The Shuttle never was going to be the low-cost launch vehicle, and the Challenge accident mostly emphasized that the Shuttle was an experimental aircraft that didn't meet any sort of human safety standard. It certainly doesn't meet the current human spaceflight standards that NASA is trying to push on the rest of the spacecraft building agencies.
Oh, BTW, Ares I also doesn't meet that standard and specifically had to get a special waiver exemption just for the design to get approval to get as much as has been done so far.
Getting a company like PanAm involved was mostly a public relations move that had little to do with reality. A "private" company has taken over shuttle operations, as United Launch Alliance is now doing most of the jobs that were originally done by NASA employees when the Shuttle program began. If that is the "management" you are talking about that PanAm was supposed to do, I don't see how that would have changed much of anything. Certainly neither PanAm nor ULA can or would have been able to offer launch services with the Shuttle by some rich billionaire like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet if they threw the money on the table and asked to have a "private" launch of the shuttle on their own dime.
The Shuttle has always been a government owned and operated spacecraft, regardless of who is doing the processing on behalf of NASA. That was precisely the problem in the 1980s, and it was only made worse when NASA kicked the pants out of private efforts like the Conestoga I and convinced several private companies who wanted to purchase that completely privately developed launcher and instead were told they would have space on the Shuttle for a fraction of the price that could be offered by private efforts. To really spoil the fun, once all of the promises were made by NASA for "private" spaceflight on the Shuttle, very few of those companies who were promised space on a shuttle flight ever really got the chance to send anything up into space.
As for the Constellation getting any sort of development cost saving by using "technology" from the SRB, it should be pointed out that the Ares I is really a very different vehicle. It has 1 more segment than the SRB and it has guidance systems and other equipment that is not needed on the SRB. In fact, so many engineering changes have happened on the transition from SRB to the Ares I that it might as well be considered a completely new vehicle. It is like trying to compare the HMMWV to a Hummer. Yeah, they are made by the same company and look kinda the same, but they are two completely different vehicles.
I'll admit that the Ares I-X was essentially a glorified shuttle SRB, but that did not achieve orbital velocities and was mostly a joke of a test anyway that didn't test the vehicle in anything close to the final vehicle configuration.
My "dream" is the hope that I as a private citizen can throw some money on the table and go into space, without any sort of approval process from NASA. Perhaps the FAA-AST, but not NASA. At the moment, regardless of how much money I throw on the table (how I get that money is my problem and irrelevant to the discussion), I simply can't get a ride into space at the moment. That is something which needs to change. Promoting private spaceflight efforts like what SpaceX is doing with the Falcon 9 will provide a path that I can do just that. I don't see that happening with the Constellation program, which is one of many reasons I simply can't support that program.
Still, my point was that if the first firing had failed on a NASA vehicle it would have been (correctly) called out for it, while anything NewSpace is fine and dandy and they can do no wrong. My "flagrance" is a result of this submitter always spinning his submissions and having conveient omissions (the first failure in this case).
I would have to disagree in this case. NASA has had launch aborts on very public launches, including the Space Shuttle. They weren't decried as catastrophic or the end of the mission and loss of vehicle. It was merely an abort that forced a recycle of the launch. For the Shuttle, that implies a 24-hour turn around at a minimum to perhaps a week in delaying the launch for the next attempt. This abort for the Falcon 9 was no different, and if anything this test firing also tested that abort procedure in an excellent fashion. What is interesting about the Falcon 9 is that this abort, fix, and re-attempt can happen in as little as 10 minutes for SpaceX, as has been demonstrated already with the Falcon 1.
SpaceX needed some test data from lighting up the engines on the pad. Instead of one test, they got two, which to me sounds like SpaceX got a bargain including seeing an error condition they hadn't seen previously at the test stands in McGregor. Some heads rolled and some procedures are being changed as a result of that mess up too, so all wasn't lost in the effort, and the engineers have data from two launch attempts already to compare before the real thing happens.
Hopefully the engineers at SpaceX will make use of that data in a positive way to get the Falcon 9 off the launch pad without a hitch.
Besides, Elon Musk wants to be an astronaut, and take a flight in his own Dragon capsule at some point in the not too distant future.
Unfortunately like D. Delos Harriman, he is likely going to be blocked by a series of lawsuits from doing so until after the company is so firmly profitable that his loss from an accident would be irrelevant to the bottom line. That is not the case that the moment with SpaceX.
I'd have to agree with you that the IPO for SpaceX is at a minimum of 5 years away. That SpaceX is going to need the IPO is true, particularly if Elon decides to go ahead and make his Saturn V-type heavy lifter vehicle that he has been dreaming about and talked about from time to time.
Well, that would take trying to find a market for such a heavy lifter vehicle too, but being able to send up the ISS in about 2-3 payloads would be something real cool, wouldn't it?
The preliminary work on an engine similar to the Saturn F1 has already started quietly at SpaceX, but I have no idea if or when it will ever see the light of day. Keep in mind that the test stands at McGregor that SpaceX now owns were originally built to test the F1 engines for the Saturn V, if that gives you an idea of what kind of dream Elon may have for the future.
I am all for Space X but they have not even flown the Falcon 9 yet. The PR for the Shuttle before and frankly even after it went into service was great as well. It was only when Challenger blew up did people start looking at it and seeing that it had not really delivered.
While the Falcon 9 hasn't flown yet, the Delta IV by Boeing and the Atlas V, both of them in configurations capable of manned spaceflight, have already flown and with enviable flight records that put the Shuttle program to shame. Orbital Sciences is also ready to launch another vehicle that will achieve orbital flight that can be man-rated, and there are another half-dozen other companies in the USA alone (and another half dozen outside of the USA) that may get there too in the next dozen years or so.
SpaceX isn't the end all to get all, but it is one of the players that will likely be there to get manned spaceflight working. More importantly, SpaceX is sending up the Dragon capsule in spite of funding from NASA, not because of it. There is definitely a private commercial aspect here with the SpaceX Falcon 9 that has an eye for the future by chasing after non-government money as customers.
The problem with Constellation and with the Shuttle program before is that they tried to be all things to all people and couldn't really satisfy any particular spaceflight customer very well. With a diversity in the marketplace and improved launch rates due to lower costs and some real competition, space is finally getting exciting again.
The real question that is to be raised, and I've raised that issue on other forums too, is if the market for space tourism and for privately owned space stations is enough to compensate for the loss in revenue from the government contracts that have been traditionally a part of commercial spaceflight.
Think of it this way: For the past several decades most of the launches into space, and all of the commercial payloads, have been for just a few narrow types of satellites: Communications sats (both like Iridum and the GEO sats that do television broadcasting), Photo reconnaissance satellites (both government and private), weather forecasting satellites, and navigation sats like the GPS system. All of these applications in space are proven and there is a steady market for launch systems to get these kind of devices into orbit. They are cost-insensitive, so far as spending $100k per pound to orbit or more is a reasonable expense considering the kind of cargo involved. If a competitor like SpaceX comes into the market place and offers slightly cheaper flight services, they gobble up that market and everybody loses. In this sense the hope is that SpaceX will get smart and start raising their launch costs so everybody can start making a profit again on launching this particular market.
That has been the status-quo for the past 40 years or so, with NASA doing their own thing on a sort of flags and footprints type missions. How else do you explain the $100 billion dumped onto the ISS over the past couple decades?
The hope, the dream here is that by dropping the cost for access to space in a substantial fashion, that SpaceX and other similar companies are going to open up traveling into space for whole new markets that at the moment are completely untapped. People are willing to pay $30 million to $50 million for a chance to be an astronaut, and spending $150 million for a circum-lunar flight is something that actually has customers right now as well. I'm not talking a dreamy eyed feasibility study, but real customers who have already put money on the table and in some cases already have gone up into space. Any basic economics textbook will tell you that if you drop the cost, that demand rises. If the demand is already there and still unmet even at these insanely high prices, how much larger is this market going to be if you drop the cost for getting into space to 10% of these prices (aka $3 million to $5 million per seat)? Indeed, as the cost of going int
No, we are on the edge of a true space race explosion amongst the private companies similar to the net in 1992. Will we see a.com bubble? Most likely. But we will still see MANY MANY companies created and expansion of man to the stars.
Wall Street is looking desperately for that "next big thing" and I also believe that soon money is going to be pouring from the private equity markets into spaceflight in a manner than has never happened before. Will Wall Street overdo that kind of speculation? Just like everything else that they do, but then again I think it will end up being better for the USA in the long run.
The one thing that puts some sanity into spaceflight is that so many companies now have "bent metal" and that they have to meet that one incredibly tough obstacle in order to prove that they are capable of competing: get something into orbit
Any company that can successfully launch their own satellites will likely have gone through a trial by fire that will imply some real engineering talent which must be in place for that to happen in the first place, unlike some of the web companies that was just a dreamer and a URL.
On the other hand, the market for even near-Earth asteroids and lunar exploration is an untapped potential that could yield some very real financial returns that are on the order of trillions of dollars. A market that size is something also hard to pass up.
Actually, its currently a terrible time to be an entry-level engineer trying to find an Aerospace job. The fact that the current Obama plan (which I fully support) is still only proposed, no one knows whats going to happen, and none of the established companies are hiring -- most of the job postings are not being actively pursued by Boeing, LockMart, etc. SpaceX has job postings up, and I think they mean to fill them, but they're a small company and they're busy right now so most of those are standing still too.
There are close to a dozen different companies in various parts of the USA that are looking for aerospace engineers that I'm aware of right at the top of my head. If you mean a cushy six figure income working for a government cost-plus contractor that pushes the notion of "waste anything but time" and working for one of the major aerospace firms, I'd have to agree. This isn't the 1960's where folks with high school diplomas could get a job in rocket development simply because they needed warm bodies, and as long as you knew which end of the rocket was the business end and had half a brain you could find work.
One thing that is holding almost everybody back right now is that this is such a monumental policy shift in how NASA is doing things that there is a whole bunch of "wait and see" to find out if existing contracts are going to be continued or not, or if a new group of folks are going to get funding. Still, from nearly everything I've seen in terms of the raw financials about aerospace companies and spaceflight companies in particular, the market for launch services has held steady and in fact is expanding somewhat even during this recession. If anything, the recession/depression for space related companies happened about a decade ago when Iridium and the "constellation" satellite market dried up and launch rates plumeted. Launch rates are higher now than any time since 9/11.
A starving engineer without a family and willing to work insane hours in a small start-up company can certainly find a job right now. I would compare the situation to what software developers have been dealing with for the past couple of decades, and that is indeed a different kind of work environment than has been the case with aerospace engineers in the past.
There was opposition to Constellation on nearly the day it was announced, from within the Bush administration itself. Indeed, there were so many problems with the design and concept that a substantial number of the NASA engineers working on Constellation set up an independent off-clock (they used the internet and worked from home in a fashion similar to an open source software project) to come up with the DIRECT launch vehicle that would have been in many ways much, much better than even the Constellation and would have maintained the shuttle infrastructure that everybody is complaining about now.
Constellation does not and never has been about preserving the shuttle infrastructure or for that matter even really about getting into space at all. It is a high-tech jobs program that benefits a relatively few political districts and states, but not really much more than that. By the time all is said and done, Constellation has been projected to cost more than $100 billion and perhaps even more... and that is just to get to the Moon. Mars would have been another $100+ and was projected to cost perhaps as much as a half trillion dollars. Shy of a fairy tale dream, that kind of funding is never going to happen for NASA.
Constellation was an unworkable program from the get go, and there were people who knew that back when it was proposed. With Mike Griffin no longer running NASA, Constellation's chief backer is no longer there to defend it.
Intuitively its going to be about 10 feet per story, to one sig fig. Or about 3 meters. So, figure around 150 feet, or around 45 meters.
As it turns out the Falcon 9 is 54 meters tall. That would be 18 stories tall according to your intuition. Your approximation was 20% off. But hey.. give of take three stories. What's that among friends?
Which is precisely why the complaint was issued, as there isn't a standard "metric" for whatever you can call a story. That is about the same as calling a foot to be the average size of the feet from the first 12 men that walk out of church on Sunday (one of the early legal definitions of a foot BTW). Instead, we have a foot to be precisely defined (by law) as 304.8 millimeters, which in turn is based on the distance of a certain number of wavelengths of a legally defined frequency of light.
Right now SpaceX is entirely being financed by private investors, and the IPO isn't something that is even being discussed. Yes, it is one of the financing options and it very likely will be the "exit strategy" for the investors once the company gets going, but don't hold your breath yet.
I think for Elon Musk, one IPO at a time is going to be what he is worrying about at the moment. Tesla Motors is poised to "go public" in the next six months to a year, and the necessary SEC paperwork is being filed to get that to happen. Originally Tesla was going to stay completely private but the business of making automobiles is chewing up enough money that a public offering is needed. If SpaceX is going to have an IPO, I would suspect that it would happen some time after Tesla has its IPO.
The Reuters article that you are citing here was likely to be some speculation and feeler from Elon Musk over which company to take to IPO first, debating if it should be Tesla or SpaceX. With the feud happening in Tesla with the dismissal of Martin Eberhard and the federal loans that are being used to develop the next model vehicle for Tesla (and a production vehicle already finished and in the portfolio), Tesla looks like a much better candidate for this kind of financing.
All that really matters from this perspective is that eventually SpaceX may go public in the future. If you want to be a small investor into a company like SpaceX, simply wait your time.
Is that necessarily a bad thing to have 30 companies the size of SpaceX who productively each perform roughly the same amount of work that the one bloated agency milking government largess to do the same thing?
Yes, I do realize that even comparing Constellation to the Falcon 9 isn't quite comparing the same thing, but it does help that SpaceX is starting from a clean sheet in terms of building up a new organization that is avoiding bureaucracy that even exists in more established private companies like Boeing or Northrop-Grumman. That is called competition, and I think it is a good thing.
From a public policy standpoint and from the perspective of a company trying to get started in the aerospace business, now is a fantastic time to be an investor in a new aerospace start-up company with thousands of very hungry engineers that have decades of experience. From what I've seen, it is actually a good time to be an aerospace engineering graduate, as there are job opportunities out there.... especially for entry-level engineers that may be willing to work for a relatively low salary to get their feet wet.
All this said, yeah it would suck to be an employee of one of the major spacecraft firms that are connected to either Shuttle parts production or to the Constellation program. This does disrupt lives, families, communities, and even whole states when substantial shifts occur. That is why it is important to really evaluate the programs carefully before you shut down something like Constellation or the Shuttle program. Still, just because some program or government project is going, does that mean we as taxpayers need to keep that program going just to employ these workers, even if whatever they are making can't possibly be used affordably even once it is completed?
I would recommend that your son try to pick up Scratch as an introductory programming language. It offers a GUI development environment and adding multi-media features such as animation and sound tracks is like breathing air in that language. He is probably interested in making his own "shot 'em up" type of game anyway, and that is a perfect language to get started with those kind of concepts.... and it teaches object oriented design right from the start as well.
There are also thousands of example programs to download from the main website, most of which are written by middle school/junior high kids as well. There is also a surprisingly large group of professional software developers like myself who are closet Scratch developers and have "pushed" the language to some interesting extremes. The language is also sandboxed in a way that keeps most of the major problem issues with software development away.
The only thing that I find lacking with the language is that it was purposely built to avoid any kind of access to external data storage devices like a hard drive (other than to load and save the programs themselves). I personally think this was a mistake, but it is a part of the philosophy of the language and something that allows it to be used in most public schools where it is being used.
I really wonder what your demography was, and the profession of your father/mother...
For me personally, I cannot envision myself programming at 7.
I've been teaching my 7 year old how to program, and they think it is a really cool thing to do. Yes, it isn't something that easily comes to them, but it is something they are certainly capable of doing.
I don't know if you've seen it or not, but Scratch is a programming language that fairly easy to pick up and extremely powerful. 7 years old is still a little bit young even for this language, but not impossible, and certainly you don't have to be a pure genus to be using this language at that age. I'll admit, however, that even this language is more geared toward middle-school aged kids (10-14 years old) where kids that age seem to have the patience necessary to grok the concepts and be able to make something useful that goes beyond the simple examples.
It doesn't, however, take a college degree to learn at least the basics of computer programming. I started to write my first programs when I was 10, and that was several decades ago.
I'm curious about what kind of "bad habits" can be learned using modern dialects of BASIC today?
Then again, the current incarnation of Visual BASIC and other similar implementations of the language are such an abomination that you can hardly call them BASIC either. Well, I should note it isn't the earlier implementations of Visual BASIC, but rather when some C programmers got ahold of the language and threw out some of the exceptional power that BASIC holds over other languages.
I'll admit that the traditional "Dartmouth BASIC" can result in some unnecessarily complex spaghetti code, but then again it also shows who the sloppy programmers are when they try to do tricks to save a couple bytes of code that ultimately makes code maintenance almost impossible. I've always hated "clever" programmers anyway, and this can be a pitfall in any language. Then again, this version of BASIC was designed to be used on a line printer terminal.
I don't want to admit to how many or how large of a program I've written using that software editing system, but it is more than a few and some fairly large programs.
BTW, I don't consider Python to be today's version of BASIC. Instead, I would consider Scratch to be the true philosophical descendant of BASIC. If you've never tried this programming language out, you are missing out on a very unique experience, and something that is certainly going to influence software design over the next century or more. For my own children, this is the software development environment I've been using to introduce basic software development concepts, and it teaches object-oriented design and event interrupts right from the beginning. Who knew that an introductory language could introduce multi-threaded design so easily? My only major complaint is that it encourages the use of infinite loops not as something to avoid but even implements a specific construct to push its use.
Yes, Python is pretty good, but it isn't an introductory environment.
The one "danger" to learning assembly is that you quickly discover how lousy many of the current operating systems are in terms of not only resource efficiency (CPU, memory, and even data storage), but that a programmer in assembly can *gasp* actually do better than a typical compiler. Yes, I've heard the arguments that a compiler can do better than an average programmer.... which I think is pure bunk.
Some of the better "modern" assemblers also have features that make them work nearly as well as a high level language with memory allocation and "function" calling methods that strongly resemble what you might even find when writing in a language like C.
I do agree with you that re-learning a new assembly language is a bit of a pain. The largest problem with assembly is that you are so close to the hardware that you must understand the hardware itself and the processor architecture models. Of course if you are a competent software developer you should know this stuff anyway even if you use a high level language.
Of course knowing assembly also gives programmers an advantage when trying to reverse-engineer other people's software, but I digress at that point. Reverse engineering is not something typically taught at a typical university except as a "special topic" or some exceptionally enlightened professor willing to teach the topic.
I am glad to see that I'm not a voice alone in the wilderness here on this issue. I also have to agree that the best operating system that Microsoft has ever released was Windows 2000 Professional. It was a significant enough improvement (where it counted.... in the OS core with stability and improved app security and other real OS features, not these crazy and fancy GUI features) over Windows NT 4 and the other operating systems like the MS-DOS based OSs of Win 95, 98, and ME that it really drew a line in the sand in terms of a real substantive operating system to abandon previous offerings to that point in time.
Heck, I'm still using that operating system even now. My only problem is that vendors are no longer supporting this operating system on the philosophy that it is a dead operating system.... and they aren't even trying to support customers even when they have drivers and software explicitly for that OS.
Windows XP seems do be doing OK, but it doesn't really offer much new and in some ways loads up the OS with what I think are useless features I really don't want or need.
On top of everything else, I wish that the developers at Microsoft would also be consistent with their control functions. For users who hare to access the "control panel" to modify settings, it seems like each team of OS developers explicitly decides to completely rewrite the configuration code from scratch and change how to do basic settings.
As a Windows user from Windows 286 and a PC-DOS 1.0 user, I've seen more than my fair share of Microsoft operating systems. I've seen some real duds (MS-DOS 4.0 and Windows 2 are some classic examples) and I've seen some fairly good successes. How Microsoft overcame the duds to make something worthy of attention is to me a miracle in itself.
I'm sort of undecided on the latest offering, but at least willing to entertain the idea. Still, it has much of the baggage from Vista and XP that I love to hate.
I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.
Keep in mind that the first settlement to Los Angeles had the entire settlement wiped out.... due to starvation and a lack of water. I'm not talking a few people dying of disease, but that the place is simply inhospitable for even a small group of people to live there.... at least live there without massive public works and technology that brings in supplies and materials for you to live there. Los Angeles in particular is a prime example of what technology can do to help bring in resources that turns an inhospitable area into not only a place to live but to thrive and for population to explode.
The one semi-good thing is that Los Angeles can survive on 19th Century technologies (canals, aquaducts, railroads, etc.) if it absolutely needed to happen. I couldn't say the same thing about a similar sized city on the Moon or Mars, but Los Angeles is certainly "proof" that you can sustain a large population in a difficult to live-in climate. It also does help that the general climate there is relatively mild and that people enjoy living there simply because of its location, forgetting that LA is mostly a desert between some mountains. If you need any substantial "proof", try to find the Los Angeles River. It has been made fun of in countless movies, and is about as artificial as the rest of the city too. In the mid-west, it would be a brook that might not even have a name.
I doubt the artist, sculptor or whatever was a "government employee" of any sort or that the memorial was designed as a work-for-hire. It was almost certainly designed independently and the design sold without including the rights. This is how nearly every memorial, sculpture or art piece on public land is done.
Of course this is why this particular issue is in court, to decide these issues. As for the status as a government employee, that is entirely relative and subjective, where the line between a contractor and an employee is blurry and ill defined. Much of that has many thanks to the computer industry who has caused that blurring to happen, but others have been doing that too.
So, did this particular artist produce this design completely on his own, without any other input from the group that put the monument proposal together? Is it unique and only found at this one location, or is it also found in many other locations as well (aka several "copies" were or are planned to be made elsewhere)? Where did it say that the monument was sold without rights? Does that include to government entities?
All of this is shooting off the hip and presuming things that may or may not be the case. Apparently this artist did think that he retained the artistic copyright to this monument, and that is why he went to court. His case was good enough that he was able to convince a couple appellate court judges that his case had merit to overturn a lower court decision.
As for if it was groundbreaking or genuinely original.... so what? That is not the legal point of contention here. Even if it was just a minor modification of Michelangelo's David, it still qualifies as something which can be protected under copyright. The real issue is the ownership of this monument by the government and if this particular artist has already been compensated or if additional compensation should happen when copies or derivative works based on this work of art are made.
Deutsche Post is the German post office. Germany may be playing fiscal games with it such as how the U.S. government plays around with the Federal Reserve, Fredie Mac, and other quasi-government agencies, but it is essentially an organ of the German government. Yes, I realize it has been "privatized" as some government functions have been in Europe, but it is the same organization that functions and has functioned like the USPS in the USA.
As for General Motors and Goldman-Sachs as agencies of the U.S. federal government.... I'd argue that they are, in fact, enjoying such status too. It has been suggested that the current ruckus over the Toyota recalls is in part due to economic competition and strategy to take out a competitor. I also don't think that the government should be owning businesses of this nature either and it was a bad move to get them under government control.
As for if the USPS could become privatized like Deutsche Post is currently being operated.... that is something that certainly can be debated. Under the current presidential administration, that doesn't seem to be even a remote glimmer of a possibility, however.
This is not a limitation of fair use. Fair use normally applies to noncommercial, private use. The US Postal service is not using as such. Their use is both commercial and public. So anyone who wants to take a picture of the statues is not violating rights. Selling the pictures for profit is violating rights.
While noncommercial and private use of copyrighted material is something for courts to take into consideration and is a part of the formal legal code for fair-use, it is possible to apply fair-use doctrine to items which are used in commercial and for-profit applications.
This includes mixing fair-use content with "free-license" content like the GFDL, GPL, and CC-by-SA licenses that also permit commercial reproduction.
The question here is if the sculpture is something which is in the public domain, having been purchased by and used by the federal government on government land (perhaps considered a "donation" to the government... depending on how the funds for it were raised) or if the original artist retained copyright status for this particular work of art. That is the real issue, and something which can be ruled upon in a very narrow way that doesn't grossly impact the copyright status of other 3-D works of art.
Where this becomes groundbreaking is for a monument placed upon federal land and if the courts rule that such public monuments can have their copyright status retained by the original artist unless such rights are explicitly relinquished by that artist by some contract or some other means of recognition of that fact.
Yes, this is quite a bit different than some rapper "sampling" the music or performance from another artist, unless the sampling was done of the work performed by say the U.S. Marine Corps Band or some other group of government employees. Such performances are usually considered to be in the public domain as they are government employees.
If I take a photo of say the city lights of New York, and I have it printed as a calendar, poster, or postcard, I would then be liable to the City of New York, the owners of every building included, the manufacturers of the lights used, and countless others. It may seem silly, but that's the case here. I know buildings, to some degree, are exempt from this, but I believe there was a story a few years ago of someone photographing the Sears Tower, and they were forbidden from doing it because they didn't have permission of the building owners for reproduction rights.
One thing that does protect you on cityscapes is that most mass-produced items are not considered "works of art" and you are free to take photographs of them. Buildings themselves are interesting, as it can be considered a 3-D sculpture and as such a sort of work of art... explicitly covered in the U.S. copyright code and explained in detail.
Automotive design is certainly something interesting in terms of its copyright status.
To me, the #1 problem with all of this is the lack of copyright registration. In the past, an author or artist had to take explicit steps to copyright their works and register that copyright with the government for protection.... sort of how a patent works now. Registration still can happen and is a good idea if you want to enforce copyright, but it is not longer necessary to enforce copyright.
In all of the cases above, I wonder if either the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower.... don't get me started there), the Ford vehicles, or this particular sculpture would ever have had their copyright registered. All it would take to register that copyright is to take a few photographs and file them with the library of congress, so it isn't really an undue burden, but it does take some extra effort. I don't think that until the groups involved had photographs taken and used on a wide basis would they have even bothered in the first place.
It wasn't done by the US government, it was done for the US government.
And for what it's worth, the government tries to claim copyrights on public legal documents and the like all the time, it's bull.
No, the "government" doesn't try to claim copyright on public legal documents. There have been some situations such as the National Electrical Code, which is published by a private organization, which has in turn been codified in the form of law that has had copyright asserted.... but that is a different situation entirely. State governments also assert copyright on some documents and works of art... but that is the state government and not the federal government.
As for the distinction of a work of art done by or for the government.... that is about as weak of an argument as you can make. About the only difference I can see is if you are salaried or not... aka are you on the payroll of the government or do you receive the money in a lump sum? The distinction between an employee and a contractor is rather fuzzy, and to use this excuse as being a contractor instead of an employee as an end-run around the U.S. copyright laws on the public domain status of works of art by government employees is something the courts should rule as essentially the same thing.
Compensation was given to this sculptor for making this work of art, and was paid by the government. As to if that artist was paid sufficient money for that sculpture, that is something which can be debated. It is this issue that is the sticking point, and it sounds to me that this artist is complaining that he didn't get enough money for what he made in this case.
The government commissioned the work of art, in this case the sculpture itself, and then had another branch of that same government take a picture of that work of art for use in its own operations.
It isn't quite so cut and dried as it would seem. The question is if that sculptor was acting as an "employee" of the government via the contract to requisition the public monument in the first place. If he was an employee, that would be a "work for hire" and there would be no copyright as it would simply be in the public domain like all other works of art by government employees. Photographs taken by NASA astronauts, for example, are in the public domain because of this principle. ESA photographs, on the other hand, aren't covered by this same principle because the EU doesn't automatically grant public domain status to such photographs.
BTW, it is a mistaken notion that fair-use doesn't apply to commercial publishers either. You can make money as a for-profit commercial publisher (aka like the USPS selling stamps, or somebody making a coffee table picture book to give another example) with fair-use photographs. It must fit the fair-use criteria, which isn't trivial, but it can be done. The profit or lack thereof from the organization is only one of several factors that goes into determining the fair-use status of a copyrighted work and how it is used.
One of the most glaring problems with copyright law is the current copyright ownership by state and local governments.
IMHO, all government organizations, at least in the USA, should have works of art owned by a government entity as being in the public domain. State's rights issues don't even apply here as it is the federal government that has exclusive constitutional authority in terms of copyright granting authority in the first place.... 1st article of the constitution no less.
Some states like California have also formalized this sentiment and have made all works of art owned by that particular state government to be in the public domain just as the federal government has through legislation. As for why more states don't do that is something that doesn't make too much sense to me.
Pfff, any excuse will do. USPS is expensive, inefficient and unreliable compared to UPS, Fed Ex and DHL.
An interesting little side note here: DHL is actually a subsidiary of the German post office. That is correct, DHL employees actually work for the German government, even if it is operated as a for-profit business.
As for comparing the efficiency of the American government vs. the German government.... that is certainly something that could be a bit of an interesting discussion in its own right.
It wasn't the U.S. federal government who paid the start-up expenses for the USPS in this case.... it was the British government instead, when Benjamin Franklin became the first American postmaster-general in North America.
Otherwise, it has been a make a little lose a little proposition for the past nearly 300 years, and one of the early forms of revenue for the American Republic after the revolution of the 18th Century.
I'd say that those start-up costs have been amortized quite some time ago. How many 18th Century organizations are you familiar with that are still operational today?
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The Shuttle never was going to be the low-cost launch vehicle, and the Challenge accident mostly emphasized that the Shuttle was an experimental aircraft that didn't meet any sort of human safety standard. It certainly doesn't meet the current human spaceflight standards that NASA is trying to push on the rest of the spacecraft building agencies.
Oh, BTW, Ares I also doesn't meet that standard and specifically had to get a special waiver exemption just for the design to get approval to get as much as has been done so far.
Getting a company like PanAm involved was mostly a public relations move that had little to do with reality. A "private" company has taken over shuttle operations, as United Launch Alliance is now doing most of the jobs that were originally done by NASA employees when the Shuttle program began. If that is the "management" you are talking about that PanAm was supposed to do, I don't see how that would have changed much of anything. Certainly neither PanAm nor ULA can or would have been able to offer launch services with the Shuttle by some rich billionaire like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet if they threw the money on the table and asked to have a "private" launch of the shuttle on their own dime.
The Shuttle has always been a government owned and operated spacecraft, regardless of who is doing the processing on behalf of NASA. That was precisely the problem in the 1980s, and it was only made worse when NASA kicked the pants out of private efforts like the Conestoga I and convinced several private companies who wanted to purchase that completely privately developed launcher and instead were told they would have space on the Shuttle for a fraction of the price that could be offered by private efforts. To really spoil the fun, once all of the promises were made by NASA for "private" spaceflight on the Shuttle, very few of those companies who were promised space on a shuttle flight ever really got the chance to send anything up into space.
As for the Constellation getting any sort of development cost saving by using "technology" from the SRB, it should be pointed out that the Ares I is really a very different vehicle. It has 1 more segment than the SRB and it has guidance systems and other equipment that is not needed on the SRB. In fact, so many engineering changes have happened on the transition from SRB to the Ares I that it might as well be considered a completely new vehicle. It is like trying to compare the HMMWV to a Hummer. Yeah, they are made by the same company and look kinda the same, but they are two completely different vehicles.
I'll admit that the Ares I-X was essentially a glorified shuttle SRB, but that did not achieve orbital velocities and was mostly a joke of a test anyway that didn't test the vehicle in anything close to the final vehicle configuration.
My "dream" is the hope that I as a private citizen can throw some money on the table and go into space, without any sort of approval process from NASA. Perhaps the FAA-AST, but not NASA. At the moment, regardless of how much money I throw on the table (how I get that money is my problem and irrelevant to the discussion), I simply can't get a ride into space at the moment. That is something which needs to change. Promoting private spaceflight efforts like what SpaceX is doing with the Falcon 9 will provide a path that I can do just that. I don't see that happening with the Constellation program, which is one of many reasons I simply can't support that program.
Still, my point was that if the first firing had failed on a NASA vehicle it would have been (correctly) called out for it, while anything NewSpace is fine and dandy and they can do no wrong. My "flagrance" is a result of this submitter always spinning his submissions and having conveient omissions (the first failure in this case).
I would have to disagree in this case. NASA has had launch aborts on very public launches, including the Space Shuttle. They weren't decried as catastrophic or the end of the mission and loss of vehicle. It was merely an abort that forced a recycle of the launch. For the Shuttle, that implies a 24-hour turn around at a minimum to perhaps a week in delaying the launch for the next attempt. This abort for the Falcon 9 was no different, and if anything this test firing also tested that abort procedure in an excellent fashion. What is interesting about the Falcon 9 is that this abort, fix, and re-attempt can happen in as little as 10 minutes for SpaceX, as has been demonstrated already with the Falcon 1.
SpaceX needed some test data from lighting up the engines on the pad. Instead of one test, they got two, which to me sounds like SpaceX got a bargain including seeing an error condition they hadn't seen previously at the test stands in McGregor. Some heads rolled and some procedures are being changed as a result of that mess up too, so all wasn't lost in the effort, and the engineers have data from two launch attempts already to compare before the real thing happens.
Hopefully the engineers at SpaceX will make use of that data in a positive way to get the Falcon 9 off the launch pad without a hitch.
Besides, Elon Musk wants to be an astronaut, and take a flight in his own Dragon capsule at some point in the not too distant future.
Unfortunately like D. Delos Harriman, he is likely going to be blocked by a series of lawsuits from doing so until after the company is so firmly profitable that his loss from an accident would be irrelevant to the bottom line. That is not the case that the moment with SpaceX.
I'd have to agree with you that the IPO for SpaceX is at a minimum of 5 years away. That SpaceX is going to need the IPO is true, particularly if Elon decides to go ahead and make his Saturn V-type heavy lifter vehicle that he has been dreaming about and talked about from time to time.
Well, that would take trying to find a market for such a heavy lifter vehicle too, but being able to send up the ISS in about 2-3 payloads would be something real cool, wouldn't it?
The preliminary work on an engine similar to the Saturn F1 has already started quietly at SpaceX, but I have no idea if or when it will ever see the light of day. Keep in mind that the test stands at McGregor that SpaceX now owns were originally built to test the F1 engines for the Saturn V, if that gives you an idea of what kind of dream Elon may have for the future.
I am all for Space X but they have not even flown the Falcon 9 yet. The PR for the Shuttle before and frankly even after it went into service was great as well. It was only when Challenger blew up did people start looking at it and seeing that it had not really delivered.
While the Falcon 9 hasn't flown yet, the Delta IV by Boeing and the Atlas V, both of them in configurations capable of manned spaceflight, have already flown and with enviable flight records that put the Shuttle program to shame. Orbital Sciences is also ready to launch another vehicle that will achieve orbital flight that can be man-rated, and there are another half-dozen other companies in the USA alone (and another half dozen outside of the USA) that may get there too in the next dozen years or so.
SpaceX isn't the end all to get all, but it is one of the players that will likely be there to get manned spaceflight working. More importantly, SpaceX is sending up the Dragon capsule in spite of funding from NASA, not because of it. There is definitely a private commercial aspect here with the SpaceX Falcon 9 that has an eye for the future by chasing after non-government money as customers.
The problem with Constellation and with the Shuttle program before is that they tried to be all things to all people and couldn't really satisfy any particular spaceflight customer very well. With a diversity in the marketplace and improved launch rates due to lower costs and some real competition, space is finally getting exciting again.
The real question that is to be raised, and I've raised that issue on other forums too, is if the market for space tourism and for privately owned space stations is enough to compensate for the loss in revenue from the government contracts that have been traditionally a part of commercial spaceflight.
Think of it this way: For the past several decades most of the launches into space, and all of the commercial payloads, have been for just a few narrow types of satellites: Communications sats (both like Iridum and the GEO sats that do television broadcasting), Photo reconnaissance satellites (both government and private), weather forecasting satellites, and navigation sats like the GPS system. All of these applications in space are proven and there is a steady market for launch systems to get these kind of devices into orbit. They are cost-insensitive, so far as spending $100k per pound to orbit or more is a reasonable expense considering the kind of cargo involved. If a competitor like SpaceX comes into the market place and offers slightly cheaper flight services, they gobble up that market and everybody loses. In this sense the hope is that SpaceX will get smart and start raising their launch costs so everybody can start making a profit again on launching this particular market.
That has been the status-quo for the past 40 years or so, with NASA doing their own thing on a sort of flags and footprints type missions. How else do you explain the $100 billion dumped onto the ISS over the past couple decades?
The hope, the dream here is that by dropping the cost for access to space in a substantial fashion, that SpaceX and other similar companies are going to open up traveling into space for whole new markets that at the moment are completely untapped. People are willing to pay $30 million to $50 million for a chance to be an astronaut, and spending $150 million for a circum-lunar flight is something that actually has customers right now as well. I'm not talking a dreamy eyed feasibility study, but real customers who have already put money on the table and in some cases already have gone up into space. Any basic economics textbook will tell you that if you drop the cost, that demand rises. If the demand is already there and still unmet even at these insanely high prices, how much larger is this market going to be if you drop the cost for getting into space to 10% of these prices (aka $3 million to $5 million per seat)? Indeed, as the cost of going int
No, we are on the edge of a true space race explosion amongst the private companies similar to the net in 1992. Will we see a .com bubble? Most likely. But we will still see MANY MANY companies created and expansion of man to the stars.
Wall Street is looking desperately for that "next big thing" and I also believe that soon money is going to be pouring from the private equity markets into spaceflight in a manner than has never happened before. Will Wall Street overdo that kind of speculation? Just like everything else that they do, but then again I think it will end up being better for the USA in the long run.
The one thing that puts some sanity into spaceflight is that so many companies now have "bent metal" and that they have to meet that one incredibly tough obstacle in order to prove that they are capable of competing: get something into orbit
Any company that can successfully launch their own satellites will likely have gone through a trial by fire that will imply some real engineering talent which must be in place for that to happen in the first place, unlike some of the web companies that was just a dreamer and a URL.
On the other hand, the market for even near-Earth asteroids and lunar exploration is an untapped potential that could yield some very real financial returns that are on the order of trillions of dollars. A market that size is something also hard to pass up.
Actually, its currently a terrible time to be an entry-level engineer trying to find an Aerospace job. The fact that the current Obama plan (which I fully support) is still only proposed, no one knows whats going to happen, and none of the established companies are hiring -- most of the job postings are not being actively pursued by Boeing, LockMart, etc. SpaceX has job postings up, and I think they mean to fill them, but they're a small company and they're busy right now so most of those are standing still too.
There are close to a dozen different companies in various parts of the USA that are looking for aerospace engineers that I'm aware of right at the top of my head. If you mean a cushy six figure income working for a government cost-plus contractor that pushes the notion of "waste anything but time" and working for one of the major aerospace firms, I'd have to agree. This isn't the 1960's where folks with high school diplomas could get a job in rocket development simply because they needed warm bodies, and as long as you knew which end of the rocket was the business end and had half a brain you could find work.
One thing that is holding almost everybody back right now is that this is such a monumental policy shift in how NASA is doing things that there is a whole bunch of "wait and see" to find out if existing contracts are going to be continued or not, or if a new group of folks are going to get funding. Still, from nearly everything I've seen in terms of the raw financials about aerospace companies and spaceflight companies in particular, the market for launch services has held steady and in fact is expanding somewhat even during this recession. If anything, the recession/depression for space related companies happened about a decade ago when Iridium and the "constellation" satellite market dried up and launch rates plumeted. Launch rates are higher now than any time since 9/11.
A starving engineer without a family and willing to work insane hours in a small start-up company can certainly find a job right now. I would compare the situation to what software developers have been dealing with for the past couple of decades, and that is indeed a different kind of work environment than has been the case with aerospace engineers in the past.
There was opposition to Constellation on nearly the day it was announced, from within the Bush administration itself. Indeed, there were so many problems with the design and concept that a substantial number of the NASA engineers working on Constellation set up an independent off-clock (they used the internet and worked from home in a fashion similar to an open source software project) to come up with the DIRECT launch vehicle that would have been in many ways much, much better than even the Constellation and would have maintained the shuttle infrastructure that everybody is complaining about now.
Constellation does not and never has been about preserving the shuttle infrastructure or for that matter even really about getting into space at all. It is a high-tech jobs program that benefits a relatively few political districts and states, but not really much more than that. By the time all is said and done, Constellation has been projected to cost more than $100 billion and perhaps even more... and that is just to get to the Moon. Mars would have been another $100+ and was projected to cost perhaps as much as a half trillion dollars. Shy of a fairy tale dream, that kind of funding is never going to happen for NASA.
Constellation was an unworkable program from the get go, and there were people who knew that back when it was proposed. With Mike Griffin no longer running NASA, Constellation's chief backer is no longer there to defend it.
Intuitively its going to be about 10 feet per story, to one sig fig. Or about 3 meters. So, figure around 150 feet, or around 45 meters.
As it turns out the Falcon 9 is 54 meters tall. That would be 18 stories tall according to your intuition. Your approximation was 20% off. But hey.. give of take three stories. What's that among friends?
Which is precisely why the complaint was issued, as there isn't a standard "metric" for whatever you can call a story. That is about the same as calling a foot to be the average size of the feet from the first 12 men that walk out of church on Sunday (one of the early legal definitions of a foot BTW). Instead, we have a foot to be precisely defined (by law) as 304.8 millimeters, which in turn is based on the distance of a certain number of wavelengths of a legally defined frequency of light.
Right now SpaceX is entirely being financed by private investors, and the IPO isn't something that is even being discussed. Yes, it is one of the financing options and it very likely will be the "exit strategy" for the investors once the company gets going, but don't hold your breath yet.
I think for Elon Musk, one IPO at a time is going to be what he is worrying about at the moment. Tesla Motors is poised to "go public" in the next six months to a year, and the necessary SEC paperwork is being filed to get that to happen. Originally Tesla was going to stay completely private but the business of making automobiles is chewing up enough money that a public offering is needed. If SpaceX is going to have an IPO, I would suspect that it would happen some time after Tesla has its IPO.
The Reuters article that you are citing here was likely to be some speculation and feeler from Elon Musk over which company to take to IPO first, debating if it should be Tesla or SpaceX. With the feud happening in Tesla with the dismissal of Martin Eberhard and the federal loans that are being used to develop the next model vehicle for Tesla (and a production vehicle already finished and in the portfolio), Tesla looks like a much better candidate for this kind of financing.
All that really matters from this perspective is that eventually SpaceX may go public in the future. If you want to be a small investor into a company like SpaceX, simply wait your time.
Is that necessarily a bad thing to have 30 companies the size of SpaceX who productively each perform roughly the same amount of work that the one bloated agency milking government largess to do the same thing?
Yes, I do realize that even comparing Constellation to the Falcon 9 isn't quite comparing the same thing, but it does help that SpaceX is starting from a clean sheet in terms of building up a new organization that is avoiding bureaucracy that even exists in more established private companies like Boeing or Northrop-Grumman. That is called competition, and I think it is a good thing.
From a public policy standpoint and from the perspective of a company trying to get started in the aerospace business, now is a fantastic time to be an investor in a new aerospace start-up company with thousands of very hungry engineers that have decades of experience. From what I've seen, it is actually a good time to be an aerospace engineering graduate, as there are job opportunities out there.... especially for entry-level engineers that may be willing to work for a relatively low salary to get their feet wet.
All this said, yeah it would suck to be an employee of one of the major spacecraft firms that are connected to either Shuttle parts production or to the Constellation program. This does disrupt lives, families, communities, and even whole states when substantial shifts occur. That is why it is important to really evaluate the programs carefully before you shut down something like Constellation or the Shuttle program. Still, just because some program or government project is going, does that mean we as taxpayers need to keep that program going just to employ these workers, even if whatever they are making can't possibly be used affordably even once it is completed?
I would recommend that your son try to pick up Scratch as an introductory programming language. It offers a GUI development environment and adding multi-media features such as animation and sound tracks is like breathing air in that language. He is probably interested in making his own "shot 'em up" type of game anyway, and that is a perfect language to get started with those kind of concepts.... and it teaches object oriented design right from the start as well.
There are also thousands of example programs to download from the main website, most of which are written by middle school/junior high kids as well. There is also a surprisingly large group of professional software developers like myself who are closet Scratch developers and have "pushed" the language to some interesting extremes. The language is also sandboxed in a way that keeps most of the major problem issues with software development away.
The only thing that I find lacking with the language is that it was purposely built to avoid any kind of access to external data storage devices like a hard drive (other than to load and save the programs themselves). I personally think this was a mistake, but it is a part of the philosophy of the language and something that allows it to be used in most public schools where it is being used.
I've been teaching my 7 year old how to program, and they think it is a really cool thing to do. Yes, it isn't something that easily comes to them, but it is something they are certainly capable of doing.
I don't know if you've seen it or not, but Scratch is a programming language that fairly easy to pick up and extremely powerful. 7 years old is still a little bit young even for this language, but not impossible, and certainly you don't have to be a pure genus to be using this language at that age. I'll admit, however, that even this language is more geared toward middle-school aged kids (10-14 years old) where kids that age seem to have the patience necessary to grok the concepts and be able to make something useful that goes beyond the simple examples.
It doesn't, however, take a college degree to learn at least the basics of computer programming. I started to write my first programs when I was 10, and that was several decades ago.
I'm curious about what kind of "bad habits" can be learned using modern dialects of BASIC today?
Then again, the current incarnation of Visual BASIC and other similar implementations of the language are such an abomination that you can hardly call them BASIC either. Well, I should note it isn't the earlier implementations of Visual BASIC, but rather when some C programmers got ahold of the language and threw out some of the exceptional power that BASIC holds over other languages.
I'll admit that the traditional "Dartmouth BASIC" can result in some unnecessarily complex spaghetti code, but then again it also shows who the sloppy programmers are when they try to do tricks to save a couple bytes of code that ultimately makes code maintenance almost impossible. I've always hated "clever" programmers anyway, and this can be a pitfall in any language. Then again, this version of BASIC was designed to be used on a line printer terminal.
I don't want to admit to how many or how large of a program I've written using that software editing system, but it is more than a few and some fairly large programs.
BTW, I don't consider Python to be today's version of BASIC. Instead, I would consider Scratch to be the true philosophical descendant of BASIC. If you've never tried this programming language out, you are missing out on a very unique experience, and something that is certainly going to influence software design over the next century or more. For my own children, this is the software development environment I've been using to introduce basic software development concepts, and it teaches object-oriented design and event interrupts right from the beginning. Who knew that an introductory language could introduce multi-threaded design so easily? My only major complaint is that it encourages the use of infinite loops not as something to avoid but even implements a specific construct to push its use.
Yes, Python is pretty good, but it isn't an introductory environment.
The one "danger" to learning assembly is that you quickly discover how lousy many of the current operating systems are in terms of not only resource efficiency (CPU, memory, and even data storage), but that a programmer in assembly can *gasp* actually do better than a typical compiler. Yes, I've heard the arguments that a compiler can do better than an average programmer.... which I think is pure bunk.
Some of the better "modern" assemblers also have features that make them work nearly as well as a high level language with memory allocation and "function" calling methods that strongly resemble what you might even find when writing in a language like C.
I do agree with you that re-learning a new assembly language is a bit of a pain. The largest problem with assembly is that you are so close to the hardware that you must understand the hardware itself and the processor architecture models. Of course if you are a competent software developer you should know this stuff anyway even if you use a high level language.
Of course knowing assembly also gives programmers an advantage when trying to reverse-engineer other people's software, but I digress at that point. Reverse engineering is not something typically taught at a typical university except as a "special topic" or some exceptionally enlightened professor willing to teach the topic.
I am glad to see that I'm not a voice alone in the wilderness here on this issue. I also have to agree that the best operating system that Microsoft has ever released was Windows 2000 Professional. It was a significant enough improvement (where it counted.... in the OS core with stability and improved app security and other real OS features, not these crazy and fancy GUI features) over Windows NT 4 and the other operating systems like the MS-DOS based OSs of Win 95, 98, and ME that it really drew a line in the sand in terms of a real substantive operating system to abandon previous offerings to that point in time.
Heck, I'm still using that operating system even now. My only problem is that vendors are no longer supporting this operating system on the philosophy that it is a dead operating system.... and they aren't even trying to support customers even when they have drivers and software explicitly for that OS.
Windows XP seems do be doing OK, but it doesn't really offer much new and in some ways loads up the OS with what I think are useless features I really don't want or need.
On top of everything else, I wish that the developers at Microsoft would also be consistent with their control functions. For users who hare to access the "control panel" to modify settings, it seems like each team of OS developers explicitly decides to completely rewrite the configuration code from scratch and change how to do basic settings.
As a Windows user from Windows 286 and a PC-DOS 1.0 user, I've seen more than my fair share of Microsoft operating systems. I've seen some real duds (MS-DOS 4.0 and Windows 2 are some classic examples) and I've seen some fairly good successes. How Microsoft overcame the duds to make something worthy of attention is to me a miracle in itself.
I'm sort of undecided on the latest offering, but at least willing to entertain the idea. Still, it has much of the baggage from Vista and XP that I love to hate.
I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.
Keep in mind that the first settlement to Los Angeles had the entire settlement wiped out.... due to starvation and a lack of water. I'm not talking a few people dying of disease, but that the place is simply inhospitable for even a small group of people to live there.... at least live there without massive public works and technology that brings in supplies and materials for you to live there. Los Angeles in particular is a prime example of what technology can do to help bring in resources that turns an inhospitable area into not only a place to live but to thrive and for population to explode.
The one semi-good thing is that Los Angeles can survive on 19th Century technologies (canals, aquaducts, railroads, etc.) if it absolutely needed to happen. I couldn't say the same thing about a similar sized city on the Moon or Mars, but Los Angeles is certainly "proof" that you can sustain a large population in a difficult to live-in climate. It also does help that the general climate there is relatively mild and that people enjoy living there simply because of its location, forgetting that LA is mostly a desert between some mountains. If you need any substantial "proof", try to find the Los Angeles River. It has been made fun of in countless movies, and is about as artificial as the rest of the city too. In the mid-west, it would be a brook that might not even have a name.
I doubt the artist, sculptor or whatever was a "government employee" of any sort or that the memorial was designed as a work-for-hire. It was almost certainly designed independently and the design sold without including the rights. This is how nearly every memorial, sculpture or art piece on public land is done.
Of course this is why this particular issue is in court, to decide these issues. As for the status as a government employee, that is entirely relative and subjective, where the line between a contractor and an employee is blurry and ill defined. Much of that has many thanks to the computer industry who has caused that blurring to happen, but others have been doing that too.
So, did this particular artist produce this design completely on his own, without any other input from the group that put the monument proposal together? Is it unique and only found at this one location, or is it also found in many other locations as well (aka several "copies" were or are planned to be made elsewhere)? Where did it say that the monument was sold without rights? Does that include to government entities?
All of this is shooting off the hip and presuming things that may or may not be the case. Apparently this artist did think that he retained the artistic copyright to this monument, and that is why he went to court. His case was good enough that he was able to convince a couple appellate court judges that his case had merit to overturn a lower court decision.
As for if it was groundbreaking or genuinely original.... so what? That is not the legal point of contention here. Even if it was just a minor modification of Michelangelo's David, it still qualifies as something which can be protected under copyright. The real issue is the ownership of this monument by the government and if this particular artist has already been compensated or if additional compensation should happen when copies or derivative works based on this work of art are made.
Deutsche Post is the German post office. Germany may be playing fiscal games with it such as how the U.S. government plays around with the Federal Reserve, Fredie Mac, and other quasi-government agencies, but it is essentially an organ of the German government. Yes, I realize it has been "privatized" as some government functions have been in Europe, but it is the same organization that functions and has functioned like the USPS in the USA.
As for General Motors and Goldman-Sachs as agencies of the U.S. federal government.... I'd argue that they are, in fact, enjoying such status too. It has been suggested that the current ruckus over the Toyota recalls is in part due to economic competition and strategy to take out a competitor. I also don't think that the government should be owning businesses of this nature either and it was a bad move to get them under government control.
As for if the USPS could become privatized like Deutsche Post is currently being operated.... that is something that certainly can be debated. Under the current presidential administration, that doesn't seem to be even a remote glimmer of a possibility, however.
This is not a limitation of fair use. Fair use normally applies to noncommercial, private use. The US Postal service is not using as such. Their use is both commercial and public. So anyone who wants to take a picture of the statues is not violating rights. Selling the pictures for profit is violating rights.
While noncommercial and private use of copyrighted material is something for courts to take into consideration and is a part of the formal legal code for fair-use, it is possible to apply fair-use doctrine to items which are used in commercial and for-profit applications.
This includes mixing fair-use content with "free-license" content like the GFDL, GPL, and CC-by-SA licenses that also permit commercial reproduction.
The question here is if the sculpture is something which is in the public domain, having been purchased by and used by the federal government on government land (perhaps considered a "donation" to the government... depending on how the funds for it were raised) or if the original artist retained copyright status for this particular work of art. That is the real issue, and something which can be ruled upon in a very narrow way that doesn't grossly impact the copyright status of other 3-D works of art.
Where this becomes groundbreaking is for a monument placed upon federal land and if the courts rule that such public monuments can have their copyright status retained by the original artist unless such rights are explicitly relinquished by that artist by some contract or some other means of recognition of that fact.
Yes, this is quite a bit different than some rapper "sampling" the music or performance from another artist, unless the sampling was done of the work performed by say the U.S. Marine Corps Band or some other group of government employees. Such performances are usually considered to be in the public domain as they are government employees.
If I take a photo of say the city lights of New York, and I have it printed as a calendar, poster, or postcard, I would then be liable to the City of New York, the owners of every building included, the manufacturers of the lights used, and countless others. It may seem silly, but that's the case here. I know buildings, to some degree, are exempt from this, but I believe there was a story a few years ago of someone photographing the Sears Tower, and they were forbidden from doing it because they didn't have permission of the building owners for reproduction rights.
One thing that does protect you on cityscapes is that most mass-produced items are not considered "works of art" and you are free to take photographs of them. Buildings themselves are interesting, as it can be considered a 3-D sculpture and as such a sort of work of art... explicitly covered in the U.S. copyright code and explained in detail.
Automotive design is certainly something interesting in terms of its copyright status.
To me, the #1 problem with all of this is the lack of copyright registration. In the past, an author or artist had to take explicit steps to copyright their works and register that copyright with the government for protection.... sort of how a patent works now. Registration still can happen and is a good idea if you want to enforce copyright, but it is not longer necessary to enforce copyright.
In all of the cases above, I wonder if either the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower.... don't get me started there), the Ford vehicles, or this particular sculpture would ever have had their copyright registered. All it would take to register that copyright is to take a few photographs and file them with the library of congress, so it isn't really an undue burden, but it does take some extra effort. I don't think that until the groups involved had photographs taken and used on a wide basis would they have even bothered in the first place.
It wasn't done by the US government, it was done for the US government.
And for what it's worth, the government tries to claim copyrights on public legal documents and the like all the time, it's bull.
No, the "government" doesn't try to claim copyright on public legal documents. There have been some situations such as the National Electrical Code, which is published by a private organization, which has in turn been codified in the form of law that has had copyright asserted.... but that is a different situation entirely. State governments also assert copyright on some documents and works of art... but that is the state government and not the federal government.
As for the distinction of a work of art done by or for the government.... that is about as weak of an argument as you can make. About the only difference I can see is if you are salaried or not... aka are you on the payroll of the government or do you receive the money in a lump sum? The distinction between an employee and a contractor is rather fuzzy, and to use this excuse as being a contractor instead of an employee as an end-run around the U.S. copyright laws on the public domain status of works of art by government employees is something the courts should rule as essentially the same thing.
Compensation was given to this sculptor for making this work of art, and was paid by the government. As to if that artist was paid sufficient money for that sculpture, that is something which can be debated. It is this issue that is the sticking point, and it sounds to me that this artist is complaining that he didn't get enough money for what he made in this case.
The government commissioned the work of art, in this case the sculpture itself, and then had another branch of that same government take a picture of that work of art for use in its own operations.
It isn't quite so cut and dried as it would seem. The question is if that sculptor was acting as an "employee" of the government via the contract to requisition the public monument in the first place. If he was an employee, that would be a "work for hire" and there would be no copyright as it would simply be in the public domain like all other works of art by government employees. Photographs taken by NASA astronauts, for example, are in the public domain because of this principle. ESA photographs, on the other hand, aren't covered by this same principle because the EU doesn't automatically grant public domain status to such photographs.
BTW, it is a mistaken notion that fair-use doesn't apply to commercial publishers either. You can make money as a for-profit commercial publisher (aka like the USPS selling stamps, or somebody making a coffee table picture book to give another example) with fair-use photographs. It must fit the fair-use criteria, which isn't trivial, but it can be done. The profit or lack thereof from the organization is only one of several factors that goes into determining the fair-use status of a copyrighted work and how it is used.
One of the most glaring problems with copyright law is the current copyright ownership by state and local governments.
IMHO, all government organizations, at least in the USA, should have works of art owned by a government entity as being in the public domain. State's rights issues don't even apply here as it is the federal government that has exclusive constitutional authority in terms of copyright granting authority in the first place.... 1st article of the constitution no less.
Some states like California have also formalized this sentiment and have made all works of art owned by that particular state government to be in the public domain just as the federal government has through legislation. As for why more states don't do that is something that doesn't make too much sense to me.
Pfff, any excuse will do. USPS is expensive, inefficient and unreliable compared to UPS, Fed Ex and DHL.
An interesting little side note here: DHL is actually a subsidiary of the German post office. That is correct, DHL employees actually work for the German government, even if it is operated as a for-profit business.
As for comparing the efficiency of the American government vs. the German government.... that is certainly something that could be a bit of an interesting discussion in its own right.
It wasn't the U.S. federal government who paid the start-up expenses for the USPS in this case.... it was the British government instead, when Benjamin Franklin became the first American postmaster-general in North America.
Otherwise, it has been a make a little lose a little proposition for the past nearly 300 years, and one of the early forms of revenue for the American Republic after the revolution of the 18th Century.
I'd say that those start-up costs have been amortized quite some time ago. How many 18th Century organizations are you familiar with that are still operational today?