NASA has tried. There has been a singular failure within NASA to get any sort of new vehicle for manned spaceflight developed. From the CRV to the DC-X, the Apollo II project and several other interesting but failed experiments leading up to the Ares I/Ares V/Orion spacecraft system (and arguably even the DIRECT concept) keep getting massive amounts of funding but also consistently get shut down eventually... usually due to political expediency or lack of congressional support to get those projects to completion. Like the Ares I-X vehicle (arguably just a slightly modified Shuttle SRB designed to fly on its own), the DC-X also had "hardware" built to demonstrate the concept and even flew a couple of missions (a couple short hops off the ground to a couple hundred feet).
As for why a Shuttle "Mark 2" vehicle hasn't been built? A very excellent question. I would argue because the company who made it in the first place (Rockwell International) doesn't exist any more and the engineers who designed the vehicle are either retired or dead from old age. It is a classic case of "not invented here" syndrome, where everybody wants to do something new and different. Starting up a Shuttle orbiter production line would also cost billions of dollars... something that Congress is very reluctant to spend all at one time as would be necessary for such a project.
The Shuttle is history already, only the walking zombies are insisting that it lives on. The time to save the Shuttle was about two years ago.... and about two years after (at the time) the original decision to end the Shuttle program had been made. There was a chance and there were even groups within the space community that were saying "now is the time to save the Shuttle".... but nobody paid attention at the time in terms of politicians or anybody that mattered.
Yes, I realize there may be institutional knowledge in the Shuttle program that is going to be lost, just as there was a whole bunch of useful knowledge lost when the Apollo program was canceled. America survived just fine, recovered, and moved on although we lost the ability to go to the Moon. That is the sad part, if anything.
We can preserve at least some of that knowledge by supporting a robust commercial spaceflight industry where the costs for access to space are in a steady decline and more people would be willing to invest into those vehicles. If the costs for access to space decline, more and new opportunities will arise in terms of what can be done, and hopefully some of those laid off will be of use to some of these new companies that are being created.
Bigelow Aerospace is hiring right now, and they need people with the kinds of experience that the workers at KSC can provide. Moving from Florida to Las Vegas may not be the most idea thing in the world, but it is at least a job and I hear that the housing is pretty cheap in Vegas at the moment (compared to a couple of years ago). Besides, Bigelow may be opening a facility at KSC in the near future too.
Yes, the STS is using liquid hydrogen, but the Saturn V used the kerosene/LOX fuel mixture, as does the Delta IV, Atlas V, and Falcon 9 rockets for their first stages. Kerosene or some other petroleum product is indeed one of the primary fuels being used for spaceflight. If you don't mind the smell of fried foods, you could use bio-diesel for that matter. Liquid Hydrogen is being used on the Shuttle because it has a slightly higher ISP than kerosene when combined with LOX, but it requires fancier handling procedures, a whole bunch of "insulation" to keep the cold things cold and the warm things warm.
Oh, wasn't it the "insulation" that ended up killing the astronauts on the Columbia? All on that quest to get some slightly higher performance that might not have been needed in the first place. Kerosene is liquid at "room temperatures" so you don't need any special cryogenic facilities for handling it when used for rocketry.
Hydrazine is used because it is hypergolic.... this is a very nice property for thrusters that need to be used on demand in short pulses for station keeping but it isn't the primary fuel that is used for getting into space. The main fuel being used for the 1st stages of most rockets today is simply kerosene and liquid oxygen..... the original poster was correct.
As for the difference between kerosene and gasoline, I'll leave it to a petroleum engineer to explain the difference if you care... both are hydrocarbons derived from crude oil. While I suppose it would be possible to fuel an entire rocket on this stuff, it wouldn't be the most ideal propellant.
I have no doubt that the finest work ever done in relation to the Shuttle program is perhaps being done now by the workers at KSC, and that these vehicles are in the best shape that they have ever been in.
The issue is that the time to save the Shuttle program has passed by and that the production lines needed to replace parts currently being used for the maintenance have now shut down, and that there is a need to at least replace the Columbia and perhaps create a few more new orbiters in order to really use this capability to its fullest. Getting that supply chain going again including restoring the staff at the Michoud Assembly Facility is not just difficult, I would dare say that in the current federal budget environment would be impossible to accomplish. And that is but the most obvious facility that has already had lay-offs with the employees already gone and moved on to other things. Many other factories involved with the construction and maintenance of the Space Shuttle have had similar kinds of lay-offs.
If anything, what is happening at KSC is just a delayed action to stuff that has been happening for years now.
Would it stink if it were me in the position you are in? Absolutely! I would be hating life in that kind of circumstance. I am very much aware that this is going to force many people to change their lifestyles in Brevard County. Then again, the problem is that everybody is depending on the government here where there are another thousand counties or so in America that are asking why are they sending money to this county when they would be just as deserving.
Over time, I think this is going to be something better for that part of Florida anyway, and in terms of places to perform launches into orbit, KSC is quite difficult to beat. It still is one of the premier locations on the Earth for orbital spaceflight and that is a fact of geography that other places like Virginia, Texas, and New Mexico can't beat.
I agree that what needs to happen is to reduce the cost of launches and spaceflight in general. I personally don't think that the Ares/Orion (or this new "heavy lift vehicle" for that matter) is going to be any cheaper, but that is a personal opinion and the sentiment is well in hand. To me, the best chance that KSC has is to encourage The Florida Space Authority to get its act together and turn KSC into the spaceflight equivalent of the O'Hare International Airport. I believe that day is coming where even NASA is going to be told to wait for an opening for launch with a launch window measured on the order of minutes instead of days because of the sheer traffic happening there. Perhaps other locations could open up that might work out better, but I think it would take an idiot to pass up on the potential of that launch location for all but specialized flights.
It is time to let the Space Shuttle go gracefully into history. That program has served our country well, and so have the thousands of dedicated people who have help to get that hunk of equipment into orbit. The jobs are eventually going to return, but it won't be the same kind of jobs and the companies involved won't be the same either. In fact, many of the companies who will eventually be there may not even exist yet. That would be my suggestion: find those companies or form one of them if you have the skills necessary.
Correction.... only one country was intelligent enough to use it in a strategic manner that aided their cause and ultimately ensured world peace. And the willingness to use that weapon if provoked should be apparent too.
What make me upset is that "mutual assured destruction" is no longer a part of U.S. foreign policy, where the current president will simply say "opps, I hope you really didn't mean that" if some American city is left as a smoldering ruin. The pure knowledge that any nuclear attack against America would result in the complete nuclear destruction of that country which made the attack was at least in the past sufficient to stop idiots from going too far and surprisingly even offered a bit of a respite for the rest of the world in terms of active warfare. That is no longer the case and in fact the world is going to be far worse off as a result.
Time will tell, and I suppose that is the ultimate test of these political theories. I just hate to be proven correct in this instance.
Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration doesn't see this nuclear plant as a proliferation risk. I would dare say that there are many in America that do see this as a huge potential problem that is only going to cause problems in the future, and there were plenty of people in the "previous administration" that expressed deep concern about this power plant.
The problem here is that we won't know if this is a problem until after Iran detonates one of their bombs, most likely on Tel Aviv or New York City. At that point it will be too late to do anything about it.
Too many people think that (-1, Troll) means (-1, I disagree with your political viewpoint) Unfortunately those don't always get yanked out in the meta-moderation process and furthermore the moderation process turns into a sort of political flame war trying to get their viewpoint modded up to the top.
There are trollish comments made to many stories that legitimately deserve this moderation, especially when it is off topic. I'm going dangerously off-topic here myself even for responding, but sometimes a "meta conversation" about the moderation process is appropriate on slashdot when a clear-cut example shows up like this. Moderation is intended to pull out the advertisements for Viagra, the GNAA, and other pure garbage that has nothing to do with the topic in the story at hand. Mod those type of comments down and let us read the stuff that has at least some reasoned opinions even if it may not be something you like.
BTW, (-1, Flamebait) is also not (-1, I disagree). Sometimes a person may be attempting to provoke a fight, but it would be useful to actually read the comment first before moderating in that manner. For me, labeling something flamebait is even more frequently applied merely because of a disagreement of a political viewpoint. If anything, I now sort of wear a flamebait moderation as a badge of honor as it implies that I touched a raw nerve politically speaking. For myself, I treat it more as (-1, Personal attack), as comments that cut down a poster in an insulting manner ought to be modded down.
Otherwise, my response to this question is: Welcome to Slashdot! The moderation system is what it is.
SpaceX has been having a string of successes lately. Admittedly they've put in a great deal of effort to get to this point and SpaceX has had its share of failures too.... so don't presume that this string of successes is inevitable either.
One thing I will be saying about SpaceX is that their engineers have been doing their homework and trying desperately not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. If there has been a rocketry related accident report or for that matter any post-mortem report about a launch that is in the public, I'm quite certain that a SpaceX engineer has read that report at some point or another. There also seems to be some very good communication going on between the engineers, which also helps to avoid problems that might fester if they aren't addressed.
In other words, they seem to have the right environment to do some really tough engineering and do it well.
There was certainly some growing pains with the Falcon 1 team, which it should be pointed out was a much smaller company that involved more young engineers with a lack of experience. They still have many of those young engineers, but SpaceX now also has a few "seasoned veterans" sprinkled in to give caution where it is needed.
Hopefully SpaceX doesn't become an ossified engineering shop that gets smug on itself thinking that other groups don't have any good ideas. Unfortunately most of the traditional aerospace companies have done just that.
And you don't think that a trans-oceanic jet aircraft isn't flying at similar kinds of margins? Most of those passenger jets fly very close to the Coffin corner in terms of the altitude, airspeed, and wing properties that requires an automated flight system to keep the pilot from killing everybody on board. Modern aviation pulls a whole bunch from rocket science including engines that also have to push the envelope in terms of temperatures and weight. If anything, I would argue that airliners have to be more complex than a rocket engine, and the fact that the engines have to run much longer gives them much more time for failure.
The main thing that makes a rocket engine so complex is the pump used to cram fuel into the engine bell. This is what makes most "rocket scientists" mainly a bunch of glorified plumbers, and the gem of any quality rocket motor is this pump. Otherwise, the basic mechanics of getting into space is pretty straight forward. While acceleration is a factor, many aircraft are rated for g-forces that are at least on the order of what you would find in most rockets... so again I don't think it is as big of a deal as is made.
The big thing is the oxidizer, which must be carried up with the rocket unlike an airplane. If a 747 had to carry the oxygen necessary for a trip to Sydney, a fair bit of the cargo space would be eaten up with the oxygen tanks or whatever oxidizer would be used in that situation.
Another thing that makes rockets so stinking expensive is that they pretty much have to work the first time you light them up. It is in this area that I think rockets that don't necessarily have to push the envelope as hard on the bleeding edge of performance could significantly drop their costs, especially if you could get to the point where you "build a little, test a little, fly a little", and then take the results of that testing and make another iteration in the engine design. That is not happening right now, where rocket motors are so much on that bleeding edge of development trying to squeeze out that last bit of ISP performance that they destroy the engines after every use.... sort of like what happens when you run a drag racing engine. What is needed is an engine like found in a Chevy Truck: cheap, simple to fix, and reliable. I do believe that rocket engines could be built with a similar kind of performance objective. The Merlin engine on the Falcon rocket family is an attempt to use this basic kind of philosophy in rocket engine design... and SpaceX is hardly the only company trying to do that either or from my perspective necessarily the best at it. But SpaceX has finished the engine and has gone into orbital spaceflight already. My hat is off to them for that fact.
The picture in that test is a bit ugly too, and I'd be glad that my life didn't depend upon the parachutes working. For those posters on this story that assert this was a "useless" test that didn't really prove anything, I hope that at least some of those would be pointed to this story to see what happens when a test of this nature goes wrong. I certainly wouldn't want to be in a capsule if the kind of damage in the photograph happened to me. Landing in the water at those speeds has nearly the same kind of impact damage as hitting land too, but you get to drown if you somehow survive.
And the advocates for Ares/Orion continue to assert theirs is a better program... with "the best minds on the planet" helping to design that vehicle? The best lobbyists in Washington D.C. perhaps...
Considering that the energy requirements for getting to orbit are actually a little bit easier than a flight from London to Sydney, I would say that there certainly is a whole bunch of room for engineers to come up with a more affordable way in terms of getting into space. Yes, I get that the airplane going to Australia from Europe can obtain "in-situ" oxidizer for the journey, but the capital layout costs for a 747 are certainly comparable to building a reusable spacecraft.
I do think that eventually you can put into space something like a small package that you drop off at your local FedEx or UPS store for roughly $1000 that can be flown into space, do its thing, and then return to some address listed on that package for whatever it is that you are doing. BTW, that is a business model that SpaceX is trying to develop as well and is interested in researchers right now that want to do that, even though the price is currently a bit more than $1k. It is a bit less than $5k/kilo in a pressurized environment right now, and if you have a small package that you want to send up into space, call up SpaceX today asking for details. You can fly it within a year or so on an already scheduled flight.
This puts space research in the hands of entrepreneurs and folks who want to try things out for themselves, including folks who don't necessarily want to let their "competition" know what they are up to. BTW, this is also what is different about the SpaceX approach. Until now, if you wanted to get into space you needed to get government permission for even the most mundane payload and essentially build your own rocket in order to get into space. SpaceX is the first company where you can simply throw money down on the table (cash, check, or electronic bank transfer) and simply purchase a flight into space where they take care of the paperwork.
Yes, there are some other commercial companies that will fly cargo into space for you like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, but they really are focused on government contracts and their pricing model shows that. It is also one of the reasons why even telecommunication satellite operators generally avoid American companies when going into space. There is also Ariainespace that will fly commercial cargo, but you are still need to go through a lengthy government procurement process to get a flight on those vehicles. It also isn't a pressurized vehicle that will return back to the ground.
Setting up a business model similar to the aviation and commercial oceanic shipping companies is really the new innovation here, not necessarily the vehicles themselves. Doing that in such a manner that you don't have to even be a rocket engineer in order to send up a payload is an even larger benefit that is going to reduce the barriers to getting businesses established in space that haven't been done before.
Presuming that "large scale manufacturing" needs vehicles much larger than a SpaceX Dragon or Boeing CST-100, I'm quite certain that the companies involved would more than oblige at providing such a vehicle if the market for something much larger was necessary. SpaceX already announced the plans for an "F1-class" rocket engine that could fly much larger vehicles than the Falcon 9-Heavy. One vehicle that was discussed, the Falcon XX, would have the same cargo capacity as a 747 and put that kind of cargo into orbit on a faring about as large as the interior space of a 747 too. I think it will be awhile before something larger and heavier than a railroad engine is going to need to be sent into space, or brought back home for that matter.
The SpaceX Dragon is going to carry its LES all of the way to orbit, although I think SpaceX is planning on using the propellant mass + rocket nozzles for maneuvering in orbit rather than as something for landing on the ground. Basically it gives them an extra safety margin for whatever it is that they plan on doing in space.
I'm not so sure how that is going to work, where the thrusters also can act as an emergency escape system too as the requirements seem to be a bit different, but that seems to be the current plan. It does make sense so far as if the LES is activated during launch that pesky details like worrying about station keeping and fuel needed to dock with the ISS aren't really needed or relevant in the situation. Why not dump all of that fuel which may be used in those situations for an emergency escape? And if the emergency situation doesn't happen, you have a huge reserve of fuel for other important tasks once you "get up there".
That is also one of the reasons why SpaceX is taking their sweet time in getting this vehicle put together, as they are trying to make sure that the Draco thrusters that they are using on the Dragon are going to be functioning properly if needed. Thrusters that have the delta-v necessary for an LES are also pretty dang impressive in their own right too.
What kinds of cargo need to be brought down from orbit? Besides passengers (where I hope the need to bring them back should be obvious) there are other kinds of space-based research that has tremendous usefulness if you can have a down link capability. Doing a biological experiment would be incredibly useful to bring it back to an Earth-based laboratory where you can poke and prod at whatever it is that you developed in space. Ditto for any metallurgy or materials science tests that you might be performing, where again having those materials and not having to haul up the entire lab just to do one or two tests on those materials would be very useful.
In addition, if there is any sort of space-based manufacturing that will go on, that ability to be able to bring back stuff is even more important.
The whole things boils down to the cost for access to space. With a typical Shuttle flight costing on the order of about a billion dollars per flight (let's not get into a fight over the exact numbers... but it is roughly that price when most costs are legitimately considered), there are very few if any vehicles that you would even consider returning back to the Earth for that price. That is over $40k/kilogram of cargo delivered. Perhaps the Hubble Telescope or some other incredibly expensive spacecraft would justify the expense, but at that price point it isn't worth sending the spacecraft up to retrieve anything.
I'd also say that another reason why dead satellite recovery hasn't happened more on the Space Shuttle is that NASA hasn't been willing to risk astronauts on such a dangerous task like recovering a satellite. Losing an astronaut in space merely to save a few bucks due to refurbishing a spacecraft isn't a valid justification for that kind of danger. I should note that the Dragon spacecraft is being designed to fly in an unmanned configuration, so the potential loss of human life doesn't even need to be figured into the equation for using a Dragon spacecraft for at least some tasks that may need to be done in space with this technology.
Drop the cost for access to space, and you will find that there will be many more applications for using space that will show up. Unfortunately if we had to rely upon NASA to get the job done it would end up costing even more to get into space, not less. The Ares/Orion spaceship system was going to end up costing even more per pound delivered to and/or retrieved from orbit than the Space Shuttle.
I suppose we're going to repeat going back to the moon next as a grand finale.
The problem with Apollo 17 was the fact that it was a finale. NASA took some amazing hardware that could go places, and then simply threw it away like yesterday's garbage. There were a number of projects developed with the Apollo Applications Program that I believe could have been flown at a sustainable rate with the funds that ended up going to the Space Shuttle.
Admittedly this is with 20/20 hindsight, but for the cost that NASA dumped into the Shuttle program, they could have flown more astronauts, put more tonnage into space (including the construction of something the size of the ISS) and perhaps even reduced the cost of access to space considerably had they simply stuck with the Apollo family of spacecraft over the past 40 years. Even now, all these years later, the Apollo hardware is looking very good and a very elegant design solution to a very tough engineering problem. Compared to the Soyuz spacecraft it still looks sleek, shiny, and modern.... but the Soyuz spacecraft are still flying and the Apollo spacecraft aren't.
The reason why a "splashdown" in the Pacific is being redone here is because it works. If the goal is to get into space and come home safely.... how else do you propose to get the job done? Are you sure that will be cheaper and be ready to fly by next year?
One thing that is certainly going to be different is the ability to have the miniature cameras in odd places that didn't exist before. I certainly liked the camera placed on the outside of the Dragon spacecraft that showed the whole splashdown from the perspective of a fly sitting on the outside of the capsule. Such a view perspective wasn't even possible during the Apollo era, where instead if they were lucky there was a U.S. Navy helicopter that had the one ton television camera in an otherwise stripped down aircraft that produced a grainy video feed.... presuming that the helicopter could even find the spacecraft as it was coming down.
In terms of internet coverage, you don't have to worry about some network executive deciding if a major league baseball game or some sitcom is going to get better ratings than a rocket launch... you just have to punch in the URL of some website like SpaceVidcast and you with several 10's of thousands of other people get to watch that launch live.... with or without commentary if you want. Rather than waiting for some public relations official telling you the weather forecast for KSC, you can simply go straight to the NOAA weather station and look up the latest weather radar scan and make your own forecast if you want.
Yeah, the internet has changed things, as has the miniaturization of electronic components. An iPhone has the computing power of all of NASA combined from 1969. Let's just say that the guidance computer is put into the Dragon spacecraft based on what the needs of the pilot are for a visual display and not due to considerations such as weight or power consumption of that computer. Its physical location is more of an afterthought. The largest and most power hungry device is going to be the flat-screen plasma panel for that display, not the computer itself.
As if SpaceX is having a problem with getting stuff into space. If they were having some serious problems with getting that task accomplished, I would agree that this test would be a relatively non-issue...
But the vehicle for getting into space has already flown that this capsule is going to be sitting on top of. I should note here too that SpaceX has also announced with this test what the flight profile is going to be like for the next Falcon 9 flight:
During the Dragon's orbital shakedown later this year, the ship will cruise around Earth between one and three times, fire its Draco maneuvering thrusters and fall into the Pacific Ocean somewhere off the coast of Los Angeles near the Channel Islands.
The flight could last from less than two hours to five hours, depending on SpaceX's final decision on its duration.
This drop test was mainly to test the parachute system and to establish the recovery procedures for when this next flight is going to happen that will make it to orbit. Rather than using an entire Air Carrier task force from the U.S. Navy (how the Apollo and Gemini capsules were recovered), SpaceX is using a fleet of three boats that are all about the size of the S.S. Minnow from Gilligan's Island. That is a huge deal and I hope the cost savings for that difference in the recovery fleet should be glaringly obvious.
The point here too is that SpaceX is very close to having a full fledged spacecraft that can go up into space, maneuver around while up there, and safely bring cargo back down from orbit. Besides the Soyuz, Space Shuttle, and Shenzhou spacecraft, the Dragon will be the only one currently capable of doing that sort of mission profile. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle next year, the Dragon will be the only American spacecraft to be capable of doing this and it will also be only the second vehicle that you can put money onto the table to simply purchase a flight into space (after the Soyuz). Given the reluctance of the Russians to permit that kind of flight and the demand they have for at least two Russian cosmonauts to be involved, the Dragon offers an even more unique perspective for being able to bring stuff back home or to go up into space if you need a pressurized cargo capacity.
Yes, both Orbital Science and Boeing are in the process of building orbital spacecraft that will be capable of returning back to the Earth.... but at what stage in the development of those vehicles are they at? What is NASA working on for their own space-capable vehicle? Please don't tell me that the Ares I with the Orion capsule is going to be oh so much better.... if that is even going to be built at all.
They did have software that was written by that company. Do you mean to say that not one of the developers of this server ever played a single game of World of Warcraft, that they never once even peeked at the disassembled/decompiled source code involved with the client software?
The analogy with Firefox and Apache is a poor one as that is software already written according to a published specification and both are open source projects. If the example here was something like Internet Explorer and that software was using a custom encrypted protocol for hyperlinked data that did not use HTTP/HTML but was some custom server software written by Microsoft, yes the analogy would fit better. In that case, the reverse engineering clean room would also apply, and you would have to be equally careful. Arguably even more careful given the sue-happy nature of Microsoft.
It doesn't matter that they didn't have direct access to the server to decompile or disassemble the server software itself. The fact that these developers used software written by that company (Blizzard) and were thus "contaminated" by the source code on a proprietary protocol is the problem.
It still gets back to the point that those involved here were playing fast and loose with copyright and simply didn't give a damn about the law in the first place. That came out in court, where arguments precisely like this one were made to a judge where those involved displayed a blatant defiance to the law or any need for special protections because it was a reverse engineering effort. That made those involved appear as common hackers and tainted the case right from the beginning. Act like that, and don't be to surprised that a judge will slap you down even if your argument is 100% correct in terms of a strict interpretation of the law. Appearances do matter in situations like that, and the issue of a clean room is also in part to keep up appearances even if the effort isn't strictly needed. If you haven't shown that you are trying to be careful about copyright, the presumption is that you aren't being careful at all.
Islam and Islamism are not the same thing. One is religious, the other political. You mean Islamic.
You mean there is a difference? So much of the Islamic culture is so meshed together that it sometimes is hard to tell. There certainly is no separation of public from religious life in most Islamic countries.
In fact one of the driving forces of modern Wahabism is that Christians go to church on Sunday and break the rest of the big "10 commandments" on the rest of the week.
If this were to be used for parody purposes only, I'd agree, but this isn't a simple parody situation used to make a joke. This is a group that is explicitly trying to perform a service that uses this logo and vehicle (also "trademarked") to perform a service.... although this is a service that is in a completely different "industry" that does make the trademark claim weaker.
If these guys were using the logo for repairing computers and other consumer electronics devices, it certainly would be a stronger case. Using this logo to "save souls" is something that is harder to justify as a trademark violation. One famous example I knew about was the "French's" logo, used on bottles of mustard and other condiments also had another company with a similar name and even trademark that had the logo used for hauling concrete. It had another bump on the "flag", but the outside of the trucks were painted yellow and a standard joke was that they were hauling around mustard instead of concrete. If you lived in the Los Angeles area, you'd be quite familiar with these trucks. I don't know if they still are around, but I do remember another reference to these trucks here on Slashdot.
As a parody example, perhaps the best parody I can think of is the TV series "Chuck" that has the "Nerd Herd" as a part of the company "Buy-More", which also has vehicles that drive around (well supposedly in the context of the show) and do electronics service calls in a fashion very similar to the "Geek Squad" for Best-Buy. This is pure parody at its finest and something that would generally be protected even if the similarities to real services can be made.
The thing that stinks about trademark law is that you need to make every effort to defend trademark usage even if perhaps that usage is legal, where the legal burden is upon the trademark owner to force the courts to say that such usage is legal. There is also, unfortunately, nothing in trademark law that penalizes a company from defending itself in even parody situations other than having its lawyers spin their wheels and charge the company for their time in defending the trademark. In other words, even if a company loses a trademark case, they still "win" as they can demonstrate in subsequent legal challenges that they have made good-faith efforts to defend their trademark.
I agree that context of information tends to be even more important, and the "whole picture" in terms of these virtual worlds and how they are organized is a big deal. There is some creativity there, and that can and should be copyrighted at some point along the line.
Some of the blame for this sort of rests on the way that Blizzard has organized the game, where a significant part of the game is purchased in the form of client software that only loosely depends on the server itself for actual information clues. Other MMORPGs tend to supply more data from the server in terms of graphics and statistical data for the creatures involved, where the case is much more cut and dried.
I am not really familiar with this particular server and their practices, but my experience with other "private server" hacker groups is one where they really don't take copyright seriously at all even for elements that would be trivial to tweak and change in terms of original content. If they were merely using the game engine itself and presenting a whole new "world" of original content, the private server groups would have much more in their favor.
What I find sad is that with the effort that some of these groups have put into reverse engineering some of these servers, they could have even developed their own game from scratch that would have been completely unencumbered with any kind of copyright issue at all. It could have even been "like" World of Warcraft but doing something new and different. In the vain effort to be lazy and not put that little bit of extra effort, they get slapped by a court and now have to pay.
The reason for clean-rooming software has to do with legally keeping away from having the implementer "accidentally" including some bits of the original software algorithms into source code of whatever it is that you are working on. This doesn't necessarily involve even looking at the original source code but can involve decompiled or even dis-assembled software too.
By doing a clean room implementation, you are legally protecting yourself in a substantial way and making sure that there is no excuse for a lawsuit to happen, where you can present the specification documents and "prove" the clean-room implementation as strictly meeting the interoperability requirements as specified in the law. Essentially, you can snowball the court with documentation that you are trying to do it the right way... and lawyers love a flood of paperwork in that regard too if you are trying to use it for defense purposes.
If you want to play fast and loose with copyright law, don't be too surprised if that kind of behavior eventually catches up to you and bites you in the end. Those living on the knife's edge of copyright law tend not to really know where the line between legal and illegal really is at, and far too often end up having legal proceedings that go against them. What happened here with this private server group is precisely that kind of problem. That they were making money off of the effort only compounded the problem.
What makes a difference here is that the entertainment companies got ahold of Representative Sonny Bono with the "Copyright Extension Term Act" and subsequently with additional legislation in the form of the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". In both cases, rather than considering the needs of mere ordinary mortals, some insanely high penalties were enaced for copyright violations.
It isn't as if you haven't been warned. If you have ever popped a movie into a VCR, DVD, Blue-ray or other medium and have seen the "FBI warning" (a similar Interpol warning also sometimes shows up depending on where you live), it clearly states that infringing copyright can give you a penalty of "up to $250,000". That is per incident.... and part of what figured into this judgment.
If you don't want to see this kind of punitive damage, make sure you let your elected representatives know how you feel about this kind of penalty and to encourage them to scale it back legislatively. Good luck with that though.... most congress critters won't care and there certainly isn't a huge outcry from the general public to scale that kind of thing back either. Perhaps you can get a popular movement about the issue going, but that is going to take some real leadership and a whole lot of work.
Using a contest as a recruiting tool, on the other hand, is an interesting way to do thing. Hold a contest and then people may submit their code samples for that contest to solve a small but critical problem for the company. It should give a pretty good idea about how resourceful the candidates might be, how much they follow specifications, and how well they understand a critical problem domain for the company.
Don't necessarily promise employment, but ask for enough information so you can contact that individual and perhaps offer them the chance to move on as staff to continue to do things like was in the contest on a permanent basis. At the very least, those who participate and get a job offer would be flattered even if they turn down the offer and perhaps there might be a couple desperate people who might say "yes" in such a situation. Nothing gives an ego boost better than a job offer anyway and is in some ways worth more than a prize.
On the other hand, if a company is using a contest as a means to reduce its R&D staff and hoping to "outsource" that engineering effort through contests.... they are likely not a company you should be working with in the first place. A contest isn't necessarily going to reduce engineering costs and will likely even increase them over the long term as bugs in the source code are discovered or slight tweaks need to be made that may make the "winning" code obsolete. Unless it is a widely acknowledged program in general, it might even show "the competition" where you are weak and what kinds of problems you are facing as a company.
If you are a computer science intern and not at least making 2x minimum wage, you are most certainly getting ripped off. Perhaps getting paid less than the full-time professionals, but still you should be getting paid a pretty healthy wage none the less and certainly more than working at a burger flipper job.
An "unpaid computer science intern"? I hope you are getting other benefits such as a major scholarship or a nearly guaranteed job afterward, or some significant political connections for doing that kind of work.
There are some industries where the competition for jobs is so fierce that the only way to get any sort of experience at all is to have an unpaid internship first. The entertainment industries (radio & television) come to mind here, but not computer science or for that matter most other engineering specialties. If a company asks you to do an unpaid internship, make sure that they know they will get what they pay for too.
Slashdot Mirror
Why haven't we tried an update of the shuttle?
NASA has tried. There has been a singular failure within NASA to get any sort of new vehicle for manned spaceflight developed. From the CRV to the DC-X, the Apollo II project and several other interesting but failed experiments leading up to the Ares I/Ares V/Orion spacecraft system (and arguably even the DIRECT concept) keep getting massive amounts of funding but also consistently get shut down eventually... usually due to political expediency or lack of congressional support to get those projects to completion. Like the Ares I-X vehicle (arguably just a slightly modified Shuttle SRB designed to fly on its own), the DC-X also had "hardware" built to demonstrate the concept and even flew a couple of missions (a couple short hops off the ground to a couple hundred feet).
As for why a Shuttle "Mark 2" vehicle hasn't been built? A very excellent question. I would argue because the company who made it in the first place (Rockwell International) doesn't exist any more and the engineers who designed the vehicle are either retired or dead from old age. It is a classic case of "not invented here" syndrome, where everybody wants to do something new and different. Starting up a Shuttle orbiter production line would also cost billions of dollars... something that Congress is very reluctant to spend all at one time as would be necessary for such a project.
The Shuttle is history already, only the walking zombies are insisting that it lives on. The time to save the Shuttle was about two years ago.... and about two years after (at the time) the original decision to end the Shuttle program had been made. There was a chance and there were even groups within the space community that were saying "now is the time to save the Shuttle".... but nobody paid attention at the time in terms of politicians or anybody that mattered.
Yes, I realize there may be institutional knowledge in the Shuttle program that is going to be lost, just as there was a whole bunch of useful knowledge lost when the Apollo program was canceled. America survived just fine, recovered, and moved on although we lost the ability to go to the Moon. That is the sad part, if anything.
We can preserve at least some of that knowledge by supporting a robust commercial spaceflight industry where the costs for access to space are in a steady decline and more people would be willing to invest into those vehicles. If the costs for access to space decline, more and new opportunities will arise in terms of what can be done, and hopefully some of those laid off will be of use to some of these new companies that are being created.
Bigelow Aerospace is hiring right now, and they need people with the kinds of experience that the workers at KSC can provide. Moving from Florida to Las Vegas may not be the most idea thing in the world, but it is at least a job and I hear that the housing is pretty cheap in Vegas at the moment (compared to a couple of years ago). Besides, Bigelow may be opening a facility at KSC in the near future too.
Yes, the STS is using liquid hydrogen, but the Saturn V used the kerosene/LOX fuel mixture, as does the Delta IV, Atlas V, and Falcon 9 rockets for their first stages. Kerosene or some other petroleum product is indeed one of the primary fuels being used for spaceflight. If you don't mind the smell of fried foods, you could use bio-diesel for that matter. Liquid Hydrogen is being used on the Shuttle because it has a slightly higher ISP than kerosene when combined with LOX, but it requires fancier handling procedures, a whole bunch of "insulation" to keep the cold things cold and the warm things warm.
Oh, wasn't it the "insulation" that ended up killing the astronauts on the Columbia? All on that quest to get some slightly higher performance that might not have been needed in the first place. Kerosene is liquid at "room temperatures" so you don't need any special cryogenic facilities for handling it when used for rocketry.
Hydrazine is used because it is hypergolic.... this is a very nice property for thrusters that need to be used on demand in short pulses for station keeping but it isn't the primary fuel that is used for getting into space. The main fuel being used for the 1st stages of most rockets today is simply kerosene and liquid oxygen..... the original poster was correct.
As for the difference between kerosene and gasoline, I'll leave it to a petroleum engineer to explain the difference if you care... both are hydrocarbons derived from crude oil. While I suppose it would be possible to fuel an entire rocket on this stuff, it wouldn't be the most ideal propellant.
I have no doubt that the finest work ever done in relation to the Shuttle program is perhaps being done now by the workers at KSC, and that these vehicles are in the best shape that they have ever been in.
The issue is that the time to save the Shuttle program has passed by and that the production lines needed to replace parts currently being used for the maintenance have now shut down, and that there is a need to at least replace the Columbia and perhaps create a few more new orbiters in order to really use this capability to its fullest. Getting that supply chain going again including restoring the staff at the Michoud Assembly Facility is not just difficult, I would dare say that in the current federal budget environment would be impossible to accomplish. And that is but the most obvious facility that has already had lay-offs with the employees already gone and moved on to other things. Many other factories involved with the construction and maintenance of the Space Shuttle have had similar kinds of lay-offs.
If anything, what is happening at KSC is just a delayed action to stuff that has been happening for years now.
Would it stink if it were me in the position you are in? Absolutely! I would be hating life in that kind of circumstance. I am very much aware that this is going to force many people to change their lifestyles in Brevard County. Then again, the problem is that everybody is depending on the government here where there are another thousand counties or so in America that are asking why are they sending money to this county when they would be just as deserving.
Over time, I think this is going to be something better for that part of Florida anyway, and in terms of places to perform launches into orbit, KSC is quite difficult to beat. It still is one of the premier locations on the Earth for orbital spaceflight and that is a fact of geography that other places like Virginia, Texas, and New Mexico can't beat.
I agree that what needs to happen is to reduce the cost of launches and spaceflight in general. I personally don't think that the Ares/Orion (or this new "heavy lift vehicle" for that matter) is going to be any cheaper, but that is a personal opinion and the sentiment is well in hand. To me, the best chance that KSC has is to encourage The Florida Space Authority to get its act together and turn KSC into the spaceflight equivalent of the O'Hare International Airport. I believe that day is coming where even NASA is going to be told to wait for an opening for launch with a launch window measured on the order of minutes instead of days because of the sheer traffic happening there. Perhaps other locations could open up that might work out better, but I think it would take an idiot to pass up on the potential of that launch location for all but specialized flights.
It is time to let the Space Shuttle go gracefully into history. That program has served our country well, and so have the thousands of dedicated people who have help to get that hunk of equipment into orbit. The jobs are eventually going to return, but it won't be the same kind of jobs and the companies involved won't be the same either. In fact, many of the companies who will eventually be there may not even exist yet. That would be my suggestion: find those companies or form one of them if you have the skills necessary.
Correction.... only one country was intelligent enough to use it in a strategic manner that aided their cause and ultimately ensured world peace. And the willingness to use that weapon if provoked should be apparent too.
What make me upset is that "mutual assured destruction" is no longer a part of U.S. foreign policy, where the current president will simply say "opps, I hope you really didn't mean that" if some American city is left as a smoldering ruin. The pure knowledge that any nuclear attack against America would result in the complete nuclear destruction of that country which made the attack was at least in the past sufficient to stop idiots from going too far and surprisingly even offered a bit of a respite for the rest of the world in terms of active warfare. That is no longer the case and in fact the world is going to be far worse off as a result.
Time will tell, and I suppose that is the ultimate test of these political theories. I just hate to be proven correct in this instance.
Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration doesn't see this nuclear plant as a proliferation risk. I would dare say that there are many in America that do see this as a huge potential problem that is only going to cause problems in the future, and there were plenty of people in the "previous administration" that expressed deep concern about this power plant.
The problem here is that we won't know if this is a problem until after Iran detonates one of their bombs, most likely on Tel Aviv or New York City. At that point it will be too late to do anything about it.
Too many people think that (-1, Troll) means (-1, I disagree with your political viewpoint) Unfortunately those don't always get yanked out in the meta-moderation process and furthermore the moderation process turns into a sort of political flame war trying to get their viewpoint modded up to the top.
There are trollish comments made to many stories that legitimately deserve this moderation, especially when it is off topic. I'm going dangerously off-topic here myself even for responding, but sometimes a "meta conversation" about the moderation process is appropriate on slashdot when a clear-cut example shows up like this. Moderation is intended to pull out the advertisements for Viagra, the GNAA, and other pure garbage that has nothing to do with the topic in the story at hand. Mod those type of comments down and let us read the stuff that has at least some reasoned opinions even if it may not be something you like.
BTW, (-1, Flamebait) is also not (-1, I disagree). Sometimes a person may be attempting to provoke a fight, but it would be useful to actually read the comment first before moderating in that manner. For me, labeling something flamebait is even more frequently applied merely because of a disagreement of a political viewpoint. If anything, I now sort of wear a flamebait moderation as a badge of honor as it implies that I touched a raw nerve politically speaking. For myself, I treat it more as (-1, Personal attack), as comments that cut down a poster in an insulting manner ought to be modded down.
Otherwise, my response to this question is: Welcome to Slashdot! The moderation system is what it is.
SpaceX has been having a string of successes lately. Admittedly they've put in a great deal of effort to get to this point and SpaceX has had its share of failures too.... so don't presume that this string of successes is inevitable either.
One thing I will be saying about SpaceX is that their engineers have been doing their homework and trying desperately not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. If there has been a rocketry related accident report or for that matter any post-mortem report about a launch that is in the public, I'm quite certain that a SpaceX engineer has read that report at some point or another. There also seems to be some very good communication going on between the engineers, which also helps to avoid problems that might fester if they aren't addressed.
In other words, they seem to have the right environment to do some really tough engineering and do it well.
There was certainly some growing pains with the Falcon 1 team, which it should be pointed out was a much smaller company that involved more young engineers with a lack of experience. They still have many of those young engineers, but SpaceX now also has a few "seasoned veterans" sprinkled in to give caution where it is needed.
Hopefully SpaceX doesn't become an ossified engineering shop that gets smug on itself thinking that other groups don't have any good ideas. Unfortunately most of the traditional aerospace companies have done just that.
And you don't think that a trans-oceanic jet aircraft isn't flying at similar kinds of margins? Most of those passenger jets fly very close to the Coffin corner in terms of the altitude, airspeed, and wing properties that requires an automated flight system to keep the pilot from killing everybody on board. Modern aviation pulls a whole bunch from rocket science including engines that also have to push the envelope in terms of temperatures and weight. If anything, I would argue that airliners have to be more complex than a rocket engine, and the fact that the engines have to run much longer gives them much more time for failure.
The main thing that makes a rocket engine so complex is the pump used to cram fuel into the engine bell. This is what makes most "rocket scientists" mainly a bunch of glorified plumbers, and the gem of any quality rocket motor is this pump. Otherwise, the basic mechanics of getting into space is pretty straight forward. While acceleration is a factor, many aircraft are rated for g-forces that are at least on the order of what you would find in most rockets... so again I don't think it is as big of a deal as is made.
The big thing is the oxidizer, which must be carried up with the rocket unlike an airplane. If a 747 had to carry the oxygen necessary for a trip to Sydney, a fair bit of the cargo space would be eaten up with the oxygen tanks or whatever oxidizer would be used in that situation.
Another thing that makes rockets so stinking expensive is that they pretty much have to work the first time you light them up. It is in this area that I think rockets that don't necessarily have to push the envelope as hard on the bleeding edge of performance could significantly drop their costs, especially if you could get to the point where you "build a little, test a little, fly a little", and then take the results of that testing and make another iteration in the engine design. That is not happening right now, where rocket motors are so much on that bleeding edge of development trying to squeeze out that last bit of ISP performance that they destroy the engines after every use.... sort of like what happens when you run a drag racing engine. What is needed is an engine like found in a Chevy Truck: cheap, simple to fix, and reliable. I do believe that rocket engines could be built with a similar kind of performance objective. The Merlin engine on the Falcon rocket family is an attempt to use this basic kind of philosophy in rocket engine design... and SpaceX is hardly the only company trying to do that either or from my perspective necessarily the best at it. But SpaceX has finished the engine and has gone into orbital spaceflight already. My hat is off to them for that fact.
I think this is the test you were talking about:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/orion-test-para/
The picture in that test is a bit ugly too, and I'd be glad that my life didn't depend upon the parachutes working. For those posters on this story that assert this was a "useless" test that didn't really prove anything, I hope that at least some of those would be pointed to this story to see what happens when a test of this nature goes wrong. I certainly wouldn't want to be in a capsule if the kind of damage in the photograph happened to me. Landing in the water at those speeds has nearly the same kind of impact damage as hitting land too, but you get to drown if you somehow survive.
And the advocates for Ares/Orion continue to assert theirs is a better program... with "the best minds on the planet" helping to design that vehicle? The best lobbyists in Washington D.C. perhaps...
Considering that the energy requirements for getting to orbit are actually a little bit easier than a flight from London to Sydney, I would say that there certainly is a whole bunch of room for engineers to come up with a more affordable way in terms of getting into space. Yes, I get that the airplane going to Australia from Europe can obtain "in-situ" oxidizer for the journey, but the capital layout costs for a 747 are certainly comparable to building a reusable spacecraft.
I do think that eventually you can put into space something like a small package that you drop off at your local FedEx or UPS store for roughly $1000 that can be flown into space, do its thing, and then return to some address listed on that package for whatever it is that you are doing. BTW, that is a business model that SpaceX is trying to develop as well and is interested in researchers right now that want to do that, even though the price is currently a bit more than $1k. It is a bit less than $5k/kilo in a pressurized environment right now, and if you have a small package that you want to send up into space, call up SpaceX today asking for details. You can fly it within a year or so on an already scheduled flight.
This puts space research in the hands of entrepreneurs and folks who want to try things out for themselves, including folks who don't necessarily want to let their "competition" know what they are up to. BTW, this is also what is different about the SpaceX approach. Until now, if you wanted to get into space you needed to get government permission for even the most mundane payload and essentially build your own rocket in order to get into space. SpaceX is the first company where you can simply throw money down on the table (cash, check, or electronic bank transfer) and simply purchase a flight into space where they take care of the paperwork.
Yes, there are some other commercial companies that will fly cargo into space for you like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, but they really are focused on government contracts and their pricing model shows that. It is also one of the reasons why even telecommunication satellite operators generally avoid American companies when going into space. There is also Ariainespace that will fly commercial cargo, but you are still need to go through a lengthy government procurement process to get a flight on those vehicles. It also isn't a pressurized vehicle that will return back to the ground.
Setting up a business model similar to the aviation and commercial oceanic shipping companies is really the new innovation here, not necessarily the vehicles themselves. Doing that in such a manner that you don't have to even be a rocket engineer in order to send up a payload is an even larger benefit that is going to reduce the barriers to getting businesses established in space that haven't been done before.
Presuming that "large scale manufacturing" needs vehicles much larger than a SpaceX Dragon or Boeing CST-100, I'm quite certain that the companies involved would more than oblige at providing such a vehicle if the market for something much larger was necessary. SpaceX already announced the plans for an "F1-class" rocket engine that could fly much larger vehicles than the Falcon 9-Heavy. One vehicle that was discussed, the Falcon XX, would have the same cargo capacity as a 747 and put that kind of cargo into orbit on a faring about as large as the interior space of a 747 too. I think it will be awhile before something larger and heavier than a railroad engine is going to need to be sent into space, or brought back home for that matter.
The SpaceX Dragon is going to carry its LES all of the way to orbit, although I think SpaceX is planning on using the propellant mass + rocket nozzles for maneuvering in orbit rather than as something for landing on the ground. Basically it gives them an extra safety margin for whatever it is that they plan on doing in space.
I'm not so sure how that is going to work, where the thrusters also can act as an emergency escape system too as the requirements seem to be a bit different, but that seems to be the current plan. It does make sense so far as if the LES is activated during launch that pesky details like worrying about station keeping and fuel needed to dock with the ISS aren't really needed or relevant in the situation. Why not dump all of that fuel which may be used in those situations for an emergency escape? And if the emergency situation doesn't happen, you have a huge reserve of fuel for other important tasks once you "get up there".
That is also one of the reasons why SpaceX is taking their sweet time in getting this vehicle put together, as they are trying to make sure that the Draco thrusters that they are using on the Dragon are going to be functioning properly if needed. Thrusters that have the delta-v necessary for an LES are also pretty dang impressive in their own right too.
What kinds of cargo need to be brought down from orbit? Besides passengers (where I hope the need to bring them back should be obvious) there are other kinds of space-based research that has tremendous usefulness if you can have a down link capability. Doing a biological experiment would be incredibly useful to bring it back to an Earth-based laboratory where you can poke and prod at whatever it is that you developed in space. Ditto for any metallurgy or materials science tests that you might be performing, where again having those materials and not having to haul up the entire lab just to do one or two tests on those materials would be very useful.
In addition, if there is any sort of space-based manufacturing that will go on, that ability to be able to bring back stuff is even more important.
The whole things boils down to the cost for access to space. With a typical Shuttle flight costing on the order of about a billion dollars per flight (let's not get into a fight over the exact numbers... but it is roughly that price when most costs are legitimately considered), there are very few if any vehicles that you would even consider returning back to the Earth for that price. That is over $40k/kilogram of cargo delivered. Perhaps the Hubble Telescope or some other incredibly expensive spacecraft would justify the expense, but at that price point it isn't worth sending the spacecraft up to retrieve anything.
I'd also say that another reason why dead satellite recovery hasn't happened more on the Space Shuttle is that NASA hasn't been willing to risk astronauts on such a dangerous task like recovering a satellite. Losing an astronaut in space merely to save a few bucks due to refurbishing a spacecraft isn't a valid justification for that kind of danger. I should note that the Dragon spacecraft is being designed to fly in an unmanned configuration, so the potential loss of human life doesn't even need to be figured into the equation for using a Dragon spacecraft for at least some tasks that may need to be done in space with this technology.
Drop the cost for access to space, and you will find that there will be many more applications for using space that will show up. Unfortunately if we had to rely upon NASA to get the job done it would end up costing even more to get into space, not less. The Ares/Orion spaceship system was going to end up costing even more per pound delivered to and/or retrieved from orbit than the Space Shuttle.
I suppose we're going to repeat going back to the moon next as a grand finale.
The problem with Apollo 17 was the fact that it was a finale. NASA took some amazing hardware that could go places, and then simply threw it away like yesterday's garbage. There were a number of projects developed with the Apollo Applications Program that I believe could have been flown at a sustainable rate with the funds that ended up going to the Space Shuttle.
Admittedly this is with 20/20 hindsight, but for the cost that NASA dumped into the Shuttle program, they could have flown more astronauts, put more tonnage into space (including the construction of something the size of the ISS) and perhaps even reduced the cost of access to space considerably had they simply stuck with the Apollo family of spacecraft over the past 40 years. Even now, all these years later, the Apollo hardware is looking very good and a very elegant design solution to a very tough engineering problem. Compared to the Soyuz spacecraft it still looks sleek, shiny, and modern.... but the Soyuz spacecraft are still flying and the Apollo spacecraft aren't.
The reason why a "splashdown" in the Pacific is being redone here is because it works. If the goal is to get into space and come home safely.... how else do you propose to get the job done? Are you sure that will be cheaper and be ready to fly by next year?
One thing that is certainly going to be different is the ability to have the miniature cameras in odd places that didn't exist before. I certainly liked the camera placed on the outside of the Dragon spacecraft that showed the whole splashdown from the perspective of a fly sitting on the outside of the capsule. Such a view perspective wasn't even possible during the Apollo era, where instead if they were lucky there was a U.S. Navy helicopter that had the one ton television camera in an otherwise stripped down aircraft that produced a grainy video feed.... presuming that the helicopter could even find the spacecraft as it was coming down.
In terms of internet coverage, you don't have to worry about some network executive deciding if a major league baseball game or some sitcom is going to get better ratings than a rocket launch... you just have to punch in the URL of some website like SpaceVidcast and you with several 10's of thousands of other people get to watch that launch live.... with or without commentary if you want. Rather than waiting for some public relations official telling you the weather forecast for KSC, you can simply go straight to the NOAA weather station and look up the latest weather radar scan and make your own forecast if you want.
Yeah, the internet has changed things, as has the miniaturization of electronic components. An iPhone has the computing power of all of NASA combined from 1969. Let's just say that the guidance computer is put into the Dragon spacecraft based on what the needs of the pilot are for a visual display and not due to considerations such as weight or power consumption of that computer. Its physical location is more of an afterthought. The largest and most power hungry device is going to be the flat-screen plasma panel for that display, not the computer itself.
As if SpaceX is having a problem with getting stuff into space. If they were having some serious problems with getting that task accomplished, I would agree that this test would be a relatively non-issue...
But the vehicle for getting into space has already flown that this capsule is going to be sitting on top of. I should note here too that SpaceX has also announced with this test what the flight profile is going to be like for the next Falcon 9 flight:
--- Spaceflight Now
This drop test was mainly to test the parachute system and to establish the recovery procedures for when this next flight is going to happen that will make it to orbit. Rather than using an entire Air Carrier task force from the U.S. Navy (how the Apollo and Gemini capsules were recovered), SpaceX is using a fleet of three boats that are all about the size of the S.S. Minnow from Gilligan's Island. That is a huge deal and I hope the cost savings for that difference in the recovery fleet should be glaringly obvious.
The point here too is that SpaceX is very close to having a full fledged spacecraft that can go up into space, maneuver around while up there, and safely bring cargo back down from orbit. Besides the Soyuz, Space Shuttle, and Shenzhou spacecraft, the Dragon will be the only one currently capable of doing that sort of mission profile. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle next year, the Dragon will be the only American spacecraft to be capable of doing this and it will also be only the second vehicle that you can put money onto the table to simply purchase a flight into space (after the Soyuz). Given the reluctance of the Russians to permit that kind of flight and the demand they have for at least two Russian cosmonauts to be involved, the Dragon offers an even more unique perspective for being able to bring stuff back home or to go up into space if you need a pressurized cargo capacity.
Yes, both Orbital Science and Boeing are in the process of building orbital spacecraft that will be capable of returning back to the Earth.... but at what stage in the development of those vehicles are they at? What is NASA working on for their own space-capable vehicle? Please don't tell me that the Ares I with the Orion capsule is going to be oh so much better.... if that is even going to be built at all.
They did have software that was written by that company. Do you mean to say that not one of the developers of this server ever played a single game of World of Warcraft, that they never once even peeked at the disassembled/decompiled source code involved with the client software?
The analogy with Firefox and Apache is a poor one as that is software already written according to a published specification and both are open source projects. If the example here was something like Internet Explorer and that software was using a custom encrypted protocol for hyperlinked data that did not use HTTP/HTML but was some custom server software written by Microsoft, yes the analogy would fit better. In that case, the reverse engineering clean room would also apply, and you would have to be equally careful. Arguably even more careful given the sue-happy nature of Microsoft.
It doesn't matter that they didn't have direct access to the server to decompile or disassemble the server software itself. The fact that these developers used software written by that company (Blizzard) and were thus "contaminated" by the source code on a proprietary protocol is the problem.
It still gets back to the point that those involved here were playing fast and loose with copyright and simply didn't give a damn about the law in the first place. That came out in court, where arguments precisely like this one were made to a judge where those involved displayed a blatant defiance to the law or any need for special protections because it was a reverse engineering effort. That made those involved appear as common hackers and tainted the case right from the beginning. Act like that, and don't be to surprised that a judge will slap you down even if your argument is 100% correct in terms of a strict interpretation of the law. Appearances do matter in situations like that, and the issue of a clean room is also in part to keep up appearances even if the effort isn't strictly needed. If you haven't shown that you are trying to be careful about copyright, the presumption is that you aren't being careful at all.
Islam and Islamism are not the same thing. One is religious, the other political. You mean Islamic.
You mean there is a difference? So much of the Islamic culture is so meshed together that it sometimes is hard to tell. There certainly is no separation of public from religious life in most Islamic countries.
In fact one of the driving forces of modern Wahabism is that Christians go to church on Sunday and break the rest of the big "10 commandments" on the rest of the week.
If this were to be used for parody purposes only, I'd agree, but this isn't a simple parody situation used to make a joke. This is a group that is explicitly trying to perform a service that uses this logo and vehicle (also "trademarked") to perform a service.... although this is a service that is in a completely different "industry" that does make the trademark claim weaker.
If these guys were using the logo for repairing computers and other consumer electronics devices, it certainly would be a stronger case. Using this logo to "save souls" is something that is harder to justify as a trademark violation. One famous example I knew about was the "French's" logo, used on bottles of mustard and other condiments also had another company with a similar name and even trademark that had the logo used for hauling concrete. It had another bump on the "flag", but the outside of the trucks were painted yellow and a standard joke was that they were hauling around mustard instead of concrete. If you lived in the Los Angeles area, you'd be quite familiar with these trucks. I don't know if they still are around, but I do remember another reference to these trucks here on Slashdot.
As a parody example, perhaps the best parody I can think of is the TV series "Chuck" that has the "Nerd Herd" as a part of the company "Buy-More", which also has vehicles that drive around (well supposedly in the context of the show) and do electronics service calls in a fashion very similar to the "Geek Squad" for Best-Buy. This is pure parody at its finest and something that would generally be protected even if the similarities to real services can be made.
The thing that stinks about trademark law is that you need to make every effort to defend trademark usage even if perhaps that usage is legal, where the legal burden is upon the trademark owner to force the courts to say that such usage is legal. There is also, unfortunately, nothing in trademark law that penalizes a company from defending itself in even parody situations other than having its lawyers spin their wheels and charge the company for their time in defending the trademark. In other words, even if a company loses a trademark case, they still "win" as they can demonstrate in subsequent legal challenges that they have made good-faith efforts to defend their trademark.
I agree that context of information tends to be even more important, and the "whole picture" in terms of these virtual worlds and how they are organized is a big deal. There is some creativity there, and that can and should be copyrighted at some point along the line.
Some of the blame for this sort of rests on the way that Blizzard has organized the game, where a significant part of the game is purchased in the form of client software that only loosely depends on the server itself for actual information clues. Other MMORPGs tend to supply more data from the server in terms of graphics and statistical data for the creatures involved, where the case is much more cut and dried.
I am not really familiar with this particular server and their practices, but my experience with other "private server" hacker groups is one where they really don't take copyright seriously at all even for elements that would be trivial to tweak and change in terms of original content. If they were merely using the game engine itself and presenting a whole new "world" of original content, the private server groups would have much more in their favor.
What I find sad is that with the effort that some of these groups have put into reverse engineering some of these servers, they could have even developed their own game from scratch that would have been completely unencumbered with any kind of copyright issue at all. It could have even been "like" World of Warcraft but doing something new and different. In the vain effort to be lazy and not put that little bit of extra effort, they get slapped by a court and now have to pay.
The reason for clean-rooming software has to do with legally keeping away from having the implementer "accidentally" including some bits of the original software algorithms into source code of whatever it is that you are working on. This doesn't necessarily involve even looking at the original source code but can involve decompiled or even dis-assembled software too.
By doing a clean room implementation, you are legally protecting yourself in a substantial way and making sure that there is no excuse for a lawsuit to happen, where you can present the specification documents and "prove" the clean-room implementation as strictly meeting the interoperability requirements as specified in the law. Essentially, you can snowball the court with documentation that you are trying to do it the right way... and lawyers love a flood of paperwork in that regard too if you are trying to use it for defense purposes.
If you want to play fast and loose with copyright law, don't be too surprised if that kind of behavior eventually catches up to you and bites you in the end. Those living on the knife's edge of copyright law tend not to really know where the line between legal and illegal really is at, and far too often end up having legal proceedings that go against them. What happened here with this private server group is precisely that kind of problem. That they were making money off of the effort only compounded the problem.
What makes a difference here is that the entertainment companies got ahold of Representative Sonny Bono with the "Copyright Extension Term Act" and subsequently with additional legislation in the form of the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". In both cases, rather than considering the needs of mere ordinary mortals, some insanely high penalties were enaced for copyright violations.
It isn't as if you haven't been warned. If you have ever popped a movie into a VCR, DVD, Blue-ray or other medium and have seen the "FBI warning" (a similar Interpol warning also sometimes shows up depending on where you live), it clearly states that infringing copyright can give you a penalty of "up to $250,000". That is per incident.... and part of what figured into this judgment.
If you don't want to see this kind of punitive damage, make sure you let your elected representatives know how you feel about this kind of penalty and to encourage them to scale it back legislatively. Good luck with that though.... most congress critters won't care and there certainly isn't a huge outcry from the general public to scale that kind of thing back either. Perhaps you can get a popular movement about the issue going, but that is going to take some real leadership and a whole lot of work.
Using a contest as a recruiting tool, on the other hand, is an interesting way to do thing. Hold a contest and then people may submit their code samples for that contest to solve a small but critical problem for the company. It should give a pretty good idea about how resourceful the candidates might be, how much they follow specifications, and how well they understand a critical problem domain for the company.
Don't necessarily promise employment, but ask for enough information so you can contact that individual and perhaps offer them the chance to move on as staff to continue to do things like was in the contest on a permanent basis. At the very least, those who participate and get a job offer would be flattered even if they turn down the offer and perhaps there might be a couple desperate people who might say "yes" in such a situation. Nothing gives an ego boost better than a job offer anyway and is in some ways worth more than a prize.
On the other hand, if a company is using a contest as a means to reduce its R&D staff and hoping to "outsource" that engineering effort through contests.... they are likely not a company you should be working with in the first place. A contest isn't necessarily going to reduce engineering costs and will likely even increase them over the long term as bugs in the source code are discovered or slight tweaks need to be made that may make the "winning" code obsolete. Unless it is a widely acknowledged program in general, it might even show "the competition" where you are weak and what kinds of problems you are facing as a company.
If you are a computer science intern and not at least making 2x minimum wage, you are most certainly getting ripped off. Perhaps getting paid less than the full-time professionals, but still you should be getting paid a pretty healthy wage none the less and certainly more than working at a burger flipper job.
An "unpaid computer science intern"? I hope you are getting other benefits such as a major scholarship or a nearly guaranteed job afterward, or some significant political connections for doing that kind of work.
There are some industries where the competition for jobs is so fierce that the only way to get any sort of experience at all is to have an unpaid internship first. The entertainment industries (radio & television) come to mind here, but not computer science or for that matter most other engineering specialties. If a company asks you to do an unpaid internship, make sure that they know they will get what they pay for too.