It is called performance rights, as spelled out explicitly on audio recordings. The performer (in this case the CEO of BuckyBalls) owns copyright automatically as soon as the recording is "fixed in a medium". That it is his voice is not under dispute and even cited in the video as to who is speaking. It doesn't even matter if they recorded it first, the performer owns the rights.
This is also why "bootlegging" a concert by bringing in a recording device can be prosecuted. It doesn't matter if it is your equipment, if you didn't have permission or a license to record that music from the performer, you can't reproduce that recording. Yes, I do realize that recording a Paul McCartney concert when you are sitting on the front row is a slightly different situation than recording a phone conversation, but the law is essentially the same either way.
I admit this is a stretch, and certainly the use of the voicemail is something that I believe to be a proper fair use exemption, but the voice mail copyright clearly does belong to the CEO who was speaking. It can't be reproduced without his consent or unless you are following fair-use principles.
For myself, this is one of the reasons I hate automagic granting of copyright, as it throws situations like this into a tailspin. I personally prefer that copyrighted material is formally registered with a national registration entity... such as the Library of Congress in the United States. This used to be the law in America where you had to make a formal effort to register copyright before you had its protection. For a book, movie, or even a recording that wasn't too difficult as it was relatively cheap (it still is less than $50 even now) and it does some good too in terms of having a place where your stuff is officially archived (which is how the Library of Congress got all of its books).
I'm just saying that the makers of the Zen Magnets should play this thing out, get a really good lawyer, and not be worrying about trying to prove damages for an action that looks like is going to make their company a whole bunch of money anyway through the Barbara Streisand effect. The take down might just be perfectly legal even if it is a bit of a stretch.
It makes you wonder a bit about a cow magnet where you deliberately feed a magnet to livestock.
This is used because many cows are so stupid that they will eat part of a barbed wire fence and other junk while grazing. Generally you don't feed the cows multiple magnets, and they stay in the rumen of the cow... a rather strange organ that is unique to cattle and other ruminants. Still, it is interesting that sometimes feeding magnets to creatures can be beneficial as well.
There is a lag effect between when a brand is known for quality and how long it takes consumers to wise up that it is a bunch of garbage. My mother and my wife's aunts all swear by Kenmore appliances, as they were of fairly decent quality in the 1960's and 1970's. By about the mid 1980's Sears really trashed the quality.... do doubt giving some senior executive a major bonus while the profits were high and the costs were low.
There has been a minor attempt to restore the cred on that brand, but for me it is too little and too late. I have a Kenmore refrigerator right now that is I suppose OK, but the customer service I get from Sears is disgusting and I will never go shopping there again for as long as I live. I regret making the purchase there and found a fridge made by the same manufacturer (under a different label) sold at Lowe's for a couple hundred dollars less. I don't mind paying the extra money, but the manager at the Sears store was such a jerk to me that I should have simply returned the fridge the day after it was delivered.
I think the energy savings is debatable if you have to expend a whole bunch of energy to build a new machine and transport it together with all of the supplies to and from the various suppliers and manufacturers along the supply chain.
What annoys me is that these machines are purposely being designed so they can't be repaired. Engineers for consumer appliances would spend design effort to come up with ways that products could be taken apart and put back together again... perhaps even to make changes simply to make it easier to repair the devices. That is no longer the case for most consumer products.
While I will agree that many of the older appliances were wasteful of energy and had a greater "environmental impact" in terms of their day to day usage, they were designed to last for years and could be repaired with only a modest effort with just a couple of minor parts. I don't understand why at least somebody doesn't get involved with making more equipment like this, even if it cost a little bit more.
The problem here is that while this may seem like abuse, I think the law is on the side of Buckyballs here in terms of a potential copyright violation. Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement and while you and I may think that the content is clearly used properly under fair use provisions, that is not a proven legal fact until it has been tested in court. The counter take-down notice (demanding that the content be restored) is indeed the proper legal remedy that should have been followed here, not suing Buckyballs into the ground on this issue.
The voicemail and the images clearly are copyrighted by Buckyballs, and the DMCA notice was to take the content down. If you post something that contains copyrighted content belonging to somebody else, even if it being used under clear fair-use provisions, it can be subject to a DMCA take-down notice. If that happens to you, live with it and file the counter notice if you want it put back up... or simply live with it being gone.
Where the penalties come in is if you start to file take down notices for things you don't even own or if you keep filing a take down notice for the same content (or similar content) even after it has gone to court where it has been proven as legitimate fair use. The above post by hedwards goes into the formal legal citation for this.
It should also be pointed out that fair use exemptions also apply to short excerpts used for criticism. Generally this applies to something like a couple of screen shots of a computer game or a few seconds from a movie for a "review", but it can also apply to something like what is being done here with the voicemail message. Yes, the voicemail copyright is owned by Buckyballs, but is use and reproduction is protected under copyright law by way of the fair use clause. Making commentary about a recording is perfectly legal. If this isn't commentary about a recording, I don't know what else would be called commentary.
It is an interesting concept. The trick here would be to prove damages, although it is possible to file a libel tort if the assertion of copyright infringement was knowingly false. Because there was technically copyrighted material involved that was owned by Buckyballs, I don't think this assertion would work in court. Yes, the content is being reproduced under clear fair-use standards, which is precisely why the counter notice was issued. That process is spelled out very clearly in the DMCA and to me is one of the few good things in that legislation (surrounded by a whole bunch of evil text).
Basically an ISP must respond to a take-down notice, but if a protest if filed then the content must be restored and the matter goes to a court for resolution. Of course companies like YouTube may not be entirely friendly about the process and may lean a little more toward taking stuff down rather than restoring it. It may even take a lawsuit against the ISP to "educate" them about what the DMCA actually says. This can get tricky though, as restoring the content which is later proven to be infringing in court can bring penalties that may be increased due to the content being restored. It definitely is time to hire an attorney if this kind of chest thumping starts to happen and you care about whatever it is that is getting yanked around on the net.
Considering the cost of building the Hubble Telescope was between $2-$3 billion dollars, it would take several shuttle launches to equal that cost. Admittedly, a series of telescopes that were each costing about $1 billion and launching them for another half billion on EELVs might have been more cost effective, but not substantially so. Overall, the total cost of the program has been calculated at the high end as being about $6 billion. That would have covered the cost of only 3-4 telescopes. Presuming the first telescope was a dud and that instead of the service flights there would have been another telescope launched, I think you can safely say that on the whole it is a break-even proposition or perhaps that using the Shuttles actually saved a modest amount of money in the process. I am using the rough cost of about a half billion dollars per Shuttle mission as a rough compromise for the mission costs.
I don't think it is quite so certain that the Hubble service missions were a waste of money and it also shows that manned spaceflight can have value in terms of in-orbit repairs. Until the Hubble missions, there wasn't any real certainty that complex repair missions in orbit were even possible regardless of the cost.
The trick here, of course, is getting the cost of going into space low enough that sending somebody up to perform repairs on expensive equipment like the Hubble Telescope is cost effective. I just wish NASA actually had that as an objective, but sadly cost is not something they really worry about.
Interestingly enough, 8008 variants are still being used widely and make up the backbone of most computers on the internet. The 8086 and its successor chips are all a 100% superset of the 8008, and is also completely compatible with software written for the 8008 on an opcode level, discounting I/O routines.
As for Comcast, I just had a salesman who came to my door this past week asking me if I wanted to sign up for their service. I told him where to shove his company and that I thought their service stank.
It has been ages since I've connected to Usenet. It still has value for dedicated newsgroups on highly specialized topics, but the spambots otherwise destroyed it ages ago. I loved it when it was before Slashdot and other forms of social media, but I've moved on. It still is available if you need it, however, and the archives have some real gems if you want to dig them out.
Just who is this "somebody else" that is building to NASA's still yet to be published manned spaceflight requirements?
I firmly believe that the manned commercial spaceflight market is going to swamp and overwhelm the NASA projects in time. That isn't quite the case right now, but I think it would be bad business planning to depend solely upon NASA as the only potential customer. I'm not saying "if we build it, NASA will buy it", but rather think more along the lines of how aircraft manufacturers design new vehicles for commercial flight. The U.S. Postal Service (as an example of a government agency who got in early with new technologies like aviation) did and still does have some significant impact in terms of commercial aviation. At one time it looked like they would be the only customer for aviation besides the military, but now the USPS (previously the Post Office Department) is a comparatively minor player in the game. It is FAA requirements, not USPS requirements that drive safety features in aircraft.
As for the heavy lift rocket.... that is something I think is ultimately doomed to failure as a spacecraft in search of a mission even from NASA. There is no mission besides a trip to Mars that needs such a vehicle, and even a trip to Mars is out of the question in terms of congressional funding. The first action that NASA is going to do with a completed "heavy lift vehicle" in whatever form it takes is to cancel the program and write a page in a history book about concept. At the very least show me what needs (not would be "nice to have") and is an absolute mission requirement for such a vehicle. Yeah, it would be nice to have a Saturn V right now, but we can't relive the past and pretend that decisions made in the past don't impact the present.
FYI, the FAA does have jurisdiction on all commercial spaceflight activity by means of their office of commercial spaceflight. They are the regulatory agency and it is through the FAA that commercial astronauts are certified. NASA has a role only because some in congress can't give up the fact that NASA no longer has a monopoly on spaceflight in America. The jurisdiction of the FAA extends quite a bit further than up to 100,000 feet.
I still assert that had NASA kept the Apollo/Saturn program going... including perhaps a scaled back but continued production of the Saturn V and certainly the Saturn 1B vehicles... that NASA would have put more astronauts into space, had fewer casualties, and been to many more places besides running around in circles at low Earth orbit. We know that the Apollo spacecraft were capable of interplanetary spaceflight... because it went places other than merely orbiting the Earth.
Of the bold plans for using Apollo hardware, the most outrageous to me is the Manned Venus Flyby mission that was to use existing Apollo hardware and something that later took form as Skylab for supplies and living space enroute. Even the most ambitious plans for Orion have yet to achieve something approaching this mission design, much less going on to a place like Mars or even Phobos.
There was some interesting technology developed for the Space Shuttle, but it should have been built as a demonstrator project first... something more akin to the original X-programs like the X-15 rather than something which became the Frankenstein monster that the Shuttle became. That the Shuttle program worked out as well as it did is more a testament to the dedication and hard work of those who were able to shoehorn the program as it was the only game in town.
The only capability which the Saturn family of rockets lacked which the Shuttle introduced was the ability to carry down from orbit payloads that weighed on the order of dozens of tons of payload. I think if the need for that kind of capability was needed, some other specialized method would be created for that purpose. The number of times that capability was actually used is small enough I could use a single hand to count them.
It might have been in theory a way to subsidize the flights, but the practical matter of how it turned out is that it was the shuttle flights that subsidized the satellite launches... to the point that it took out private spaceflight efforts like the Conestoga rocket. I have no idea if these guys could have been commercially successful, but competing against the insanely low cargo rates quoted by NASA was one of the reasons why this company never was able to make a profit and ultimately why it shut down.
It should also be pointed out that while NASA quoted some low prices for sending commercial cargo into space on the Shuttle, they never really delivered except in a couple of very rare cases. By the time of the Challenger accident, NASA quit even accepting commercial payloads except for things that would support existing missions directly, and after the Columbia accident NASA quit even accepting non-NASA payloads from other government agencies like the NRO.
The history of commercial spaceflight is interesting, particularly because they have been fighting NASA much more than having NASA as a partner that was trying to incubate commercial spaceflight. Some of that mentality still exists, although the arguments against commercial spaceflight are rather weak now.
Considering that Skylab has just over half of the volume of the ISS, I think you are being quite generous here suggesting it would take that many flights with a Saturn V. 2-3 flights for the habitation modules and a couple more perhaps for the power farm, and it would have been a kick-ass station that would put to shame what is currently called the ISS. I think it certainly could have been built for far less than the $100 billion that the ISS has burned through too.
Surprisingly, the Gemini spacecraft was in reality the proper successor to the Apollo spacecraft as it wasn't even authorized until most of the Apollo hardware had already been built. The design tempo on the Gemini spacecraft was rather high, and there were several innovations put into the Gemini spacecraft that never even made it into the Apollo design which had improved safety for the astronauts and represented a later design.
The one difference is that the Gemini spacecraft went into orbit first, and because it was a smaller spacecraft most people presume that it was a predecessor to Apollo designs. I will admit that the orbital rendezvous procedures were worked out with the Gemini program, along with EVA procedures and a whole bunch of other very important tasks that were incredibly important to human spaceflight. This experience was invaluable for later missions including later Shuttle missions. The ISS could never have been built if the Gemini flights had never flown.
When the "Manned Orbiting Laboratory" was designed, the original spacecraft that were going to service that space station was the Gemini spacecraft. There is even a version that was explicitly designed for docking with a space station that had a really bizarre through the rear hatch that penetrated the heat shield. In addition, there was a 5-man variant of the Gemini spacecraft called the "Big G" which at least got as far as the spacecraft mock-up stage (real metal being bent to test manufacturing procedures). BTW, the engineering and design work that went into the MOL ended up being the basis for Skylab when the last Saturn V was finally launched. The original plan was for nearly a dozen different space stations along a construction path more similar to how Russia ended up deploying their space stations in the 1970's.
However, requirements for commercial crew companies under the new model haven't even been released yet.
I find it disingenuous to be having NASA come up with commercial crew regulations when they clearly are acting as a competitor to the companies who are trying to put commercial crew vehicles into service. If that doesn't strike you as something odd, I am at a loss as to what would. I don't understand why Congress is insisting that NASA set the standards here.
My largest concern is that the standards, if they ever get published, will be written in such a way that nobody could possibly meet those standards. It should also be noteworthy that any time NASA has established such standards, they've had to exempt their own vehicles from those standards as something even NASA couldn't meet.
Also, while SpaceX is using the existing human spaceflight requirements as a yardstick, they fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Aviation Administration and not NASA... other than the fact that SpaceX is trying to get NASA as a customer and it certainly is appropriate for NASA to establish independent standards for their own astronauts. If NASA sets the bar too high in that situation, they simply will be without a launcher to send astronauts into space. Oh wait.... NASA is without a launcher capable of sending astronauts into space and they are now using Soyuz capsules made with Soviet designs manufactured in Russia. Yeah, that sounds like a step forward to me.
If you can define man-rated, I'll bite here. Both the Delta IV and the Atlas V have enough thrust to place a capsule like the Orion up into orbit, or at least a manned vehicle.
I should also point out that it was an Atlas launcher (admittedly a predecessor to the current Atlas V) that has already seen service in the manned spaceflight program for NASA: It put John Glenn into orbit! Seriously, the argument that these vehicles aren't man-rated is overblown and isn't even a realistic argument here.
If you are willing to trust sending into orbit billion dollar payloads that represent a million man-hours of effort or more, that is something that at least exceeds the safety margin given for Shuttle launches and is likely to be better. There may need to be some minor tweaks to finish any honest assessment to make these vehicles man-rated, but that is very trivial compared to what is needed to get a brand-new launcher up to speed and rated for carrying astronauts. The NRO wouldn't have been sending their satellites up on these launchers if they weren't reliable.
Unfortunately I don't think the Space Shuttles are going to be available for use with the Orion-class vessel (called "Michael" in the book). They were supposed to be acting like fighters from the mothership being more like a carrier. I don't know if that ever would have worked, but at least it was plausible and something other SciFi movies have tried to take advantage of.
I agree it would make a might fine movie and something that ought to be made. The whole plot line with the Soviet Union isn't nearly as important and certainly could be updated to reflect the current world political situation.
Then again, I have no idea how you would put a nuclear Iran into the story or if it would be wise for the producers to even consider how to do that.
There are a lot of people (mostly Baby Boomers who haven't kept track) that think NASA is still receiving about 5%-10% of the federal budget. NASA used to be listed on IRS publications like the 1040 instruction booklet for where tax dollars are being spent. It became such a minor budget item that it was dropped altogether and lumped under "miscellaneous appropriations".
It should also be noteworthy that NASA isn't even the largest space agency in the U.S. Federal government at the moment, as that honor goes to the National Reconnaissance Office. Other agencies such as NOAA and even the Department of Agriculture (mainly with the Forest Service) are even involved with spaceflight.
In the meantime, the Dragon capsule being designed by SpaceX is making it first real flight next month. Heck, it is already at the cape ready for launch, and all they are doing now is a waiting game to get a launch slot to open... and some last minute tests to take care of some engineering questions they have about the rocket. This is both a test for the Falcon 9 (its second flight) and the capsule, but in this case they are doing some in-orbit testing of the avionics, the Draco thrusters, and the heat shield for re-entry purposes. They are also testing recovery procedures in what is for now an unmanned vehicle.
I'd have to agree that the timing of this is a little suspect, and the rocket that the Orion is supposedly going to be flying on has yet to even be approved for funding in the first place. The Obama administration may be eying a variant of DIRECT right now, but that isn't really ready for prime time. Boeing, on the other hand, is going to be flying their CST-100 on a Delta IV. That is a proven rocket system with over a dozen flights to certify its reliability and to work out the bugs in terms of getting things into orbit.
The question for what the Orion is going to be flying on in order to make this test is a very real question that ought to be asked. Perhaps a heavy launch variant of the Delta IV, Atlas V, or the Falcon 9 might be able to get it up into space, but there was some explicit engineering done on the Orion vehicle to make sure it couldn't fly on the EELVs. Yes, this was by design and it was done to make sure it had to fly on the Ares I rocket. How Lock-Mart is going to refit this to fly on something else is going to be real interesting. I thought they were well past the raw specification stage and were making mock-ups and building actual hardware.
Can't believe this weird mix of shuttle hardware could work out cheaper than a new big dumb rocket stack. I suppose the factories making shuttle tanks and solid rocket booster won't need retooling, but even so, this beasty looks much more complex than Ares.
It isn't really cheaper at all. Cost is not a driver here, but rather continuing to employ people in key congressional districts so NASA can gets its appropriations bill passed.
As for the factories making the tanks getting a retooling.... it is going to happen anyway. The external tank production line at Michoud has been shut down.... with a big New Orleans style parade with the final tank going down to the port and sailing off for Florida. The employees have been laid off and most of them have gone on to other jobs. There still is a crew left at the Michoud facility as there were other things going on besides the Shuttle contracts, but that was a major part of the work force there. They were going to be gearing up for the Constellation projects and specifically the Ares V, but I suppose that isn't working out so well either.
As for the ATK rockets produced at Promontory, Utah, those employees have also been laid off and many have moved onto other things. ATK landed a cute little contract for the Air Force that is sucking up those employees that they didn't want to let go and were still receiving Constellation funding (the funding is still flowing the the system).
I suppose the raw engineering has been done and there is a modest saving there, but having to bring back and train a whole new production crew from scratch sounds like an incredibly expensive proposition... especially if the funding for this is as shaky as I've ever seen any sort of project funding.
I don't expect more than a couple of flights with this hardware, even if it makes it to flight status in the first place.
Railroads had the bonuses removed from Civ II. Basically, you only built a railroad for transportation routes rather than filling the map with this grid that had railroad going to every single square on the map. Certainly there is no need to build a railroad on an island with only one city.
This is something that with Civ V has been worked on even more, where now there is maintenance costs associated with roads and railroads. This gives you a real incentive to remove the roads even if you aren't at war. A scored earth approach when giving up cities is even more useful in these situations.
As a matter of face, Muhammad was one of the "Great Prophets" that would appear in Civ IV. It would even be a unit that you could move around or even kill if you cared to. The main purpose was to establish Islam in the game (you get to select the "holy city" that becomes the new version of Mecca in your game universe), but if that isn't a depiction of "The Prophet", I don't know what else would be.
On the whole, I think that the developers were pretty even handed with the role of religions in the game, and there certainly were some benefits for having religion. The main complaints I heard about it is mainly the game balance that is thrown out of whack when some of the religions (notably Buddhism) were used in multi-player games. Solo playing generally wasn't as big of a deal.
I certainly enjoyed building up an army of missionaries (another unit in the game) to "spread the word" and conquer the world from a religious aspect rather than through military action. Some cities tended to be a real hard nut to crack in terms of spreading religion, and it could be considered an act of war to send a missionary to another civilization's city. It made life real exciting even if you succeeded in converting the enemy city. Cities with the same religion as you have also could be conquered via culture rather than military units... something I also enjoyed doing at least with solo play.
Borders effectively existed in the original "Civ" (aka Civ 1), but weren't explicitly drawn on the map until Civ 3. In the earlier versions, it was pretty much those squares which were under production. There were some tricks to "lay siege" to an enemy city by building a city real close to your target and push back by acquiring production squares from the enemy even if you haven't taken the city. Lower production cuts down on units built there and can starve the citizens to drop the size of the city down too. For a really tough city to take out, it at least was one additional strategy for combat.
So those exceptions don't apply to mere mortals like you or I, but if you drop a few hundred C-notes into the political campaigns of a few key members of congress, you too can buy an exemption for your own pet project.
Yeah, I like that very much. It is such a democratic process that treat all people justly and fairly under the law.
BTW, the Librarian of Congress is an appointed position that is done jointly by the President pro-tem of the Senate and the Speaker of the House. It doesn't even involve the Executive branch at all. Talk about a highly politicized political office.
This might just be the part of the world where you live. I find it amazing to look out windows and generally try to get a window seat whenever I can explicitly to be able to look out the windows during the flight. Of course I live in the middle of the Rocky Mountains where there really are some things to see as you are flying.
Looking out the window and seeing the entire Grand Canyon in one glance is certainly an experience worth doing, or looking out and seeing mountains that you know are tens of thousands of feet tall and you are easily flying over the top of those mountains. Flying over land at night is to me even more amazing, as each little light shows up like a constellation of stars underneath you. Sometimes you can see elevation differences mapped out by each streetlight.
Yes, when you fly over countryside that has a solid cloud layer over it make for boring flights, but it isn't always overcast everywhere. Or I suppose that you never really see the sun where you live.
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It is called performance rights, as spelled out explicitly on audio recordings. The performer (in this case the CEO of BuckyBalls) owns copyright automatically as soon as the recording is "fixed in a medium". That it is his voice is not under dispute and even cited in the video as to who is speaking. It doesn't even matter if they recorded it first, the performer owns the rights.
This is also why "bootlegging" a concert by bringing in a recording device can be prosecuted. It doesn't matter if it is your equipment, if you didn't have permission or a license to record that music from the performer, you can't reproduce that recording. Yes, I do realize that recording a Paul McCartney concert when you are sitting on the front row is a slightly different situation than recording a phone conversation, but the law is essentially the same either way.
I admit this is a stretch, and certainly the use of the voicemail is something that I believe to be a proper fair use exemption, but the voice mail copyright clearly does belong to the CEO who was speaking. It can't be reproduced without his consent or unless you are following fair-use principles.
For myself, this is one of the reasons I hate automagic granting of copyright, as it throws situations like this into a tailspin. I personally prefer that copyrighted material is formally registered with a national registration entity... such as the Library of Congress in the United States. This used to be the law in America where you had to make a formal effort to register copyright before you had its protection. For a book, movie, or even a recording that wasn't too difficult as it was relatively cheap (it still is less than $50 even now) and it does some good too in terms of having a place where your stuff is officially archived (which is how the Library of Congress got all of its books).
I'm just saying that the makers of the Zen Magnets should play this thing out, get a really good lawyer, and not be worrying about trying to prove damages for an action that looks like is going to make their company a whole bunch of money anyway through the Barbara Streisand effect. The take down might just be perfectly legal even if it is a bit of a stretch.
It makes you wonder a bit about a cow magnet where you deliberately feed a magnet to livestock.
This is used because many cows are so stupid that they will eat part of a barbed wire fence and other junk while grazing. Generally you don't feed the cows multiple magnets, and they stay in the rumen of the cow... a rather strange organ that is unique to cattle and other ruminants. Still, it is interesting that sometimes feeding magnets to creatures can be beneficial as well.
There is a lag effect between when a brand is known for quality and how long it takes consumers to wise up that it is a bunch of garbage. My mother and my wife's aunts all swear by Kenmore appliances, as they were of fairly decent quality in the 1960's and 1970's. By about the mid 1980's Sears really trashed the quality.... do doubt giving some senior executive a major bonus while the profits were high and the costs were low.
There has been a minor attempt to restore the cred on that brand, but for me it is too little and too late. I have a Kenmore refrigerator right now that is I suppose OK, but the customer service I get from Sears is disgusting and I will never go shopping there again for as long as I live. I regret making the purchase there and found a fridge made by the same manufacturer (under a different label) sold at Lowe's for a couple hundred dollars less. I don't mind paying the extra money, but the manager at the Sears store was such a jerk to me that I should have simply returned the fridge the day after it was delivered.
I think the energy savings is debatable if you have to expend a whole bunch of energy to build a new machine and transport it together with all of the supplies to and from the various suppliers and manufacturers along the supply chain.
What annoys me is that these machines are purposely being designed so they can't be repaired. Engineers for consumer appliances would spend design effort to come up with ways that products could be taken apart and put back together again... perhaps even to make changes simply to make it easier to repair the devices. That is no longer the case for most consumer products.
While I will agree that many of the older appliances were wasteful of energy and had a greater "environmental impact" in terms of their day to day usage, they were designed to last for years and could be repaired with only a modest effort with just a couple of minor parts. I don't understand why at least somebody doesn't get involved with making more equipment like this, even if it cost a little bit more.
The problem here is that while this may seem like abuse, I think the law is on the side of Buckyballs here in terms of a potential copyright violation. Fair use is a defense against copyright infringement and while you and I may think that the content is clearly used properly under fair use provisions, that is not a proven legal fact until it has been tested in court. The counter take-down notice (demanding that the content be restored) is indeed the proper legal remedy that should have been followed here, not suing Buckyballs into the ground on this issue.
The voicemail and the images clearly are copyrighted by Buckyballs, and the DMCA notice was to take the content down. If you post something that contains copyrighted content belonging to somebody else, even if it being used under clear fair-use provisions, it can be subject to a DMCA take-down notice. If that happens to you, live with it and file the counter notice if you want it put back up... or simply live with it being gone.
Where the penalties come in is if you start to file take down notices for things you don't even own or if you keep filing a take down notice for the same content (or similar content) even after it has gone to court where it has been proven as legitimate fair use. The above post by hedwards goes into the formal legal citation for this.
It should also be pointed out that fair use exemptions also apply to short excerpts used for criticism. Generally this applies to something like a couple of screen shots of a computer game or a few seconds from a movie for a "review", but it can also apply to something like what is being done here with the voicemail message. Yes, the voicemail copyright is owned by Buckyballs, but is use and reproduction is protected under copyright law by way of the fair use clause. Making commentary about a recording is perfectly legal. If this isn't commentary about a recording, I don't know what else would be called commentary.
It is an interesting concept. The trick here would be to prove damages, although it is possible to file a libel tort if the assertion of copyright infringement was knowingly false. Because there was technically copyrighted material involved that was owned by Buckyballs, I don't think this assertion would work in court. Yes, the content is being reproduced under clear fair-use standards, which is precisely why the counter notice was issued. That process is spelled out very clearly in the DMCA and to me is one of the few good things in that legislation (surrounded by a whole bunch of evil text).
Basically an ISP must respond to a take-down notice, but if a protest if filed then the content must be restored and the matter goes to a court for resolution. Of course companies like YouTube may not be entirely friendly about the process and may lean a little more toward taking stuff down rather than restoring it. It may even take a lawsuit against the ISP to "educate" them about what the DMCA actually says. This can get tricky though, as restoring the content which is later proven to be infringing in court can bring penalties that may be increased due to the content being restored. It definitely is time to hire an attorney if this kind of chest thumping starts to happen and you care about whatever it is that is getting yanked around on the net.
Considering the cost of building the Hubble Telescope was between $2-$3 billion dollars, it would take several shuttle launches to equal that cost. Admittedly, a series of telescopes that were each costing about $1 billion and launching them for another half billion on EELVs might have been more cost effective, but not substantially so. Overall, the total cost of the program has been calculated at the high end as being about $6 billion. That would have covered the cost of only 3-4 telescopes. Presuming the first telescope was a dud and that instead of the service flights there would have been another telescope launched, I think you can safely say that on the whole it is a break-even proposition or perhaps that using the Shuttles actually saved a modest amount of money in the process. I am using the rough cost of about a half billion dollars per Shuttle mission as a rough compromise for the mission costs.
I don't think it is quite so certain that the Hubble service missions were a waste of money and it also shows that manned spaceflight can have value in terms of in-orbit repairs. Until the Hubble missions, there wasn't any real certainty that complex repair missions in orbit were even possible regardless of the cost.
The trick here, of course, is getting the cost of going into space low enough that sending somebody up to perform repairs on expensive equipment like the Hubble Telescope is cost effective. I just wish NASA actually had that as an objective, but sadly cost is not something they really worry about.
Interestingly enough, 8008 variants are still being used widely and make up the backbone of most computers on the internet. The 8086 and its successor chips are all a 100% superset of the 8008, and is also completely compatible with software written for the 8008 on an opcode level, discounting I/O routines.
As for Comcast, I just had a salesman who came to my door this past week asking me if I wanted to sign up for their service. I told him where to shove his company and that I thought their service stank.
It has been ages since I've connected to Usenet. It still has value for dedicated newsgroups on highly specialized topics, but the spambots otherwise destroyed it ages ago. I loved it when it was before Slashdot and other forms of social media, but I've moved on. It still is available if you need it, however, and the archives have some real gems if you want to dig them out.
Just who is this "somebody else" that is building to NASA's still yet to be published manned spaceflight requirements?
I firmly believe that the manned commercial spaceflight market is going to swamp and overwhelm the NASA projects in time. That isn't quite the case right now, but I think it would be bad business planning to depend solely upon NASA as the only potential customer. I'm not saying "if we build it, NASA will buy it", but rather think more along the lines of how aircraft manufacturers design new vehicles for commercial flight. The U.S. Postal Service (as an example of a government agency who got in early with new technologies like aviation) did and still does have some significant impact in terms of commercial aviation. At one time it looked like they would be the only customer for aviation besides the military, but now the USPS (previously the Post Office Department) is a comparatively minor player in the game. It is FAA requirements, not USPS requirements that drive safety features in aircraft.
As for the heavy lift rocket.... that is something I think is ultimately doomed to failure as a spacecraft in search of a mission even from NASA. There is no mission besides a trip to Mars that needs such a vehicle, and even a trip to Mars is out of the question in terms of congressional funding. The first action that NASA is going to do with a completed "heavy lift vehicle" in whatever form it takes is to cancel the program and write a page in a history book about concept. At the very least show me what needs (not would be "nice to have") and is an absolute mission requirement for such a vehicle. Yeah, it would be nice to have a Saturn V right now, but we can't relive the past and pretend that decisions made in the past don't impact the present.
FYI, the FAA does have jurisdiction on all commercial spaceflight activity by means of their office of commercial spaceflight. They are the regulatory agency and it is through the FAA that commercial astronauts are certified. NASA has a role only because some in congress can't give up the fact that NASA no longer has a monopoly on spaceflight in America. The jurisdiction of the FAA extends quite a bit further than up to 100,000 feet.
I still assert that had NASA kept the Apollo/Saturn program going... including perhaps a scaled back but continued production of the Saturn V and certainly the Saturn 1B vehicles... that NASA would have put more astronauts into space, had fewer casualties, and been to many more places besides running around in circles at low Earth orbit. We know that the Apollo spacecraft were capable of interplanetary spaceflight... because it went places other than merely orbiting the Earth.
Of the bold plans for using Apollo hardware, the most outrageous to me is the Manned Venus Flyby mission that was to use existing Apollo hardware and something that later took form as Skylab for supplies and living space enroute. Even the most ambitious plans for Orion have yet to achieve something approaching this mission design, much less going on to a place like Mars or even Phobos.
There was some interesting technology developed for the Space Shuttle, but it should have been built as a demonstrator project first... something more akin to the original X-programs like the X-15 rather than something which became the Frankenstein monster that the Shuttle became. That the Shuttle program worked out as well as it did is more a testament to the dedication and hard work of those who were able to shoehorn the program as it was the only game in town.
The only capability which the Saturn family of rockets lacked which the Shuttle introduced was the ability to carry down from orbit payloads that weighed on the order of dozens of tons of payload. I think if the need for that kind of capability was needed, some other specialized method would be created for that purpose. The number of times that capability was actually used is small enough I could use a single hand to count them.
It might have been in theory a way to subsidize the flights, but the practical matter of how it turned out is that it was the shuttle flights that subsidized the satellite launches... to the point that it took out private spaceflight efforts like the Conestoga rocket. I have no idea if these guys could have been commercially successful, but competing against the insanely low cargo rates quoted by NASA was one of the reasons why this company never was able to make a profit and ultimately why it shut down.
It should also be pointed out that while NASA quoted some low prices for sending commercial cargo into space on the Shuttle, they never really delivered except in a couple of very rare cases. By the time of the Challenger accident, NASA quit even accepting commercial payloads except for things that would support existing missions directly, and after the Columbia accident NASA quit even accepting non-NASA payloads from other government agencies like the NRO.
The history of commercial spaceflight is interesting, particularly because they have been fighting NASA much more than having NASA as a partner that was trying to incubate commercial spaceflight. Some of that mentality still exists, although the arguments against commercial spaceflight are rather weak now.
Considering that Skylab has just over half of the volume of the ISS, I think you are being quite generous here suggesting it would take that many flights with a Saturn V. 2-3 flights for the habitation modules and a couple more perhaps for the power farm, and it would have been a kick-ass station that would put to shame what is currently called the ISS. I think it certainly could have been built for far less than the $100 billion that the ISS has burned through too.
Surprisingly, the Gemini spacecraft was in reality the proper successor to the Apollo spacecraft as it wasn't even authorized until most of the Apollo hardware had already been built. The design tempo on the Gemini spacecraft was rather high, and there were several innovations put into the Gemini spacecraft that never even made it into the Apollo design which had improved safety for the astronauts and represented a later design.
The one difference is that the Gemini spacecraft went into orbit first, and because it was a smaller spacecraft most people presume that it was a predecessor to Apollo designs. I will admit that the orbital rendezvous procedures were worked out with the Gemini program, along with EVA procedures and a whole bunch of other very important tasks that were incredibly important to human spaceflight. This experience was invaluable for later missions including later Shuttle missions. The ISS could never have been built if the Gemini flights had never flown.
When the "Manned Orbiting Laboratory" was designed, the original spacecraft that were going to service that space station was the Gemini spacecraft. There is even a version that was explicitly designed for docking with a space station that had a really bizarre through the rear hatch that penetrated the heat shield. In addition, there was a 5-man variant of the Gemini spacecraft called the "Big G" which at least got as far as the spacecraft mock-up stage (real metal being bent to test manufacturing procedures). BTW, the engineering and design work that went into the MOL ended up being the basis for Skylab when the last Saturn V was finally launched. The original plan was for nearly a dozen different space stations along a construction path more similar to how Russia ended up deploying their space stations in the 1970's.
However, requirements for commercial crew companies under the new model haven't even been released yet.
I find it disingenuous to be having NASA come up with commercial crew regulations when they clearly are acting as a competitor to the companies who are trying to put commercial crew vehicles into service. If that doesn't strike you as something odd, I am at a loss as to what would. I don't understand why Congress is insisting that NASA set the standards here.
My largest concern is that the standards, if they ever get published, will be written in such a way that nobody could possibly meet those standards. It should also be noteworthy that any time NASA has established such standards, they've had to exempt their own vehicles from those standards as something even NASA couldn't meet.
Also, while SpaceX is using the existing human spaceflight requirements as a yardstick, they fall under the jurisdiction of the Federal Aviation Administration and not NASA... other than the fact that SpaceX is trying to get NASA as a customer and it certainly is appropriate for NASA to establish independent standards for their own astronauts. If NASA sets the bar too high in that situation, they simply will be without a launcher to send astronauts into space. Oh wait.... NASA is without a launcher capable of sending astronauts into space and they are now using Soyuz capsules made with Soviet designs manufactured in Russia. Yeah, that sounds like a step forward to me.
If you can define man-rated, I'll bite here. Both the Delta IV and the Atlas V have enough thrust to place a capsule like the Orion up into orbit, or at least a manned vehicle.
I should also point out that it was an Atlas launcher (admittedly a predecessor to the current Atlas V) that has already seen service in the manned spaceflight program for NASA: It put John Glenn into orbit! Seriously, the argument that these vehicles aren't man-rated is overblown and isn't even a realistic argument here.
If you are willing to trust sending into orbit billion dollar payloads that represent a million man-hours of effort or more, that is something that at least exceeds the safety margin given for Shuttle launches and is likely to be better. There may need to be some minor tweaks to finish any honest assessment to make these vehicles man-rated, but that is very trivial compared to what is needed to get a brand-new launcher up to speed and rated for carrying astronauts. The NRO wouldn't have been sending their satellites up on these launchers if they weren't reliable.
Unfortunately I don't think the Space Shuttles are going to be available for use with the Orion-class vessel (called "Michael" in the book). They were supposed to be acting like fighters from the mothership being more like a carrier. I don't know if that ever would have worked, but at least it was plausible and something other SciFi movies have tried to take advantage of.
I agree it would make a might fine movie and something that ought to be made. The whole plot line with the Soviet Union isn't nearly as important and certainly could be updated to reflect the current world political situation.
Then again, I have no idea how you would put a nuclear Iran into the story or if it would be wise for the producers to even consider how to do that.
There are a lot of people (mostly Baby Boomers who haven't kept track) that think NASA is still receiving about 5%-10% of the federal budget. NASA used to be listed on IRS publications like the 1040 instruction booklet for where tax dollars are being spent. It became such a minor budget item that it was dropped altogether and lumped under "miscellaneous appropriations".
It should also be noteworthy that NASA isn't even the largest space agency in the U.S. Federal government at the moment, as that honor goes to the National Reconnaissance Office. Other agencies such as NOAA and even the Department of Agriculture (mainly with the Forest Service) are even involved with spaceflight.
In the meantime, the Dragon capsule being designed by SpaceX is making it first real flight next month. Heck, it is already at the cape ready for launch, and all they are doing now is a waiting game to get a launch slot to open... and some last minute tests to take care of some engineering questions they have about the rocket. This is both a test for the Falcon 9 (its second flight) and the capsule, but in this case they are doing some in-orbit testing of the avionics, the Draco thrusters, and the heat shield for re-entry purposes. They are also testing recovery procedures in what is for now an unmanned vehicle.
I'd have to agree that the timing of this is a little suspect, and the rocket that the Orion is supposedly going to be flying on has yet to even be approved for funding in the first place. The Obama administration may be eying a variant of DIRECT right now, but that isn't really ready for prime time. Boeing, on the other hand, is going to be flying their CST-100 on a Delta IV. That is a proven rocket system with over a dozen flights to certify its reliability and to work out the bugs in terms of getting things into orbit.
The question for what the Orion is going to be flying on in order to make this test is a very real question that ought to be asked. Perhaps a heavy launch variant of the Delta IV, Atlas V, or the Falcon 9 might be able to get it up into space, but there was some explicit engineering done on the Orion vehicle to make sure it couldn't fly on the EELVs. Yes, this was by design and it was done to make sure it had to fly on the Ares I rocket. How Lock-Mart is going to refit this to fly on something else is going to be real interesting. I thought they were well past the raw specification stage and were making mock-ups and building actual hardware.
Can't believe this weird mix of shuttle hardware could work out
cheaper than a new big dumb rocket stack. I suppose the
factories making shuttle tanks and solid rocket booster won't
need retooling, but even so, this beasty looks much more
complex than Ares.
It isn't really cheaper at all. Cost is not a driver here, but rather continuing to employ people in key congressional districts so NASA can gets its appropriations bill passed.
As for the factories making the tanks getting a retooling.... it is going to happen anyway. The external tank production line at Michoud has been shut down.... with a big New Orleans style parade with the final tank going down to the port and sailing off for Florida. The employees have been laid off and most of them have gone on to other jobs. There still is a crew left at the Michoud facility as there were other things going on besides the Shuttle contracts, but that was a major part of the work force there. They were going to be gearing up for the Constellation projects and specifically the Ares V, but I suppose that isn't working out so well either.
As for the ATK rockets produced at Promontory, Utah, those employees have also been laid off and many have moved onto other things. ATK landed a cute little contract for the Air Force that is sucking up those employees that they didn't want to let go and were still receiving Constellation funding (the funding is still flowing the the system).
I suppose the raw engineering has been done and there is a modest saving there, but having to bring back and train a whole new production crew from scratch sounds like an incredibly expensive proposition... especially if the funding for this is as shaky as I've ever seen any sort of project funding.
I don't expect more than a couple of flights with this hardware, even if it makes it to flight status in the first place.
Railroads had the bonuses removed from Civ II. Basically, you only built a railroad for transportation routes rather than filling the map with this grid that had railroad going to every single square on the map. Certainly there is no need to build a railroad on an island with only one city.
This is something that with Civ V has been worked on even more, where now there is maintenance costs associated with roads and railroads. This gives you a real incentive to remove the roads even if you aren't at war. A scored earth approach when giving up cities is even more useful in these situations.
As a matter of face, Muhammad was one of the "Great Prophets" that would appear in Civ IV. It would even be a unit that you could move around or even kill if you cared to. The main purpose was to establish Islam in the game (you get to select the "holy city" that becomes the new version of Mecca in your game universe), but if that isn't a depiction of "The Prophet", I don't know what else would be.
On the whole, I think that the developers were pretty even handed with the role of religions in the game, and there certainly were some benefits for having religion. The main complaints I heard about it is mainly the game balance that is thrown out of whack when some of the religions (notably Buddhism) were used in multi-player games. Solo playing generally wasn't as big of a deal.
I certainly enjoyed building up an army of missionaries (another unit in the game) to "spread the word" and conquer the world from a religious aspect rather than through military action. Some cities tended to be a real hard nut to crack in terms of spreading religion, and it could be considered an act of war to send a missionary to another civilization's city. It made life real exciting even if you succeeded in converting the enemy city. Cities with the same religion as you have also could be conquered via culture rather than military units... something I also enjoyed doing at least with solo play.
Borders effectively existed in the original "Civ" (aka Civ 1), but weren't explicitly drawn on the map until Civ 3. In the earlier versions, it was pretty much those squares which were under production. There were some tricks to "lay siege" to an enemy city by building a city real close to your target and push back by acquiring production squares from the enemy even if you haven't taken the city. Lower production cuts down on units built there and can starve the citizens to drop the size of the city down too. For a really tough city to take out, it at least was one additional strategy for combat.
So those exceptions don't apply to mere mortals like you or I, but if you drop a few hundred C-notes into the political campaigns of a few key members of congress, you too can buy an exemption for your own pet project.
Yeah, I like that very much. It is such a democratic process that treat all people justly and fairly under the law.
BTW, the Librarian of Congress is an appointed position that is done jointly by the President pro-tem of the Senate and the Speaker of the House. It doesn't even involve the Executive branch at all. Talk about a highly politicized political office.
This might just be the part of the world where you live. I find it amazing to look out windows and generally try to get a window seat whenever I can explicitly to be able to look out the windows during the flight. Of course I live in the middle of the Rocky Mountains where there really are some things to see as you are flying.
Looking out the window and seeing the entire Grand Canyon in one glance is certainly an experience worth doing, or looking out and seeing mountains that you know are tens of thousands of feet tall and you are easily flying over the top of those mountains. Flying over land at night is to me even more amazing, as each little light shows up like a constellation of stars underneath you. Sometimes you can see elevation differences mapped out by each streetlight.
Yes, when you fly over countryside that has a solid cloud layer over it make for boring flights, but it isn't always overcast everywhere. Or I suppose that you never really see the sun where you live.