it to the consumer, it is likely nearing the end of its useful life for patent protection anyway.
I guess you're not in favor of new drug development, at all, ever.
If pharmaceutical patents were the only thing covered by patent law, it might be another story and I'd likely not care so much about patent law.
Still, show me that pharmaceutical patents really help even the big companies? I think there is much more to the issue than is led on by this simple reply, and patent law is being used as a crutch when there are other issues at stake here that aren't being stated in such a simple reply. Keep in mind that the FDA and drug trials have little to nothing to do with the USPTO.
I do contrast the patent system with the copyright system, where copyright protection does seem to work fairly well in protecting individual authors. Even that isn't perfect and it can create a bit of a problem from time to time, but most people who are copyright trolls back down in a hurry if you start to push back real hard. More to the point, a semi-professional or even pure amateur author can enjoy copyright protection and the process of even "formally registering" copyright (which gives you some additional benefits over the "automatic" copyright when you first put it down) is not too expensive and can be intelligently done without a lawyer for a relatively modest cost.
I wouldn't even remotely consider filing a patent application pro se, even if I've done other legal proceedings in that manner. You are just asking for trouble if you do it in that manner without some significant experience.
Pharmaceutical companies are already complaining that they have only 5 years or less to recover their investments into new drugs. It depends on when the clock starts for recovery and some other things, but I think the situation for pharmaceuticals is a special case that doesn't apply to patents in general. If you want to get into a discussion of drug development costs, it is a much larger issue that involves the FDA and other federal agencies besides the USPTO.
A backyard mechanic who comes up with a really cool idea is not really protected with the current patent system... or are you suggesting otherwise? Prove to me how.
We know of specific industries like the computer software industry that not only thrived but flourished without patents for many decades, and it could be argued suffered dramatically when patent protection was introduced as a concept. The ramifications of that one legal decision are still being felt today in a negative manner where the full impact has yet to be completely worked through the industry.
More to the point, what good are patents really doing? I keep asking for this, and while there are some wonderful exceptions, ordinary people are not being protected by patents anyway. Please, prove me wrong on this point and I would gladly change my tune here. There is a whole side business of people that I rank with snake oil salesmen that peddle "invention conferences" and try to push people to patent their ideas. That is a huge business and brings in millions of dollars to some lawyers. But otherwise, who is really benefiting from those efforts?
If you could quantify and that say 5% of all private individuals who patent their ideas as private citizens and go through these patent attorneys and then subsequently are able to "sell their invention" to a company for more than the cost of the patent application process, I might be a whole lot more supportive. My intuitive experience on the matter is that the number is far, far less to the point that I am seriously trying to collect even a single story about somebody who has done it. That simply isn't how patents are used today anyway.
In the meantime, there are patent troll companies who do extort millions of dollars from even major corporations, where often their claims are dubious at best but it becomes cheaper to simply pay them off rather than fight them in court. I've had that happen to companies I've worked for as an engineer.... more than once. One of my former employers did, however, have a patent of their own that they did a counter suite on against the troll, which got real interesting to say the least especially when that troll forgot to include that patent as prior art.
If you want to move step-by-step, look at limiting the scope and duration of patents. That is what the U.S. Constitution requires anyway (even if it is ignored), and perhaps a more "limited time" might be a better way to move to a complete abolition. The problem with a step-by-step approach is that the tort lawyers have too much influence in the lawmaking process to let it slide by or even do anything to make ground for compromise possible. Limiting scope would be to limit patents strictly to mechanical devices or something like that.... something physical and tangible. Business method patents in particular were an awful idea, and other extensions of patents into stuff like DNA sequences really getting into esoteric ideas that IMHO should never have been permitted in the first place.
More to the point, I have thought about the side effects of zero patents, and I'm trying to see the downside. Seriously. I can't really think of a redeeming feature that current patent law brings to society as a whole other than getting a bunch of lawyers rich off of what appears to me as a "confidence game". It doesn't help ordinary people secure their inventions, and most large companies only use patents to make sure that their competition doesn't sue them into submission.
It doesn't seem to make any sort of difference for those people who are creative to seek patent protection other than to help supplement the federal budget. I suppose that is a redeeming feature after a fashion, although I could argue that a special tax upon creative people to discourage creativity is not necessarily a good thing to society as a whole.
The intent of patents isn't to protect knowledge that is out in the open as if it were a secret.
The intent is to give incentives to make secret knowledge public. Think publishing a "how to build a Stradivarius violin" manual, not a "how to make several small pieces of paper out of a big one" manual.
Basically patents weren't meant for technologies that are practical to reverse-engineer. They were meant for technology that is impossible to reverse-engineer.
I know modern reality is far from the ideal.
If you could show me a current patent application that has been filed in the past 20 years, I defy you to be able to explain how to actually create something based upon the wording of that application even if you were "skilled in the arts" of the industry that patent supposedly covers. Patents simply don't work that way.
All a patent application has is a list of legal language that involves claims for what might be the idea or concept, and noting previous patents and claims to which this idea is not because that would be prior art. It really doesn't go much into how the device or concept actually works, or does just enough to show it is a novel and therefore a patentable idea.
If, as is commonly claimed by patent defenders, that knowledge on how to produce certain technologies was actually contained in the patent application, then I might buy that as a legitimate argument. There was a time the USPTO require a working model of the device for inspection by its examiners before a patent was granted, and those models actually do show how to reproduce the technology in question. I think something was missed when an inventor no longer had to show an actual implementation of the idea before the patent was granted.
My point is that this latest round of "patent reform" doesn't even take into consideration the constitutional limits at all, and is far more concerned about "international partners" and working with major patent producers (IBM, Microsoft, etc.) than trying to really address what the whole point of a patent was supposed to be in the first place.
Here is my thought on a method to handle the awarding of patents:
Don't.
Yup. Simply outlaw the practice altogether and let trade secrets be the law of the land. By the time a product has gone through testing and has made it to the consumer, it is likely nearing the end of its useful life for patent protection anyway.
I consider patent legislation to be a failed social experiment whose time is nearing an end. No, I'm not really an anarchist and I do believe in the rule of law and even think there is a necessity for a legal system, but that patents tend to help those who don't need help and don't protect those that do. I also don't know of any way to reform the system sufficiently to be able to "protect the little guy" without screwing them over even more than they are, where being blunt that legal protection through patents doesn't work at all is likely the best advise you can give to a young aspiring inventor.
Having known many engineers and "inventors" in my lifetime, including some who sought protection through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, not a single one of them ever received in royalties any money more than the legal costs they spent trying to get the patent in the first place, assuming they got anything at all in the first place. At best all a patent has been useful for is a resume bullet point that might make the difference to get a job interview. I guess that counts for something, but it wouldn't be something I would necessarily be impressed with other than showing you actually do know how to work with lawyers.
Since I'm not reading... Does this not basically break prior art? Can I patent something that someone else invented first but didn't file?
Essentially, Yes. IMHO that is part of the problem with this whole concept. I'm sure there will be some sort of legal protection if you can show that some "prior use" in "common practice" within some industry, but on a practical matter if you invented something, used it for awhile in developing a product but didn't bother to patent the thing when you finally release that product, it does open at least the potential you can be sued for patent infringement on something that you legitimately invented on your own independently and previous to the patent application.
I would like to see how this could possible hold up to the congressional power of being able "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Somehow this round of patent reform is going still another step away from this constitutional mandate, as if it didn't even exist. Then again, I would be wary of the "limited Times" provision in any new law as well as that is where most "intellectual property reform" usually tends towards infinity on that issue.
For myself, I think patents are altogether nonsense anyway and don't do any bit of good to protect inventors at all. Many companies do just fine without patents on even very innovative developments and products, and it tends to be the patent trolls that win in most cases.... people who litigate and clog the judicial system but really don't innovate nor really improve society as a whole. This legislation seems to encourage patent trolls even more and gives them an upper hand.
Which also supports the point that IBM didn't invent this computer in the first place. Yes it was a key strategy to use off-the-shelf parts, but that was a double-edged sword as well.
One of the reasons why this computer became so popular was precisely the "off the shelf" nature of the beast, as it was easy to copy and didn't have all of the patents and other intellectual property nonsense that other computers of the era had. There were some really strange intellectual property strategies used for the "compatible" computers that were eventually built, especially when the BIOS of the original PC had a function call that essentially did nothing but return the string "IBM" as a way to validate the system. Instead, some people still did work-arounds to get past those issues, which is where the idea of computers that claimed a percentage of compatibility with the PC came, including computers that asserted they were "100% compatible" with the PC.
IBM did eventually try to bring more stuff in-house and even introduced some concepts like the Micro Channel Architecture in their PS/2 line that tried to stuff the genie back into the bottle when they realized they were losing market share. Attempts to push for even more proprietary designs in their computers only shrank their market share, to the point that IBM is not even remotely a player in the market any more.
I can't imagine any college at that time teaching programming on PC-DOS 1.0. Don't believe it.
What is hard to believe? It was mainly introductory programming classes and a small town community college, not a major university so it wasn't nearly as big of a deal as you may think.
Earlier they had been using mainframe computers used by a major university (University of Minnesota at the time) and had a timeshare system (MECC) where the college students had dial-up access for their programming courses. It was that year they shut down the timeshare system and was transitioning into something else, and the college had contracted out to buy a VAX-11 system to support the computer science classes, but the system was back ordered and wasn't installed until the spring term. Once the VAX was installed, life got a whole lot easier, but the interim "solution" was a bank of PCs runing PC-DOS 1.0
Let's just say I learned how to code very efficiently, and that one term where we had several sections of programming classes on just two PC computers was where I learned how to use flowcharts and psuedo code to effectively design my software prior to actually committing it to a source file. The last couple of weeks prior to finals those computers were literally booked solid with appointments for their access, and it was just software development projects alone that were permitted as the other students would have killed you had you done any recreational activity on them instead of actual class assignments.
Let's just say the college president personally came into the class himself at the beginning of the term and apologized to the class as a whole for the situation, even offering tuition reimbursement for those who wanted to get out of the class and waived deadlines for that class that would normally only get a partial tuition reimbursement. Most of the kids in the class simply wanted to learn about computers and were willing to put up with the situation even as rough as it was.
Before you spout out what you think about early computing history, get a grip with reality and realize not everything fits your rosy world view and that sometimes crap does happen.
The PC-XT was not the original model. By the time IBM got to the XT model, there had been enough grumbling about the keyboard that the management in charge of the PC decided to get their act together and to make a real keyboard that worked.
I was referring to the original IBM-PC... which I did have the pleasure of using including trying to use PC-DOS 1.0. It was on that computer I took my first computer programming courses in college. Believe it or not, my entire college had only five computers that term, two PCs and three Apple ][ computers.
That particular price point for the 5100 was set by the marketing department, because they didn't want it to compete against their mainframe business. It could have been sold for substantially less, and did include a number of features that was well ahead of its time.
Simply put, it was never given the chance to actually be a real product because IBM didn't want it to be something an ordinary consumer could ever possibly purchase. About the only people permitted to even buy this computer were existing customers of IBM mainframes.
When the PCjr came out, they had a similar problem where the "low-cost alternative" was in many ways technically superior to the higher end mainstream computer system. So instead, IBM expended deliberate engineering effort to downgrade and cripple yet another product instead of simply letting the superior technology take root. Typical for IBM.
There was the IBM 5100 computer, which was an amazing piece of hardware. It very likely could have been the genesis of personal computers.... had IBM any sort of vision and if their marketing department wasn't so paranoid about the concept to let it out of the laboratory.
One of the amazing things about this little microcomputer was the fact that it could emulate some of the mainframe computers then in use at the time and even could in theory run some of software running on those mainframes as native binaries.
Unfortunately IBM sat on this device and only sold it to existing mainframe customers (when it was sold at all).
Sadly, the only thing that is related between this particular computer and the later IBM PC was the part numbering system, where the more famous "IBM PC" had the part number 5150.
The original keyboard for the IBM PC was a pure piece of garbage. As a matter of fact, one of the early accessories that many PC buyers purchased was a keyboard from 3rd party developers, where important keys like the "enter key" was enlarged, along with the shift keys and a spacebar that actually felt right.
Re-read that article again, to realize how many people hated the thing. I hated it and told my professors at the time.... where they cringed in disbelief that IBM could produce such a piece of crap. One of the regular features in Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Mannor column was a review of a new keyboards to replace that piece of junk.
As if to add insult to injury, the PCjr decided to downgrade even this horrible keyboard that IBM made with something even worse. It was so awful that the CEO of IBM decided to apologize and sent a new keyboard to every customer of that computer which had registered with a warranty card. Surprisingly, this "replacement" keyboard for the PCjr was even superior to that horrible IBM PC keyboard.
I remember a computer trade journal article that came out about the same time the IBM PC was released, where they went through the parts list of the items that went into the original IBM PC. After going through all of the components including the case, the only thing they could identify that was original components that was actually designed by IBM engineers was the sticker label that went on the outside of the case which said "IBM".
That wasn't entirely fair as there were some IBM engineers who had to piece the components together and sort of did help design the motherboard, but otherwise not a single major component inside of that computer was even made by IBM. Even that process of designing the PC motherboard was going way outside of the normal IBM development cycle process and only when a completed motherboard was presented to IBM management that anything resembling a formal project to make the IBM PC a reality was initiated.
What the letters "IBM" did do to the personal computer industry, however, was to legitimize the industry so far as to give conservative business executives an excuse to buy the equipment. Before they weren't about to buy a beige computer from a bunch of hippies in California or a video game console that also happened to do some computing on the side. Before IBM, the personal computer industry was mainly hackers and hobbyists. Afterward, the personal computer went mainstream into homes and medium-sized businesses.
That may be what the "official release" is all about. This is "scheduled" for some time in November (go look it up if you really care to find out).
Once Minecraft hits the "version 1.0" status he may just simply throw the doors open to the community... or sell out to some other game company. I really don't know what is going on with the whole thing at this point, although the modder community is playing around with the presumption that everything has something akin to a Creative Commons license of some sort.
The real shock would be if Mojang sells out to one of the major game publishers (take your pick) who promptly trash the community behind the game. It isn't as if a major community-supported project has been nerfed through selling out for money in the past. Heck, just look at what Oracle has done to Java.... and Oracle is at least still giving lip service after a fashion to their user community.
Not to belabor this point, but constitutional issues are decided (usually) in civil, not criminal courts.... unless you are being explicitly charged with a crime and you are using constitutional issues as a defense as to why the criminal laws themselves should never have been written in the first place as a violation of the constitution.
If some law enforcement officer searches your house without a warrant, arrests your family without charges, or does something else equally stupid and in clear violation of this very provision you are talking about here, the usual recourse is to sue the police department who did that into oblivion. That is of course if you can get past the government immunity laws and get the "district attorney" or whoever is the lead government lawyer to permit you to be able to sue the police department or government entity who performed the action.
There isn't really anything stopping government agencies from doing stupid stuff other than the potential that they could get fired for costing the government a whole lot of money. That is precisely why the school board official who was complaining at the start of the thread about how this is costing taxpayers so much money is really out of line. If you want to stop being the target of a whole bunch of lawsuits and not be paying people piles of money for violating their constitutional rights, enforce policies that guarantee those rights to ordinary citizens and make sure that you fire on the spot any staff members who violate those policies.
1. it's currently cheaper to just buy more enriched uranium than reprocess
2. they're awfully good at producing weapons grade plutonium...so we're currently not building any. Pity that.
I think it is point #2 that is the primary political reason for not openly supporting and encouraging breeder reactors in general. If the parts and manufacturing processes were streamlined to construct and maintain breeder reactor designs in an efficient and cheap manner that some Somalian warlord could build one on his ranch, we would have to start worrying about private nuclear weapons. At the very least there seems to be an organized political effort to kill nuclear research because ignorance is bliss and the idea is that developing these technologies in the first place is incredibly difficult... or at least the perception that nuclear energy research is dangerous and expensive has been encouraged.
If this isn't being done now, it will be done some time in the future when folks aren't so paranoid about nuclear reactors. Then again, perhaps fusion technology will finally be developed so this will be considered an historical oddity that doesn't need to be followed because "cheaper" ways to make energy are available. Fusion technology is also considerably harder to implement as weapons other than simply using the raw energy itself in some fashion (such as connecting a 10 MW plant to a rail gun).
What criminal charges? If you are going to charge somebody with a crime, it needs to be something illegal in the first place.
While the fact that this could be used to record information about a student and the home might have been withheld, this device was voluntarily brought into the home. It isn't as if the school district employees broke into this family's home and planted the cameras or did something else similarly stupid. There was no criminal offense, hence no criminal charges were filed.
It was a pretty stupid thing to do in the first place, and it is civil liability that can keep this from being repeated elsewhere almost as effectively as if there were criminal laws passed to prohibit this from happening. Laws shouldn't have to cover every possible situation in life, and sometimes common sense ought to prevail in terms of knowing when you have crossed the line of decency and good taste. That is precisely the role of civil courts... to hopefully allow common sense to prevail from time to time (even if it seems somewhat rare).
The issue here is civil vs. criminal law. No laws that can put you into prison were violated, hence the employees can't be prosecuted.
Civil liability, on the other hand, is the deal being discussed. You may not be able to put somebody into jail, but often being able to sue somebody for millions of dollars is motivation enough to keep them honest and not wanting to screw you over.
In this case, if the school board implemented policies that required employees of the school district to perform certain actions, clearly it is the school district that is held liable for the implementation of those policies, not the employees themselves. This is also true of a for-profit corporation in terms of employees implementing policies that came from top management. The policies may be stupid, irrational, and in fact may violate civil liberties.... but at the same time it can open up a company or in this case a government body to a massive amount of liability if they "break the law".
This is precisely the reason why the comment that this is "a complete waste of the taxpayer's dollars" is a stupid argument in the first place. The waste of taxpayer's dollars was the implementation of a stupid policy by the school district and by those in a management position to not ensure that the law was followed. The damage was done, and now the school district has to fess up.... even if it means that it must close schools or even cease to exist as an entity. Managing a school means you have to avoid liability too, which is precisely the job of a superintendent or principal. Causing liability certainly is grounds for termination.... which apparently didn't happen. That is also a travesty.
Because this is a government entity rather than a corporate body, the school board has additional immunity that a for-profit board of directors often doesn't enjoy. While it isn't all that common, if you can clearly link a policy that causes liability to a company it is also possible for shareholders to sue members of the board of directors for violating the corporate charter.... which for most companies is to "maximize profits and to increase shareholder equity", of which causing liability clearly does not increase shareholder equity. In that case, individual board members can be sued separate from the company, but it is a more drawn out process. Top management (like a CEO) can often also be the target of such a lawsuit by shareholders. I suppose that taxpayers could sue school board members under the same principle if you can document that somehow they violated basic principles in the school board charter (yes those exist too), but it would be a bit harder to prove and a school board is not bound by law to try and make a profit.
In a sense, yes "knowingly breaking the law" is a valid defense, but for ordinary peons running things simply aren't on the hook financially for the things they do because the presumption is that their supervisors know what they are doing. Saying you were "following orders" is a strong defense if for example the company in turn wanted to sue the employee for causing liability. Such a lawsuit would normally be laughed out of court instantly.
Hasn't the original Viking 1 lander location already been declared a "UNESCO World Heritage Site"?
To me, however, the more impressive artifacts on Mars would be those vehicles which failed to land properly or failed to transmit the data back to the Earth. There are a couple of Soviet probes that predated the Viking landers as well as a few infamous vehicles sent up by America that would certainly be of interest in that regard.
That said, Mars is a pretty big place. Its surface area is roughly the same as the land surface area here on Earth of all of the continents combined... so a quick trip around the planet is still going to take some time to accomplish.
For myself, I think we are just on the verge of a renewed genuine manned (or "crewed" for the more politically correct crowd) spaceflight expeditions of the future. What the final launch of the Shuttle will imply is the end of the massive big-budget government programs that are stopping mankind from spreading out at least within the solar system.
Yes, I assert and claim that NASA has done more to stop the expansion of mankind into the cosmos than they have helped, particularly over the past couple of decades. With tens of billions of dollars dumped on Constellation, a similar amount being proposed to be tossed at the "SLS" (aka "Senate Launch System") along with over a dozen other failed manned spaceflight projects that have gone through NASA over the past several decades, I see an agency that is hindering the process for Americans to build upon their legacies to continue going forward.
It is sad that the furthest any crew has been from the Earth was the crew from Apollo 13 (due to their free-return trajectory as the fastest means to return to the Earth with the limited fuel sources they had). That is a record that should have not only been passed decades ago, but should have been passed up regularly and by orders of magnitude since. We have been in the doldrums of manned spaceflight for quite some time, and all that has happened is a stagnant spaceflight industry that is no longer attracting the best and the brightest minds due to the fact that nothing is really being built any more... at least with the traditional government cost-plus contracting business models that built the Manhattan Project and flew people to the Moon with Apollo. Not only is manned spaceflight going downhill, robotic spacecraft developed under the same system is going to become more and more rare as well.
To make my point, major robotic missions like Cassini, Voyager, and even the Mariner missions are unlikely to be repeated in the future. Support for such big government programs that will take decades to perform no longer has congressional support. There are indeed some smaller robotic craft being developed, but please name a major new robotic spacecraft system that is currently being proposed at NASA which can follow up on research that has already been done. More significantly, the reason why the loss of Spirit is so awful is precisely because there isn't any sort of "replacement" of this scientific research platform due to funding cuts and a lack of interest on the part of Congress to build another rover vehicle that will take its place. There are certainly scientists and even NASA bureaucrats who have proposed such vehicles, but they aren't getting the support to get accomplished. This is on top of the fact that the robotic missions are usually the first things cut when the NASA budget goes through the meat grinder of the congressional appropriations process.
Getting back to my more optimistic appraisal, I think we are on the verge of a new wave of exploration because it will be moving more to private citizens. The wave of the future is with private spaceflight, more specifically with some of the new commercial spaceflight companies who are getting the brighter people in the industry... because that is where things are happening. It may include robotic vehicles as well as crews going into space, but they won't be primarily dependent upon the fickle winds of politics for funding those endeavors.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the government is going to be completely out of the loop any more, but NASA isn't going to be the bleeding edge of spaceflight technologies any more. I think stuff like Project Morpheus is going to be much more common at NASA, where they are going to work to refine technologies developed by private companies and citizens. There is already some consideration that Bigelow Aerospace might be contracted out for some ISS modules (or a separate NASA-financed space station) and other commercial companies like SpaceX already are being
Yes, engine governors are usually installed on motors that are usually stationary devices (such as electrical power generators or irrigation pumps... to cite some examples) but they are also installed on some vehicles to limit the speed of the vehicle as well. As I pointed out, it has been done by some public transit companies (who have mechanics and can even hire competent mechanical engineers to design the parts if necessary) and for some larger "fleet owners" who want to put some additional control on how fast those vehicles can be operated.
For a normal consumer vehicle, they usually aren't found as they suck up extra fuel and certainly kill performance with that vehicle. At the moment, such "governors" are indeed rare but they do exist explicitly for the purpose of limiting the speed of the vehicle.
For internal combustion engines that are left "unattended" (or at least not "constantly" monitored) for extended periods of time, governors are essential for safety reasons that you have mentioned here. Just know that there are other applications for governors as well. My point was that a GPS system isn't strictly necessary if you want to limit how fast somebody can drive a vehicle.
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Some of this goes into the manufacturing philosophies of Martin Eberhard vs. Elon Musk. Eberhard was a major fan of outsourcing, where he wanted to speed up the whole process of building the original Roadster by only concentrating on the key technologies and then using existing supply chains in the automotive industry to build everything else. Given that Tesla was a brand-new start-up when Eberhard was first trying his ideas out, much of that makes a whole lot of sense too. The problem with outsourcing your components is that you are at the mercy of your suppliers in terms of both price, volume, and quality. Tesla found that out the hard way when they struggled trying to get a decent transmission working, where a simple two-speed transmission (all they were hoping for at the time) simply got thrashed by the electric motor and the engineering team working on the transmission (an outsourced supplier) never could get the job done. Admittedly it was a very tough engineering challenge, but that supplier also didn't have the motivation to get the job done.
Ultimately, it was this transmission problem coupled with spiraling costs going out of control due to the plethora of suppliers on even key components (like the frame and body from Lotus, to give another example) that got Eberhard fired. He is a mighty fine engineer and even engineering manager, but he also bet wrong on how to deal with the suppliers a few too many times.
Elon Musk, particularly with his experience at SpaceX, has become much more sold upon the concept of building everything in-house and reducing the number of external parts suppliers to the absolute bare minimum. He doesn't even mind simply buying a supplier completely and putting the employees of that company on his payroll. Where it makes sense, he also tries to even relocate those supplier subsidiaries so they are even physically located in the same building. That has worked very well for SpaceX and I've seen Musk do that with Tesla as well. Lotus was originally going to be shipping completed cars to America, but later on a "final assembly plant" was set up for the Roadster in California where "gliders" came from the UK (the Lotus plant) and had their batteries along with other parts (wheel, engine, and some other stuff) put into the vehicle for final assembly. The Tesla engine itself has been manfuactured by a wholly owned subsidiary and Elon Musk has been making moves to consolidate even that part of his business.
More to the point, I think this move on the part of Tesla towards the Roadster really shouldn't be a surprise, as the particular parts chain has been an expensive and frankly failed experiment. In that regard perhaps the original parent is correct that the business model has failed, but of course the OP didn't mention what aspect of that business model failed. Roadsters have been only marginally profitable for Tesla and the need to revamp the production line, setting up much more part manufacturing in-house, and backing out of the agreement with Lotus to make the chassis is sufficient that even another high-end model might as well be something completely different as it will essentially have to be completely re-engineered anyway. Why not just have a clean break with the past, call the existing Roadsters to be the "end of the line", and create perhaps a whole new vehicle line for high-end customers in the future?
I don't see that Tesla is going to completely give up on that market segment, and in this sense it may even be something for high performance electric vehicle fans to look forward on. If anything, I'd expect Tesla to come out with another high performance vehicle in the next couple of years trying to target the same market segment, but blowing away the Roadster in nearly every aspect and targeting the $150k-$300k price point for those who can afford the really high end vehicles. If anything, the Roadster could have sold for much more to at least some of the customers who ended up buying the Roadster. Discontinuing the Roadster is therefore going to free up resources for when that happens. I'd also expect that high performance vehicle to happen before their supposed "mass market car" that was originally targeted for around $25k or less.
On the positive side, laws are changed in a legislative process that allows for vested interest to express themselves and to bring up issues that you might not have thought through yourself. When I say "I can't think of a downside", I'm expressing the viewpoint that I have not been able to find a counter argument which would be able to refute my basic premise and hold water.
Have I ever "refactored" code and come up with a bug? Yes. Heck, I've had bugs that I couldn't resolve and the only way to "fix them" was to simply rewrite the whole section or even project from scratch, where a "reimplementation" somehow cleaned up the logic enough to have the bug go away. One particularly nasty bug that I worked on for months was finally resolved.... by upgrading the compiler. Sources of bugs can come from a variety of places so I do know how unintended consequences can have a huge impact.
Yes, I'm a software engineer and I'm particularly upset over software patents. Especially given the fact that software expressions can be protected through other means (like copyright) make it all that much harder for me to support the concept, but my philosophies regarding patent laws in general represent years of deep consideration of patent law and how they impact ordinary people including those who are close to me and that I care about on a personal level. I've seen family fortunes squandered seeking patent protection on ideas to the point that if I mention I want to seek a patent at a family gathering, most of my extended family members groan with disgust or even pull me to the side and try to get me grounded back to normal, meaning that I'll forget the whole concept of patents altogether.
It is a radical philosophy, and I appreciate the "devils advocate" position you are taking here. What I am challenging is trying to find the social good that comes from patent law and I'm questioning why we even have it in the first place. The social good that comes from patents is quite weak, and the supposed benefits that it offers for the most part really don't happen. The benefits claimed by patent law defenders including "protecting the little guy" who comes up with some new idea, as well as preserving technical knowledge for future generations. Unfortunately neither of these "benefits" really happen with current patent law, so what else of social value is it really accomplishing?
Simply outlaw the practice altogether and let trade secrets be the law of the land. By the time a product has gone through testing and has made it to the consumer, it is likely nearing the end of its useful life for patent protection anyway.
I guess you're not in favor of new drug development, at all, ever.
If pharmaceutical patents were the only thing covered by patent law, it might be another story and I'd likely not care so much about patent law.
Still, show me that pharmaceutical patents really help even the big companies? I think there is much more to the issue than is led on by this simple reply, and patent law is being used as a crutch when there are other issues at stake here that aren't being stated in such a simple reply. Keep in mind that the FDA and drug trials have little to nothing to do with the USPTO.
I do contrast the patent system with the copyright system, where copyright protection does seem to work fairly well in protecting individual authors. Even that isn't perfect and it can create a bit of a problem from time to time, but most people who are copyright trolls back down in a hurry if you start to push back real hard. More to the point, a semi-professional or even pure amateur author can enjoy copyright protection and the process of even "formally registering" copyright (which gives you some additional benefits over the "automatic" copyright when you first put it down) is not too expensive and can be intelligently done without a lawyer for a relatively modest cost.
I wouldn't even remotely consider filing a patent application pro se, even if I've done other legal proceedings in that manner. You are just asking for trouble if you do it in that manner without some significant experience.
Pharmaceutical companies are already complaining that they have only 5 years or less to recover their investments into new drugs. It depends on when the clock starts for recovery and some other things, but I think the situation for pharmaceuticals is a special case that doesn't apply to patents in general. If you want to get into a discussion of drug development costs, it is a much larger issue that involves the FDA and other federal agencies besides the USPTO.
A backyard mechanic who comes up with a really cool idea is not really protected with the current patent system... or are you suggesting otherwise? Prove to me how.
We know of specific industries like the computer software industry that not only thrived but flourished without patents for many decades, and it could be argued suffered dramatically when patent protection was introduced as a concept. The ramifications of that one legal decision are still being felt today in a negative manner where the full impact has yet to be completely worked through the industry.
More to the point, what good are patents really doing? I keep asking for this, and while there are some wonderful exceptions, ordinary people are not being protected by patents anyway. Please, prove me wrong on this point and I would gladly change my tune here. There is a whole side business of people that I rank with snake oil salesmen that peddle "invention conferences" and try to push people to patent their ideas. That is a huge business and brings in millions of dollars to some lawyers. But otherwise, who is really benefiting from those efforts?
If you could quantify and that say 5% of all private individuals who patent their ideas as private citizens and go through these patent attorneys and then subsequently are able to "sell their invention" to a company for more than the cost of the patent application process, I might be a whole lot more supportive. My intuitive experience on the matter is that the number is far, far less to the point that I am seriously trying to collect even a single story about somebody who has done it. That simply isn't how patents are used today anyway.
In the meantime, there are patent troll companies who do extort millions of dollars from even major corporations, where often their claims are dubious at best but it becomes cheaper to simply pay them off rather than fight them in court. I've had that happen to companies I've worked for as an engineer.... more than once. One of my former employers did, however, have a patent of their own that they did a counter suite on against the troll, which got real interesting to say the least especially when that troll forgot to include that patent as prior art.
If you want to move step-by-step, look at limiting the scope and duration of patents. That is what the U.S. Constitution requires anyway (even if it is ignored), and perhaps a more "limited time" might be a better way to move to a complete abolition. The problem with a step-by-step approach is that the tort lawyers have too much influence in the lawmaking process to let it slide by or even do anything to make ground for compromise possible. Limiting scope would be to limit patents strictly to mechanical devices or something like that.... something physical and tangible. Business method patents in particular were an awful idea, and other extensions of patents into stuff like DNA sequences really getting into esoteric ideas that IMHO should never have been permitted in the first place.
More to the point, I have thought about the side effects of zero patents, and I'm trying to see the downside. Seriously. I can't really think of a redeeming feature that current patent law brings to society as a whole other than getting a bunch of lawyers rich off of what appears to me as a "confidence game". It doesn't help ordinary people secure their inventions, and most large companies only use patents to make sure that their competition doesn't sue them into submission.
It doesn't seem to make any sort of difference for those people who are creative to seek patent protection other than to help supplement the federal budget. I suppose that is a redeeming feature after a fashion, although I could argue that a special tax upon creative people to discourage creativity is not necessarily a good thing to society as a whole.
The intent of patents isn't to protect knowledge that is out in the open as if it were a secret.
The intent is to give incentives to make secret knowledge public.
Think publishing a "how to build a Stradivarius violin" manual, not a "how to make several small pieces of paper out of a big one" manual.
Basically patents weren't meant for technologies that are practical to reverse-engineer. They were meant for technology that is impossible to reverse-engineer.
I know modern reality is far from the ideal.
If you could show me a current patent application that has been filed in the past 20 years, I defy you to be able to explain how to actually create something based upon the wording of that application even if you were "skilled in the arts" of the industry that patent supposedly covers. Patents simply don't work that way.
All a patent application has is a list of legal language that involves claims for what might be the idea or concept, and noting previous patents and claims to which this idea is not because that would be prior art. It really doesn't go much into how the device or concept actually works, or does just enough to show it is a novel and therefore a patentable idea.
If, as is commonly claimed by patent defenders, that knowledge on how to produce certain technologies was actually contained in the patent application, then I might buy that as a legitimate argument. There was a time the USPTO require a working model of the device for inspection by its examiners before a patent was granted, and those models actually do show how to reproduce the technology in question. I think something was missed when an inventor no longer had to show an actual implementation of the idea before the patent was granted.
My point is that this latest round of "patent reform" doesn't even take into consideration the constitutional limits at all, and is far more concerned about "international partners" and working with major patent producers (IBM, Microsoft, etc.) than trying to really address what the whole point of a patent was supposed to be in the first place.
Here is my thought on a method to handle the awarding of patents:
Don't.
Yup. Simply outlaw the practice altogether and let trade secrets be the law of the land. By the time a product has gone through testing and has made it to the consumer, it is likely nearing the end of its useful life for patent protection anyway.
I consider patent legislation to be a failed social experiment whose time is nearing an end. No, I'm not really an anarchist and I do believe in the rule of law and even think there is a necessity for a legal system, but that patents tend to help those who don't need help and don't protect those that do. I also don't know of any way to reform the system sufficiently to be able to "protect the little guy" without screwing them over even more than they are, where being blunt that legal protection through patents doesn't work at all is likely the best advise you can give to a young aspiring inventor.
Having known many engineers and "inventors" in my lifetime, including some who sought protection through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, not a single one of them ever received in royalties any money more than the legal costs they spent trying to get the patent in the first place, assuming they got anything at all in the first place. At best all a patent has been useful for is a resume bullet point that might make the difference to get a job interview. I guess that counts for something, but it wouldn't be something I would necessarily be impressed with other than showing you actually do know how to work with lawyers.
Since I'm not reading ...
Does this not basically break prior art? Can I patent something that someone else invented first but didn't file?
Essentially, Yes. IMHO that is part of the problem with this whole concept. I'm sure there will be some sort of legal protection if you can show that some "prior use" in "common practice" within some industry, but on a practical matter if you invented something, used it for awhile in developing a product but didn't bother to patent the thing when you finally release that product, it does open at least the potential you can be sued for patent infringement on something that you legitimately invented on your own independently and previous to the patent application.
I would like to see how this could possible hold up to the congressional power of being able "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Somehow this round of patent reform is going still another step away from this constitutional mandate, as if it didn't even exist. Then again, I would be wary of the "limited Times" provision in any new law as well as that is where most "intellectual property reform" usually tends towards infinity on that issue.
For myself, I think patents are altogether nonsense anyway and don't do any bit of good to protect inventors at all. Many companies do just fine without patents on even very innovative developments and products, and it tends to be the patent trolls that win in most cases.... people who litigate and clog the judicial system but really don't innovate nor really improve society as a whole. This legislation seems to encourage patent trolls even more and gives them an upper hand.
Which also supports the point that IBM didn't invent this computer in the first place. Yes it was a key strategy to use off-the-shelf parts, but that was a double-edged sword as well.
One of the reasons why this computer became so popular was precisely the "off the shelf" nature of the beast, as it was easy to copy and didn't have all of the patents and other intellectual property nonsense that other computers of the era had. There were some really strange intellectual property strategies used for the "compatible" computers that were eventually built, especially when the BIOS of the original PC had a function call that essentially did nothing but return the string "IBM" as a way to validate the system. Instead, some people still did work-arounds to get past those issues, which is where the idea of computers that claimed a percentage of compatibility with the PC came, including computers that asserted they were "100% compatible" with the PC.
IBM did eventually try to bring more stuff in-house and even introduced some concepts like the Micro Channel Architecture in their PS/2 line that tried to stuff the genie back into the bottle when they realized they were losing market share. Attempts to push for even more proprietary designs in their computers only shrank their market share, to the point that IBM is not even remotely a player in the market any more.
I can't imagine any college at that time teaching programming on PC-DOS 1.0. Don't believe it.
What is hard to believe? It was mainly introductory programming classes and a small town community college, not a major university so it wasn't nearly as big of a deal as you may think.
Earlier they had been using mainframe computers used by a major university (University of Minnesota at the time) and had a timeshare system (MECC) where the college students had dial-up access for their programming courses. It was that year they shut down the timeshare system and was transitioning into something else, and the college had contracted out to buy a VAX-11 system to support the computer science classes, but the system was back ordered and wasn't installed until the spring term. Once the VAX was installed, life got a whole lot easier, but the interim "solution" was a bank of PCs runing PC-DOS 1.0
Let's just say I learned how to code very efficiently, and that one term where we had several sections of programming classes on just two PC computers was where I learned how to use flowcharts and psuedo code to effectively design my software prior to actually committing it to a source file. The last couple of weeks prior to finals those computers were literally booked solid with appointments for their access, and it was just software development projects alone that were permitted as the other students would have killed you had you done any recreational activity on them instead of actual class assignments.
Let's just say the college president personally came into the class himself at the beginning of the term and apologized to the class as a whole for the situation, even offering tuition reimbursement for those who wanted to get out of the class and waived deadlines for that class that would normally only get a partial tuition reimbursement. Most of the kids in the class simply wanted to learn about computers and were willing to put up with the situation even as rough as it was.
Before you spout out what you think about early computing history, get a grip with reality and realize not everything fits your rosy world view and that sometimes crap does happen.
The PC-XT was not the original model. By the time IBM got to the XT model, there had been enough grumbling about the keyboard that the management in charge of the PC decided to get their act together and to make a real keyboard that worked.
I was referring to the original IBM-PC... which I did have the pleasure of using including trying to use PC-DOS 1.0. It was on that computer I took my first computer programming courses in college. Believe it or not, my entire college had only five computers that term, two PCs and three Apple ][ computers.
That particular price point for the 5100 was set by the marketing department, because they didn't want it to compete against their mainframe business. It could have been sold for substantially less, and did include a number of features that was well ahead of its time.
Simply put, it was never given the chance to actually be a real product because IBM didn't want it to be something an ordinary consumer could ever possibly purchase. About the only people permitted to even buy this computer were existing customers of IBM mainframes.
When the PCjr came out, they had a similar problem where the "low-cost alternative" was in many ways technically superior to the higher end mainstream computer system. So instead, IBM expended deliberate engineering effort to downgrade and cripple yet another product instead of simply letting the superior technology take root. Typical for IBM.
There was the IBM 5100 computer, which was an amazing piece of hardware. It very likely could have been the genesis of personal computers.... had IBM any sort of vision and if their marketing department wasn't so paranoid about the concept to let it out of the laboratory.
One of the amazing things about this little microcomputer was the fact that it could emulate some of the mainframe computers then in use at the time and even could in theory run some of software running on those mainframes as native binaries.
Unfortunately IBM sat on this device and only sold it to existing mainframe customers (when it was sold at all).
Sadly, the only thing that is related between this particular computer and the later IBM PC was the part numbering system, where the more famous "IBM PC" had the part number 5150.
The IBM was keyboard perfection:
Byte magazine in the fall of 1981 went so far as to state that the keyboard was 50% of the reason to buy an IBM PC.
IBM Personal Computer
The original keyboard for the IBM PC was a pure piece of garbage. As a matter of fact, one of the early accessories that many PC buyers purchased was a keyboard from 3rd party developers, where important keys like the "enter key" was enlarged, along with the shift keys and a spacebar that actually felt right.
Re-read that article again, to realize how many people hated the thing. I hated it and told my professors at the time.... where they cringed in disbelief that IBM could produce such a piece of crap. One of the regular features in Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Mannor column was a review of a new keyboards to replace that piece of junk.
As if to add insult to injury, the PCjr decided to downgrade even this horrible keyboard that IBM made with something even worse. It was so awful that the CEO of IBM decided to apologize and sent a new keyboard to every customer of that computer which had registered with a warranty card. Surprisingly, this "replacement" keyboard for the PCjr was even superior to that horrible IBM PC keyboard.
I remember a computer trade journal article that came out about the same time the IBM PC was released, where they went through the parts list of the items that went into the original IBM PC. After going through all of the components including the case, the only thing they could identify that was original components that was actually designed by IBM engineers was the sticker label that went on the outside of the case which said "IBM".
That wasn't entirely fair as there were some IBM engineers who had to piece the components together and sort of did help design the motherboard, but otherwise not a single major component inside of that computer was even made by IBM. Even that process of designing the PC motherboard was going way outside of the normal IBM development cycle process and only when a completed motherboard was presented to IBM management that anything resembling a formal project to make the IBM PC a reality was initiated.
What the letters "IBM" did do to the personal computer industry, however, was to legitimize the industry so far as to give conservative business executives an excuse to buy the equipment. Before they weren't about to buy a beige computer from a bunch of hippies in California or a video game console that also happened to do some computing on the side. Before IBM, the personal computer industry was mainly hackers and hobbyists. Afterward, the personal computer went mainstream into homes and medium-sized businesses.
That may be what the "official release" is all about. This is "scheduled" for some time in November (go look it up if you really care to find out).
Once Minecraft hits the "version 1.0" status he may just simply throw the doors open to the community... or sell out to some other game company. I really don't know what is going on with the whole thing at this point, although the modder community is playing around with the presumption that everything has something akin to a Creative Commons license of some sort.
The real shock would be if Mojang sells out to one of the major game publishers (take your pick) who promptly trash the community behind the game. It isn't as if a major community-supported project has been nerfed through selling out for money in the past. Heck, just look at what Oracle has done to Java.... and Oracle is at least still giving lip service after a fashion to their user community.
Not to belabor this point, but constitutional issues are decided (usually) in civil, not criminal courts.... unless you are being explicitly charged with a crime and you are using constitutional issues as a defense as to why the criminal laws themselves should never have been written in the first place as a violation of the constitution.
If some law enforcement officer searches your house without a warrant, arrests your family without charges, or does something else equally stupid and in clear violation of this very provision you are talking about here, the usual recourse is to sue the police department who did that into oblivion. That is of course if you can get past the government immunity laws and get the "district attorney" or whoever is the lead government lawyer to permit you to be able to sue the police department or government entity who performed the action.
There isn't really anything stopping government agencies from doing stupid stuff other than the potential that they could get fired for costing the government a whole lot of money. That is precisely why the school board official who was complaining at the start of the thread about how this is costing taxpayers so much money is really out of line. If you want to stop being the target of a whole bunch of lawsuits and not be paying people piles of money for violating their constitutional rights, enforce policies that guarantee those rights to ordinary citizens and make sure that you fire on the spot any staff members who violate those policies.
1. it's currently cheaper to just buy more enriched uranium than reprocess
2. they're awfully good at producing weapons grade plutonium ...so we're currently not building any. Pity that.
I think it is point #2 that is the primary political reason for not openly supporting and encouraging breeder reactors in general. If the parts and manufacturing processes were streamlined to construct and maintain breeder reactor designs in an efficient and cheap manner that some Somalian warlord could build one on his ranch, we would have to start worrying about private nuclear weapons. At the very least there seems to be an organized political effort to kill nuclear research because ignorance is bliss and the idea is that developing these technologies in the first place is incredibly difficult... or at least the perception that nuclear energy research is dangerous and expensive has been encouraged.
If this isn't being done now, it will be done some time in the future when folks aren't so paranoid about nuclear reactors. Then again, perhaps fusion technology will finally be developed so this will be considered an historical oddity that doesn't need to be followed because "cheaper" ways to make energy are available. Fusion technology is also considerably harder to implement as weapons other than simply using the raw energy itself in some fashion (such as connecting a 10 MW plant to a rail gun).
What criminal charges? If you are going to charge somebody with a crime, it needs to be something illegal in the first place.
While the fact that this could be used to record information about a student and the home might have been withheld, this device was voluntarily brought into the home. It isn't as if the school district employees broke into this family's home and planted the cameras or did something else similarly stupid. There was no criminal offense, hence no criminal charges were filed.
It was a pretty stupid thing to do in the first place, and it is civil liability that can keep this from being repeated elsewhere almost as effectively as if there were criminal laws passed to prohibit this from happening. Laws shouldn't have to cover every possible situation in life, and sometimes common sense ought to prevail in terms of knowing when you have crossed the line of decency and good taste. That is precisely the role of civil courts... to hopefully allow common sense to prevail from time to time (even if it seems somewhat rare).
The issue here is civil vs. criminal law. No laws that can put you into prison were violated, hence the employees can't be prosecuted.
Civil liability, on the other hand, is the deal being discussed. You may not be able to put somebody into jail, but often being able to sue somebody for millions of dollars is motivation enough to keep them honest and not wanting to screw you over.
In this case, if the school board implemented policies that required employees of the school district to perform certain actions, clearly it is the school district that is held liable for the implementation of those policies, not the employees themselves. This is also true of a for-profit corporation in terms of employees implementing policies that came from top management. The policies may be stupid, irrational, and in fact may violate civil liberties.... but at the same time it can open up a company or in this case a government body to a massive amount of liability if they "break the law".
This is precisely the reason why the comment that this is "a complete waste of the taxpayer's dollars" is a stupid argument in the first place. The waste of taxpayer's dollars was the implementation of a stupid policy by the school district and by those in a management position to not ensure that the law was followed. The damage was done, and now the school district has to fess up.... even if it means that it must close schools or even cease to exist as an entity. Managing a school means you have to avoid liability too, which is precisely the job of a superintendent or principal. Causing liability certainly is grounds for termination.... which apparently didn't happen. That is also a travesty.
Because this is a government entity rather than a corporate body, the school board has additional immunity that a for-profit board of directors often doesn't enjoy. While it isn't all that common, if you can clearly link a policy that causes liability to a company it is also possible for shareholders to sue members of the board of directors for violating the corporate charter.... which for most companies is to "maximize profits and to increase shareholder equity", of which causing liability clearly does not increase shareholder equity. In that case, individual board members can be sued separate from the company, but it is a more drawn out process. Top management (like a CEO) can often also be the target of such a lawsuit by shareholders. I suppose that taxpayers could sue school board members under the same principle if you can document that somehow they violated basic principles in the school board charter (yes those exist too), but it would be a bit harder to prove and a school board is not bound by law to try and make a profit.
In a sense, yes "knowingly breaking the law" is a valid defense, but for ordinary peons running things simply aren't on the hook financially for the things they do because the presumption is that their supervisors know what they are doing. Saying you were "following orders" is a strong defense if for example the company in turn wanted to sue the employee for causing liability. Such a lawsuit would normally be laughed out of court instantly.
Hasn't the original Viking 1 lander location already been declared a "UNESCO World Heritage Site"?
To me, however, the more impressive artifacts on Mars would be those vehicles which failed to land properly or failed to transmit the data back to the Earth. There are a couple of Soviet probes that predated the Viking landers as well as a few infamous vehicles sent up by America that would certainly be of interest in that regard.
That said, Mars is a pretty big place. Its surface area is roughly the same as the land surface area here on Earth of all of the continents combined... so a quick trip around the planet is still going to take some time to accomplish.
For myself, I think we are just on the verge of a renewed genuine manned (or "crewed" for the more politically correct crowd) spaceflight expeditions of the future. What the final launch of the Shuttle will imply is the end of the massive big-budget government programs that are stopping mankind from spreading out at least within the solar system.
Yes, I assert and claim that NASA has done more to stop the expansion of mankind into the cosmos than they have helped, particularly over the past couple of decades. With tens of billions of dollars dumped on Constellation, a similar amount being proposed to be tossed at the "SLS" (aka "Senate Launch System") along with over a dozen other failed manned spaceflight projects that have gone through NASA over the past several decades, I see an agency that is hindering the process for Americans to build upon their legacies to continue going forward.
It is sad that the furthest any crew has been from the Earth was the crew from Apollo 13 (due to their free-return trajectory as the fastest means to return to the Earth with the limited fuel sources they had). That is a record that should have not only been passed decades ago, but should have been passed up regularly and by orders of magnitude since. We have been in the doldrums of manned spaceflight for quite some time, and all that has happened is a stagnant spaceflight industry that is no longer attracting the best and the brightest minds due to the fact that nothing is really being built any more... at least with the traditional government cost-plus contracting business models that built the Manhattan Project and flew people to the Moon with Apollo. Not only is manned spaceflight going downhill, robotic spacecraft developed under the same system is going to become more and more rare as well.
To make my point, major robotic missions like Cassini, Voyager, and even the Mariner missions are unlikely to be repeated in the future. Support for such big government programs that will take decades to perform no longer has congressional support. There are indeed some smaller robotic craft being developed, but please name a major new robotic spacecraft system that is currently being proposed at NASA which can follow up on research that has already been done. More significantly, the reason why the loss of Spirit is so awful is precisely because there isn't any sort of "replacement" of this scientific research platform due to funding cuts and a lack of interest on the part of Congress to build another rover vehicle that will take its place. There are certainly scientists and even NASA bureaucrats who have proposed such vehicles, but they aren't getting the support to get accomplished. This is on top of the fact that the robotic missions are usually the first things cut when the NASA budget goes through the meat grinder of the congressional appropriations process.
Getting back to my more optimistic appraisal, I think we are on the verge of a new wave of exploration because it will be moving more to private citizens. The wave of the future is with private spaceflight, more specifically with some of the new commercial spaceflight companies who are getting the brighter people in the industry... because that is where things are happening. It may include robotic vehicles as well as crews going into space, but they won't be primarily dependent upon the fickle winds of politics for funding those endeavors.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the government is going to be completely out of the loop any more, but NASA isn't going to be the bleeding edge of spaceflight technologies any more. I think stuff like Project Morpheus is going to be much more common at NASA, where they are going to work to refine technologies developed by private companies and citizens. There is already some consideration that Bigelow Aerospace might be contracted out for some ISS modules (or a separate NASA-financed space station) and other commercial companies like SpaceX already are being
Yes, engine governors are usually installed on motors that are usually stationary devices (such as electrical power generators or irrigation pumps... to cite some examples) but they are also installed on some vehicles to limit the speed of the vehicle as well. As I pointed out, it has been done by some public transit companies (who have mechanics and can even hire competent mechanical engineers to design the parts if necessary) and for some larger "fleet owners" who want to put some additional control on how fast those vehicles can be operated.
For a normal consumer vehicle, they usually aren't found as they suck up extra fuel and certainly kill performance with that vehicle. At the moment, such "governors" are indeed rare but they do exist explicitly for the purpose of limiting the speed of the vehicle.
For internal combustion engines that are left "unattended" (or at least not "constantly" monitored) for extended periods of time, governors are essential for safety reasons that you have mentioned here. Just know that there are other applications for governors as well. My point was that a GPS system isn't strictly necessary if you want to limit how fast somebody can drive a vehicle.