You would be stupid to sign such a contract, however. Signing a contract where the other party is free to change the terms and conditions freely is not really even a contract, but merely a notification of terms of service.
Too bad that the courts don't look at things that way.
The real problem here is that this is a university network we are talking about. Supposedly you come to a university to learn about how the "universe" works and all things in it. That is of course where the root of the word "university" comes from as it is supposed to be a place to learn "universal" knowledge... in other words all encompassing.
This includes peer to peer networks, I should note.
A computer science program that didn't teach the concepts of peer to peer networking would seem to me as a school which is deliberately shooting themselves in the foot, and as such being in the curriculum itself would imply that students at least at some level are going to be creating these networks as a matter of practice. I'm curious about how the school will deal with that.
File sharing is hardly the only thing done with peer to peer networks as well, even if it happens to be a major aspect that gets attention.
More properly, if you want to ban peer to peer software, you need to ban the use of TCP/IP on the network. There are networking protocols that won't permit peer to peer connections at all. Perhaps this college needs to consider some other network architecture for their internal network instead.
Of course doing so would have some far reaching consequences including leaving their students unprepared for life outside of the university, but such things don't matter in higher education circles, do they?
But of course that must include the fact that in Soviet Russia, a petrified Natalie Portman with hot grits enjoys your Beowolf cluster of these things.
Something like that, I think something got lost in translation.
I have a hard time seeing how Makerbot is able to put their device together for a price point cheaper than Fab@Home, but perhaps they got the supply chain necessary to put that together and have been able to simplify the design yet another order of magnitude.
Yeah, after I posted that comment I saw something about Makerbot and it looks real interesting. A cheap 3D printer, even if it is the equivalent of dot matrix printer from a couple of decades ago.
I remember the Sinclair Z-80, which was the first really cheap computer to hit the market (sub $100 at the time). It wasn't that fancy of a computer and was incredibly difficult to get everything to work right, but it did work and was one of the first computers that somebody in a 3rd world country could afford to buy brand new. Now that is some market there. When I lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, I noticed more than a few of those computers in the slum areas by some dedicated geeks with almost no money.
One company that I know of that is doing some really cool stuff out of printed 3D parts is Unreasonable Rocket. Paul Breed and his company were competitors for the Northrup-Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge and have been building some really cool rockets that can get to the upper atmosphere (not quite orbit yet, but they are trying). He mentioned in this particular blog entry how the price on printing parts is dropping fast, and it has reached the point that he can take a CAD drawing, ship that drawing to the machinist and they'll make the part with a 3D printer with a pretty wide variety of materials, including some metal castings. Essentially, it is now cheaper to order the printed part than it is for him to pay somebody to machine the part with more traditional machining tools out of a raw block of material.
That is a huge deal. I wonder how many other companies are doing something like this? That, to me, sounds like a significant tipping point has been reached even for the higher end printers.
I wish I could provide a more "free" source, but at least one citation I found here that talks about a couple of different toy guns that were modified in the 1960's:
This is even a refereed journal and a formal publication on the topic. There are also some informal publication about this issue, including some documentaries about the topic.
An interesting TV commercial that shows one of these toy guns in action can be found here:
It is a fun commercial to watch just for the nostalgia, and it even shows how kids "reload" the gun and make it fire. Apparently some rubber bands and other very minor (and inexpensive) modifications were done to the gun to make it work with real bullets instead (to make the hammer hit the bullet primer harder).
I'm not saying that it is perfect, and I sure as heck would never actually use the gun in this manner as more than a few would-be bank robbers did have the gun misfire and basically do self-inflicted harm. You are correct that the gun wasn't really designed to take this damage, and it was a danger to somebody who tried. I think it was made out of stamped steel, so there may have been a little more structural strength with this toy than a more "modern" plastic gun.
If you are trying to use it for something more serious as a real gun with some safety margin to keep it from removing digits on your hand, I would recommend some kevlar/carbon-fiber type of reinforcing too. The point here is that the gun was used in this manner, not that it was a particularly good application of the technology.
As the article cited briefly mentions, it was a.22 round that went into the chamber, even though the gun itself was modeled after a Colt.45 gun. My bad on that one, but I was going only on memory on that point. I could dig further as I think Mattel did end up settling on a wrongful death lawsuit, which is one of the reasons they no longer make the toy together with legislation that requires toys to literally be incapable of being able to do this as well.
This said, moding up a factual seeming statement as "Insightful", not just once but twice, certainly seems to pull it out of the joke category.
If you want to make it a joke, you can do it in a way where it is obviously a joke too.
No, don't do your stupid "whoosh" impression here either. I just don't see how this comment is so insightful other than a political jab at "big business" which essentially turns the moderation into (+1, Liberal POV).
I'm also willing to realize that stupid things do happen and there is a remote possibility that this may be something to it as well. With the litigious nature of American lawyers, I can believe almost anything as the subject of a lawsuit, and to even have the plaintiffs win. I'm presuming that was in part the reference to this statement as well.
The first DVD recorder that I had access to had a serial number of three digits and cost about $10k. The salesman I talked to at the time said it was one of the first ones sold in the Western USA. The blanks at the time cost the company I was working for about $10 each. There was no mention in terms of the number of discs it would produce, but we had contracts in hand to mass produce DVDs once we had the original data formatted properly to make them for about $1 each in quantities of about 1000 and suggestions that price would go down considerably from there.
I wrote the authoring system being used to make those discs at the time, which is one of the reasons why I had access to such early technology. I don't know if some GST tax or some other costs involved in terms of UK sales, but that at least was my own experience.
The problem here is that I don't see the price dropping as significantly for 3D printers. The Fab@Home printer costs roughly $2k (about 1K GBP, give or take some) and that price has been pretty steady. It also has some strong limitations and most of the stuff created with that printer is mostly plastic stuff or some pastries being done with frosting. The printers that work with metal are still in the tens of thousands of dollars range, and haven't really dropped much in price.
Note that with the Wright Flyer drawings, it was something original performed by the staff of the Smithsonian that they are protecting, not the original plans drawn up by Orville and Wilbur Wright. Those plans are in the public domain and the patents on them have expired.
I personally don't have too much worry about an organization like the Smithsonian making money off of effort they put in, other than the Smithsonian is to me something that might as well be an agency of the U.S. government due to their very cozy relationship with Congress. I know it wasn't always that way, but I look at it that way at the present time, and think that such publications ought to simply be in the public domain as works performed by government employees. That is a completely separate issue, however, from the way you've framed the question as to the legitimacy of why those plans are restricted from commercial republication.
If you took some classical work like say the writings of William Shakespeare and prepared them in some innovative and original manner, that work would be protected by copyright as well. The original words wouldn't be, but the new packaging certainly would be including any changes you may have made to those plays to make them "more modern" in some fashion. That is how copyright works.
If patent law was treated like copyright law, that would be the case. Thank goodness there is plenty of "prior art" to show all of those things are unpatentable.
I've heard of some people trying to retroactively copyright the Shakespearean plays, saying essentially that Life+400 years isn't long enough. I guess I shouldn't give Disney any ideas here.
Copyright and Patent law are so separate that they are even regulated by two completely different branches of government. For some reason, Congress decided that copyright law wasn't even going to go through the executive branch, but instead is regulated completely and totally within the legislative branch through the Library of Congress. Yes, the Department of Justice does get involved from time to time, but mostly it stays within the legislative branch, including for copyright registration. The Librarian of Congress reports directly to the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tem of the Senate.
Patent law is regulated through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, who performs the patent reviews and archives materials related to patents. The head of the USPTO reports to the President of the USA.
Yeah, you really shouldn't mix up the two kinds of laws, and I can't think of anything more distinctive than that.
Unfortunately that has little to do with real teleportation. The teleportation currently being done is reproducing the exact quantum state of something else and moving essentially a perfect copy including the quantum entanglement properties of all of its components to another location. This is being done today about one atom at a time, and I'm not really sure how complex it has been able to get, but a water molecule is about the best you can hope for if you are real lucky. Perhaps that will improve over time.
Perhaps, and this is just a maybe, there will be a time in the very distant future where the ability to manipulate individual atoms to build something macroscopic one atom at a time will happen. That still isn't a teleporter, but it is a sort of thing that you saw out of Star Trek. None the less, I don't think it will ever be something that you plug into your 110 V, 30 amp wall socket to turn on in your kitchen. It would take a fair bit more energy than that.
Most of the machine shops near where I live right now have 3D printers to make the rough blanks for whatever it is that they are working with. They will print the part and then take it to a lathe or some other machine to do some final milling, but they are already using the process to speed up the fabrication process for more obscure parts. The high precision tolerances aren't necessary in every dimension for every part, and a 3D printer sometimes will provide more consistency for some aspects that traditional machining methods don't always perform.
I can find analogs to this with early CD-R recorders and the expensive blanks like you were talking about here. When blank CD-Rs cost about $5 each (about the upper limit I ever saw, and that was usually just the retail price in a computer store... even then wholesale costs were cheaper) it was still at a price point that a small garage band could burn a copy of their music and hand them out to fans, friends, and perhaps make a little bit of money on the side. It took somebody who was skilled with the equipment to make the CD recordings, but it did happen. That is pretty much where 3D printing is right now.
The problem is that the 3D printers used by these machine shops typically cost in the tens of thousands of dollars range, not just a couple thousand. It also takes more technical skills to use the stuff produced by these printers including access to some more specialized tools as the part coming straight off the printer isn't being used all of the time. Perhaps this will eventually get fixed and the resolution for the "voxels" (3D equivalent of a pixel) will improve over time. I've seen that with 2D scanning technology and printing, so I see that as a definite possibility.
This is also where an "open source" type fabrication model would be even more beneficial, as you would have some people with a little bit of expertise in the area that would look at this bracket and perhaps make some minor tweaks to the design (which would move it out of any patent claims because it is a different part) and make a bracket that would hold out much, much longer including suggested materials that are different than the "planned obsolescence" parts designed to deliberately fall apart.
Then again that sort of "aftermarket" design approach would really get car manufacturers worried too.
I have heard about some attempts to do some 3D printing of simple integrated circuits... essentially something like the early 7400 series chips. It might be nice to be able to print out a couple 7402 circuits or something similar. There would be some advantage to that, even if a good programmable logic chip of some kind is likely to give you much better performance at a fraction of the cost for any kind of complex circuit.
As far as Lego bricks, I think any sort of patent has experied on them, although there may still be copyright & trademark protections to worry about. As long as you don't claim they are Legos (selling under a different brand) you are likely to be safe to make your own bricks in that way. Some of the more speciailized bricks for the fancy models might have patent protection, but not the basic stackable brick.
As for how much money you will save making your own bricks, I would think that Lego could use scales of economy to undercut any cost savings by making a brick with a 3-D printer, at least for awhile. If it is cheaper to print them, that only shows the profit margin that the company has making them, and something easily fixed.
I'm not saying that such a cost savings is always going to be the case, and 3D printers may get cheap enough to mass produce stuff like Lego bricks to be cheaper than other manufacturing processes, but that seems unlikely in the near future.
I'm more worried about the idiots who are tinkering with the future of humanity by posting 3D printer schematics online.
Too late, it is already being done.
I suppose you are concerned about people making artificial life as well? In other words somebody using just chemistry to create a completely artificial life form that can reproduce itself with no outside DNA or any previous life form being needed. Guess what... it is already being done too.
All this implies is that there is still going to be a need for a good mechanic and the need perhaps for resources outside of the realm of what can be directly made by a 3D printer.
There was a toy manufacturer in America (back when such things still were made in America) who made a nearly perfect replica of a Colt.45 handgun out of plastic, complete with plastic bullets. They made hundreds of thousands of these things, and kids who were hooked on Cowboy movies & television shows during the era bought them up and acted like some super-charged John Wayne, sort of like you see in the movie Toy Story.
Anyway, some people with less than honorable intentions discovered that bullets for a real Colt.45 would fit into the chambers of this gun, and the firing mechanism (hammer & trigger) would even work to make it a real gun. It had numerous problems if you wanted to use it for target practice, and there was a tendency for the gun to even blow up in your hand (sending you to the hospital) if you fired the gun, but about 8 times out of 10 times the bullet would leave the gun just like the real thing. It was "good enough" that it was used in a number of bank robberies, and ended up killing a couple of security guards.
If you want to know where the regulations on toy guns come from, it was this incident that started the whole thing. I think something from a 3D printer could easily reproduce this particular toy gun, and getting ammunition for guns isn't all that particularly hard. You could even print out the bullets too, where the trick would be to create the primer & gunpowder with home-made recipes. Obtaining the raw ingredients: sulfer, carbon, and potassium nitrate; aren't all that hard to find, and one of the early sources of KNO3 was manure. In other words, anybody who builds an out-house and has access to some wood could also make a bomb. For awhile in London during the 19th Century, people were actually paid to have their septic system cleaned out for nitrate production, or at least not charged for the service.
I agree it would be a complex process and take somebody with some real initiative, but a basic knowledge of chemistry is all it would really take if you cared. Many 3D printers are also capable of producing metal parts too, or you could print out a machine lathe and some other machining tools to make the stuff if you were so inclined. It isn't that complicated, and what it would take to stop this is to simply outlaw the ability to be human. Somehow I think that violates some civil rights and some other basic principles there too.
The concern wasn't that "we" were able to make unlimited perfect copies for essentially nothing. The real threat was that there was no need for an expensive recording studio to make fairly decent audio recordings and that many performers wouldn't have to go through the studio system in order to get their music "published".
Let's get the situation nailed down here. It was people going to concerts with tape recorders and other recording devices, as well as cameras in movie theaters that were the first areas that the **AA got serious about copyright enforcement against ordinary consumers and more casual kinds of copying that in earlier years was considered "fair-use".
Yes, there has been problems with peer-to-peer filesharing and people setting up web pages of all of their favorite MP3 files saying "here is some music I ripped off my favorite CD... have at it". They make a whole bunch of bluster about that fact, but it really isn't impacting their bottom line all that much and in fact such distribution amounts to mainly marketing rather than actual lost sales.
In terms of damage done, it is the recordable CD that has scared the RIAA much more than network distribution of music. They are being cut out of the loop and simply are no longer involved with the production and distribution of a fairly substantial amount of music, where they are also losing market share and suffering from sales simply because the stuff they are producing is garbage. Another huge problem facing "the music industry" (as represented by the RIAA) is that new talent is being skipped over and ignored. About the only way for them to get fresh blood into the industry any more is some extravagant thing like American Idol, which still skips over a whole bunch of journeymen musicians who are fairly decent but not good enough to go all of the way to the top.
I think guys like Simon Cowell "gets it" that there are whole groups of talent that aren't getting recorded any more, even if I think his methods for finding talent are mostly showmanship rather than fixing the problem. Some major industry execs also get the problem, but not all of them, and certainly not the RIAA lawyers or for that matter those making the decisions on where to push back within the RIAA, especially as the RIAA isn't going to be making money (getting more dues paid. hence getting larger salaries) if they change tactics to embrace network distribution as a way of life and something good for the industry. Instead, they are simply fading away to irrelevance. Good for them, too, as we really don't need blood sucking lawyers like that anyway.
There is a splat on a map by the news agency who broke this story that suggests at least a location for where the launch likely happened at (presuming it was even a rocket launch).
Without going into the gritty details, when you are talking about the actions between nations you can sometimes invoke lawyers and courts, but typically those things mean pretty much whatever the leaders of those countries involved think they mean. As a practical matter, the U.S. Navy isn't about to sink a ship belonging to another country unless that country appears to be a threat. The suggestion here is that the ship would be sunk simply because it happens to be close to the coast of America. That simply is not how things work in this world.
Clearly, if this was a sub-based missile launch approximately 35 miles from the U.S. coast and performed by somebody who doesn't have approval from the U.S. government in some fashion, it would be perceived as a major threat to American sovereignty and would be dealt with, regardless of it it happened to be within or just outside of any sort of claimed territorial waters.
The response is a political question, as nobody was harmed, no city was nuked, and in fact there was nothing remotely threatening from the direction and path of this contrail at all. The only threat is if you can determine that somebody potentially dangerous to America was responsible for creating this device, whatever it was that made the cloud.
If a failsafe fails in a dangerous way, it wasn't really designed properly as a failsafe, or more properly it wasn't really a genuine failsafe.
It isn't easy to engineer something to degrade gracefully, and for rocket in particular (or more generally when manipulating large amounts of energy), sometimes it isn't an easy or obvious solution in terms of making something that fails in a graceful manner where the damage to life, property, or the environment is minimized.
It is possible to engineer most devices to be operated safely or be able to give a bit of a warning to the operator to get the heck out of Dodge before they get killed. Overriding safety protocols is usually something that gets people killed or hurt badly precisely because you are operating outside of the proscribed limits. Of course sometimes you need to test a device on the extreme edge to see what it might do and if the safety protocol is justified too.
The main problem is when you have an operator using production equipment who decides to perform an engineering envelope test on a device where they are not taking the precautions necessary for such a test, nor are they going to be able to afford the resulting damage if such a test is performed.
That is precisely what happened with the Space Shuttles Columbia and Challenger, where they were operating out of the originally designed safety parameters, and people died as a result. The Columbia was especially sad as it was an engineering change that was not properly tested resulting from somebody concerned about the couple hundred pounds of "ozone destroying" chemicals that ended up killing those astronauts. Yup, that saved the environment, I suppose.
There was a TV show that was called "Gilligan's Planet" which was an animated parody of "Gilligan's Island" set in the future where Gilligan gets rescued only to get lost again on some spacecraft. It was even more campy than original TV series, as hard as that may seem.
The TV Show that I think you are referring to is Far Out Space Nuts, starring Bob Denver (Gilligan from Gilligan's Island, but his character wasn't named that) where the lead characters were NASA employees who screwed up and accidentally launch a spacecraft while on board outfitting it for a mission. Allan Hale, Jr. (Skipper) was not a regular cast member, although he may have shown up as a guest star during the production of the series.
It certainly wasn't a fantastic show, and there were only sixteen episodes filmed in that series, which only aired on CBS on Saturday Mornings for the 1975 television season. If you remember the show, it certainly dates you as not too many people really ever saw the show.
Is there any record or anything that actually saw this thing get launched and go up? I saw a quick pan in the video which showed the contrail and a glint that may have been the business end of the rocket. All of it was so short on the clip that the rate of ascent certainly couldn't be determined from the video.
The suggestion that perhaps it was just the contrail of a commercial airliner seems to be the prevailing theory at the moment, which is why I ask. If it traveled 15 miles in 30 seconds, then clearly it was a rocket and not a commercial airliner.
Just say'in. This whole thing is so speculative that it is hard to say what is the truth here.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe a troll, but it got a very well formed and articulate response. If that is feeding trolls, give me a steak dinner.
You would be stupid to sign such a contract, however. Signing a contract where the other party is free to change the terms and conditions freely is not really even a contract, but merely a notification of terms of service.
Too bad that the courts don't look at things that way.
The real problem here is that this is a university network we are talking about. Supposedly you come to a university to learn about how the "universe" works and all things in it. That is of course where the root of the word "university" comes from as it is supposed to be a place to learn "universal" knowledge... in other words all encompassing.
This includes peer to peer networks, I should note.
A computer science program that didn't teach the concepts of peer to peer networking would seem to me as a school which is deliberately shooting themselves in the foot, and as such being in the curriculum itself would imply that students at least at some level are going to be creating these networks as a matter of practice. I'm curious about how the school will deal with that.
File sharing is hardly the only thing done with peer to peer networks as well, even if it happens to be a major aspect that gets attention.
More properly, if you want to ban peer to peer software, you need to ban the use of TCP/IP on the network. There are networking protocols that won't permit peer to peer connections at all. Perhaps this college needs to consider some other network architecture for their internal network instead.
Of course doing so would have some far reaching consequences including leaving their students unprepared for life outside of the university, but such things don't matter in higher education circles, do they?
But of course that must include the fact that in Soviet Russia, a petrified Natalie Portman with hot grits enjoys your Beowolf cluster of these things.
Something like that, I think something got lost in translation.
I didn't get the link into the above story... oops:
http://unreasonablerocket.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-printed-motor-news.html
I have a hard time seeing how Makerbot is able to put their device together for a price point cheaper than Fab@Home, but perhaps they got the supply chain necessary to put that together and have been able to simplify the design yet another order of magnitude.
Yeah, after I posted that comment I saw something about Makerbot and it looks real interesting. A cheap 3D printer, even if it is the equivalent of dot matrix printer from a couple of decades ago.
I remember the Sinclair Z-80, which was the first really cheap computer to hit the market (sub $100 at the time). It wasn't that fancy of a computer and was incredibly difficult to get everything to work right, but it did work and was one of the first computers that somebody in a 3rd world country could afford to buy brand new. Now that is some market there. When I lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, I noticed more than a few of those computers in the slum areas by some dedicated geeks with almost no money.
One company that I know of that is doing some really cool stuff out of printed 3D parts is Unreasonable Rocket. Paul Breed and his company were competitors for the Northrup-Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge and have been building some really cool rockets that can get to the upper atmosphere (not quite orbit yet, but they are trying). He mentioned in this particular blog entry how the price on printing parts is dropping fast, and it has reached the point that he can take a CAD drawing, ship that drawing to the machinist and they'll make the part with a 3D printer with a pretty wide variety of materials, including some metal castings. Essentially, it is now cheaper to order the printed part than it is for him to pay somebody to machine the part with more traditional machining tools out of a raw block of material.
That is a huge deal. I wonder how many other companies are doing something like this? That, to me, sounds like a significant tipping point has been reached even for the higher end printers.
I wish I could provide a more "free" source, but at least one citation I found here that talks about a couple of different toy guns that were modified in the 1960's:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1142105
This is even a refereed journal and a formal publication on the topic. There are also some informal publication about this issue, including some documentaries about the topic.
An interesting TV commercial that shows one of these toy guns in action can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR9ojNddiSI
It is a fun commercial to watch just for the nostalgia, and it even shows how kids "reload" the gun and make it fire. Apparently some rubber bands and other very minor (and inexpensive) modifications were done to the gun to make it work with real bullets instead (to make the hammer hit the bullet primer harder).
I'm not saying that it is perfect, and I sure as heck would never actually use the gun in this manner as more than a few would-be bank robbers did have the gun misfire and basically do self-inflicted harm. You are correct that the gun wasn't really designed to take this damage, and it was a danger to somebody who tried. I think it was made out of stamped steel, so there may have been a little more structural strength with this toy than a more "modern" plastic gun.
If you are trying to use it for something more serious as a real gun with some safety margin to keep it from removing digits on your hand, I would recommend some kevlar/carbon-fiber type of reinforcing too. The point here is that the gun was used in this manner, not that it was a particularly good application of the technology.
As the article cited briefly mentions, it was a .22 round that went into the chamber, even though the gun itself was modeled after a Colt .45 gun. My bad on that one, but I was going only on memory on that point. I could dig further as I think Mattel did end up settling on a wrongful death lawsuit, which is one of the reasons they no longer make the toy together with legislation that requires toys to literally be incapable of being able to do this as well.
This said, moding up a factual seeming statement as "Insightful", not just once but twice, certainly seems to pull it out of the joke category.
If you want to make it a joke, you can do it in a way where it is obviously a joke too.
No, don't do your stupid "whoosh" impression here either. I just don't see how this comment is so insightful other than a political jab at "big business" which essentially turns the moderation into (+1, Liberal POV).
I'm also willing to realize that stupid things do happen and there is a remote possibility that this may be something to it as well. With the litigious nature of American lawyers, I can believe almost anything as the subject of a lawsuit, and to even have the plaintiffs win. I'm presuming that was in part the reference to this statement as well.
The first DVD recorder that I had access to had a serial number of three digits and cost about $10k. The salesman I talked to at the time said it was one of the first ones sold in the Western USA. The blanks at the time cost the company I was working for about $10 each. There was no mention in terms of the number of discs it would produce, but we had contracts in hand to mass produce DVDs once we had the original data formatted properly to make them for about $1 each in quantities of about 1000 and suggestions that price would go down considerably from there.
I wrote the authoring system being used to make those discs at the time, which is one of the reasons why I had access to such early technology. I don't know if some GST tax or some other costs involved in terms of UK sales, but that at least was my own experience.
The problem here is that I don't see the price dropping as significantly for 3D printers. The Fab@Home printer costs roughly $2k (about 1K GBP, give or take some) and that price has been pretty steady. It also has some strong limitations and most of the stuff created with that printer is mostly plastic stuff or some pastries being done with frosting. The printers that work with metal are still in the tens of thousands of dollars range, and haven't really dropped much in price.
Note that with the Wright Flyer drawings, it was something original performed by the staff of the Smithsonian that they are protecting, not the original plans drawn up by Orville and Wilbur Wright. Those plans are in the public domain and the patents on them have expired.
I personally don't have too much worry about an organization like the Smithsonian making money off of effort they put in, other than the Smithsonian is to me something that might as well be an agency of the U.S. government due to their very cozy relationship with Congress. I know it wasn't always that way, but I look at it that way at the present time, and think that such publications ought to simply be in the public domain as works performed by government employees. That is a completely separate issue, however, from the way you've framed the question as to the legitimacy of why those plans are restricted from commercial republication.
If you took some classical work like say the writings of William Shakespeare and prepared them in some innovative and original manner, that work would be protected by copyright as well. The original words wouldn't be, but the new packaging certainly would be including any changes you may have made to those plays to make them "more modern" in some fashion. That is how copyright works.
If patent law was treated like copyright law, that would be the case. Thank goodness there is plenty of "prior art" to show all of those things are unpatentable.
I've heard of some people trying to retroactively copyright the Shakespearean plays, saying essentially that Life+400 years isn't long enough. I guess I shouldn't give Disney any ideas here.
Copyright and Patent law are so separate that they are even regulated by two completely different branches of government. For some reason, Congress decided that copyright law wasn't even going to go through the executive branch, but instead is regulated completely and totally within the legislative branch through the Library of Congress. Yes, the Department of Justice does get involved from time to time, but mostly it stays within the legislative branch, including for copyright registration. The Librarian of Congress reports directly to the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tem of the Senate.
Patent law is regulated through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, who performs the patent reviews and archives materials related to patents. The head of the USPTO reports to the President of the USA.
Yeah, you really shouldn't mix up the two kinds of laws, and I can't think of anything more distinctive than that.
Unfortunately that has little to do with real teleportation. The teleportation currently being done is reproducing the exact quantum state of something else and moving essentially a perfect copy including the quantum entanglement properties of all of its components to another location. This is being done today about one atom at a time, and I'm not really sure how complex it has been able to get, but a water molecule is about the best you can hope for if you are real lucky. Perhaps that will improve over time.
Perhaps, and this is just a maybe, there will be a time in the very distant future where the ability to manipulate individual atoms to build something macroscopic one atom at a time will happen. That still isn't a teleporter, but it is a sort of thing that you saw out of Star Trek. None the less, I don't think it will ever be something that you plug into your 110 V, 30 amp wall socket to turn on in your kitchen. It would take a fair bit more energy than that.
{{citation needed}}
I call BS on this.
Most of the machine shops near where I live right now have 3D printers to make the rough blanks for whatever it is that they are working with. They will print the part and then take it to a lathe or some other machine to do some final milling, but they are already using the process to speed up the fabrication process for more obscure parts. The high precision tolerances aren't necessary in every dimension for every part, and a 3D printer sometimes will provide more consistency for some aspects that traditional machining methods don't always perform.
I can find analogs to this with early CD-R recorders and the expensive blanks like you were talking about here. When blank CD-Rs cost about $5 each (about the upper limit I ever saw, and that was usually just the retail price in a computer store... even then wholesale costs were cheaper) it was still at a price point that a small garage band could burn a copy of their music and hand them out to fans, friends, and perhaps make a little bit of money on the side. It took somebody who was skilled with the equipment to make the CD recordings, but it did happen. That is pretty much where 3D printing is right now.
The problem is that the 3D printers used by these machine shops typically cost in the tens of thousands of dollars range, not just a couple thousand. It also takes more technical skills to use the stuff produced by these printers including access to some more specialized tools as the part coming straight off the printer isn't being used all of the time. Perhaps this will eventually get fixed and the resolution for the "voxels" (3D equivalent of a pixel) will improve over time. I've seen that with 2D scanning technology and printing, so I see that as a definite possibility.
This is also where an "open source" type fabrication model would be even more beneficial, as you would have some people with a little bit of expertise in the area that would look at this bracket and perhaps make some minor tweaks to the design (which would move it out of any patent claims because it is a different part) and make a bracket that would hold out much, much longer including suggested materials that are different than the "planned obsolescence" parts designed to deliberately fall apart.
Then again that sort of "aftermarket" design approach would really get car manufacturers worried too.
I have heard about some attempts to do some 3D printing of simple integrated circuits... essentially something like the early 7400 series chips. It might be nice to be able to print out a couple 7402 circuits or something similar. There would be some advantage to that, even if a good programmable logic chip of some kind is likely to give you much better performance at a fraction of the cost for any kind of complex circuit.
As far as Lego bricks, I think any sort of patent has experied on them, although there may still be copyright & trademark protections to worry about. As long as you don't claim they are Legos (selling under a different brand) you are likely to be safe to make your own bricks in that way. Some of the more speciailized bricks for the fancy models might have patent protection, but not the basic stackable brick.
As for how much money you will save making your own bricks, I would think that Lego could use scales of economy to undercut any cost savings by making a brick with a 3-D printer, at least for awhile. If it is cheaper to print them, that only shows the profit margin that the company has making them, and something easily fixed.
I'm not saying that such a cost savings is always going to be the case, and 3D printers may get cheap enough to mass produce stuff like Lego bricks to be cheaper than other manufacturing processes, but that seems unlikely in the near future.
I'm more worried about the idiots who are tinkering with the future of humanity by posting 3D printer schematics online.
Too late, it is already being done.
I suppose you are concerned about people making artificial life as well? In other words somebody using just chemistry to create a completely artificial life form that can reproduce itself with no outside DNA or any previous life form being needed. Guess what... it is already being done too.
So how do you close Pandora's box again?
All this implies is that there is still going to be a need for a good mechanic and the need perhaps for resources outside of the realm of what can be directly made by a 3D printer.
There was a toy manufacturer in America (back when such things still were made in America) who made a nearly perfect replica of a Colt .45 handgun out of plastic, complete with plastic bullets. They made hundreds of thousands of these things, and kids who were hooked on Cowboy movies & television shows during the era bought them up and acted like some super-charged John Wayne, sort of like you see in the movie Toy Story.
Anyway, some people with less than honorable intentions discovered that bullets for a real Colt .45 would fit into the chambers of this gun, and the firing mechanism (hammer & trigger) would even work to make it a real gun. It had numerous problems if you wanted to use it for target practice, and there was a tendency for the gun to even blow up in your hand (sending you to the hospital) if you fired the gun, but about 8 times out of 10 times the bullet would leave the gun just like the real thing. It was "good enough" that it was used in a number of bank robberies, and ended up killing a couple of security guards.
If you want to know where the regulations on toy guns come from, it was this incident that started the whole thing. I think something from a 3D printer could easily reproduce this particular toy gun, and getting ammunition for guns isn't all that particularly hard. You could even print out the bullets too, where the trick would be to create the primer & gunpowder with home-made recipes. Obtaining the raw ingredients: sulfer, carbon, and potassium nitrate; aren't all that hard to find, and one of the early sources of KNO3 was manure. In other words, anybody who builds an out-house and has access to some wood could also make a bomb. For awhile in London during the 19th Century, people were actually paid to have their septic system cleaned out for nitrate production, or at least not charged for the service.
I agree it would be a complex process and take somebody with some real initiative, but a basic knowledge of chemistry is all it would really take if you cared. Many 3D printers are also capable of producing metal parts too, or you could print out a machine lathe and some other machining tools to make the stuff if you were so inclined. It isn't that complicated, and what it would take to stop this is to simply outlaw the ability to be human. Somehow I think that violates some civil rights and some other basic principles there too.
The concern wasn't that "we" were able to make unlimited perfect copies for essentially nothing. The real threat was that there was no need for an expensive recording studio to make fairly decent audio recordings and that many performers wouldn't have to go through the studio system in order to get their music "published".
Let's get the situation nailed down here. It was people going to concerts with tape recorders and other recording devices, as well as cameras in movie theaters that were the first areas that the **AA got serious about copyright enforcement against ordinary consumers and more casual kinds of copying that in earlier years was considered "fair-use".
Yes, there has been problems with peer-to-peer filesharing and people setting up web pages of all of their favorite MP3 files saying "here is some music I ripped off my favorite CD... have at it". They make a whole bunch of bluster about that fact, but it really isn't impacting their bottom line all that much and in fact such distribution amounts to mainly marketing rather than actual lost sales.
In terms of damage done, it is the recordable CD that has scared the RIAA much more than network distribution of music. They are being cut out of the loop and simply are no longer involved with the production and distribution of a fairly substantial amount of music, where they are also losing market share and suffering from sales simply because the stuff they are producing is garbage. Another huge problem facing "the music industry" (as represented by the RIAA) is that new talent is being skipped over and ignored. About the only way for them to get fresh blood into the industry any more is some extravagant thing like American Idol, which still skips over a whole bunch of journeymen musicians who are fairly decent but not good enough to go all of the way to the top.
I think guys like Simon Cowell "gets it" that there are whole groups of talent that aren't getting recorded any more, even if I think his methods for finding talent are mostly showmanship rather than fixing the problem. Some major industry execs also get the problem, but not all of them, and certainly not the RIAA lawyers or for that matter those making the decisions on where to push back within the RIAA, especially as the RIAA isn't going to be making money (getting more dues paid. hence getting larger salaries) if they change tactics to embrace network distribution as a way of life and something good for the industry. Instead, they are simply fading away to irrelevance. Good for them, too, as we really don't need blood sucking lawyers like that anyway.
There is a splat on a map by the news agency who broke this story that suggests at least a location for where the launch likely happened at (presuming it was even a rocket launch).
Without going into the gritty details, when you are talking about the actions between nations you can sometimes invoke lawyers and courts, but typically those things mean pretty much whatever the leaders of those countries involved think they mean. As a practical matter, the U.S. Navy isn't about to sink a ship belonging to another country unless that country appears to be a threat. The suggestion here is that the ship would be sunk simply because it happens to be close to the coast of America. That simply is not how things work in this world.
Clearly, if this was a sub-based missile launch approximately 35 miles from the U.S. coast and performed by somebody who doesn't have approval from the U.S. government in some fashion, it would be perceived as a major threat to American sovereignty and would be dealt with, regardless of it it happened to be within or just outside of any sort of claimed territorial waters.
The response is a political question, as nobody was harmed, no city was nuked, and in fact there was nothing remotely threatening from the direction and path of this contrail at all. The only threat is if you can determine that somebody potentially dangerous to America was responsible for creating this device, whatever it was that made the cloud.
Correction:
If a failsafe fails in a dangerous way, it wasn't really designed properly as a failsafe, or more properly it wasn't really a genuine failsafe.
It isn't easy to engineer something to degrade gracefully, and for rocket in particular (or more generally when manipulating large amounts of energy), sometimes it isn't an easy or obvious solution in terms of making something that fails in a graceful manner where the damage to life, property, or the environment is minimized.
It is possible to engineer most devices to be operated safely or be able to give a bit of a warning to the operator to get the heck out of Dodge before they get killed. Overriding safety protocols is usually something that gets people killed or hurt badly precisely because you are operating outside of the proscribed limits. Of course sometimes you need to test a device on the extreme edge to see what it might do and if the safety protocol is justified too.
The main problem is when you have an operator using production equipment who decides to perform an engineering envelope test on a device where they are not taking the precautions necessary for such a test, nor are they going to be able to afford the resulting damage if such a test is performed.
That is precisely what happened with the Space Shuttles Columbia and Challenger, where they were operating out of the originally designed safety parameters, and people died as a result. The Columbia was especially sad as it was an engineering change that was not properly tested resulting from somebody concerned about the couple hundred pounds of "ozone destroying" chemicals that ended up killing those astronauts. Yup, that saved the environment, I suppose.
There was a TV show that was called "Gilligan's Planet" which was an animated parody of "Gilligan's Island" set in the future where Gilligan gets rescued only to get lost again on some spacecraft. It was even more campy than original TV series, as hard as that may seem.
The TV Show that I think you are referring to is Far Out Space Nuts, starring Bob Denver (Gilligan from Gilligan's Island, but his character wasn't named that) where the lead characters were NASA employees who screwed up and accidentally launch a spacecraft while on board outfitting it for a mission. Allan Hale, Jr. (Skipper) was not a regular cast member, although he may have shown up as a guest star during the production of the series.
It certainly wasn't a fantastic show, and there were only sixteen episodes filmed in that series, which only aired on CBS on Saturday Mornings for the 1975 television season. If you remember the show, it certainly dates you as not too many people really ever saw the show.
Is there any record or anything that actually saw this thing get launched and go up? I saw a quick pan in the video which showed the contrail and a glint that may have been the business end of the rocket. All of it was so short on the clip that the rate of ascent certainly couldn't be determined from the video.
The suggestion that perhaps it was just the contrail of a commercial airliner seems to be the prevailing theory at the moment, which is why I ask. If it traveled 15 miles in 30 seconds, then clearly it was a rocket and not a commercial airliner.
Just say'in. This whole thing is so speculative that it is hard to say what is the truth here.