Considering that the Ares/Constellation program has already spent about $50 billion and is projected to have spent another $50 billion before somebody new steps on the Moon, I'd have to say that the $20 billion is pie in the sky and a generous offer for a government operation.
That said, if instead NASA offered $20 billion as a sort of X-Prize type contest for the first vehicle back to the Moon and an additional $1 billion per return trip (up to say 10 trips)... and keeping the original Constellation 6-passenger requirement (5 on the surface in a lander).... you would find a whole bunch of people that would be takers on the idea. Mars might be a little harder, but not too much for a similar amount of money.
Too bad that would never happen, and several times that potential prize is going to be spent on a bureaucratic black hole that will likely not go anywhere in the first place.
Most of the Russian "half" (a little less than half now) of the ISS was originally built to be added onto the original MIR spacecraft in the first place. Believe it or not, some of it was built with Soviet funds back in the good old days.
I have heard some discussion that perhaps the Russians will take their modules from the ISS and use them as a core to a completely new space station.... essentially MIR-II. If that is the case, I wish the Russian Republic luck and success in the future. An American partner like the ones supposedly running this program deserve no better.
But did you notice the last line in TFA? I found it a bit chilling: "Give it to China. Let them support the damn thing."
Now I could be coming across as overly paranoid here, but the Chinese Government has its own agenda (a fact that is typically overlooked by the West as it scrambles slavishly for every trade dollar it can scavenge) and the record amply shows that does not necessarily include the welfare of anyone else. They certainly don't feel the need to recognise anyone else's laws, as we can see from the current fiasco over the detention of an Australian company executive when they didn't get the iron ore deal they wanted.
Handing them something like the ISS seems incredbly stupid to me.
While the typical American citizen has generally stayed aloof in terms of their support for NASA and the ISS, I think this is one of those thing that is going to cause ordinary folks to write... often for the first time... to their respective congressmen and demand that something be done. To say that the public will not get a say in this matter is to completely ignore that America is a representative republic.
Then again, you may be onto something that America is just a titular republic with an oligarchy represented by the "New World Order" that actually controls everything. If so, opinions don't matter anyway and this is just a sport to see what will happen next. I'll leave that to the conspiracy theory nuts to take it further.
This said, handing the thing over to the Chinese is the last thing that will happen. Sometimes I don't know where folks like a supposedly respectable newspaper like the "Washington Post" comes up with quotes like this, nor why a reporter who even remotely claims journalistic integrity would even put something like that into an article of this nature. Not only will such a thing never happen, but the individual being quoted has no more say on what is going to happen than you or I. Likely to have ultimately even less of an impact on the future of the ISS based solely on a stupid and asinine comment of that nature which is only intended to provide shock value.
The Chinese have made repeated requests to join into the consortium of nations that have contributed to the ISS, and there may be some rationale for including them in the mix... but that doesn't mean we should simply hand the whole thing over to them. Why both Russia and the USA don't want them involved (the key decision makers if you have to ask) is another matter, and it should be noted that the Chinese haven't even been given permission to board as a temporary guest. Simply put, if they aren't made an ISS partner, they never will get access to the ISS.
It would be a real stretch for Jimmy Wales to be held as a defendant in this situation. He is but one member of the board of trustees, and not even the chair any more. Liability would have to be proven, and Wales has the additional protection of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides for protections for ISPs (which arguably the Wikimedia Foundation would act as in this case) as a common carrier. Presumably a take-down notice can be made to the WMF, and the user (meaning anybody using the service) can demand that the information be restored.... leaving the issue to be settled in court.
That formal policy on the part of the WMF might show cause.... it wouldn't be an easy thing to prove even under English law. A judge with common sense would throw out any sort of case against Jimmy Wales for a good reason.
UK law in this area is still iffy. Which is going to be a problem here.
That this involves potentially an American defendant who performed all said acts on U.S. soil and that the servers that are holding the images (the Wikimedia servers) are also located in the USA is another fly in the ointment. IF extradition for a civil lawsuit can be made in this case, and if English law applies as well, there may be an attempt to get this tried in an English court. As to what possible action can be done even assuming a positive verdict... or even a default judgment assuming the defendant refuses to even recognize English law in this case... can be pure speculation.
At best, all that has happened is that this individual should avoid going to England in the near future. Generally that isn't a hard thing to do if you are an American.
Let's start at the top. You think there is justification for having no law prohibiting murder?
Interesting point. If you happen to have a remote "drone" that has the capability of firing a missile or causing a death, and happen to be piloting this aircraft in, say, Miami Florida, and you kill somebody in London (England... to note a distinction to the clueless), is the person guilty of murder?
I'd have to say, yes. The real question is who have jurisdiction on the matter. Is it Florida law or English law that prevails here for prosecution? I don't think the answer is as clear-cut as everybody would have you believe it to be.
Look at NASA - they take a huge volume of photographs (also paid for with tax dollars) which are all in the public domain!
The issue with NASA is something completely different. By statutory law and common law practices of U.S. courts, all content produced by U.S. Government employees while performing official job duties is considered to be in the public domain. There are some Ansel Adams photographs, for example, that were done as a work for hire by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) (meaning that Mr. Adams was a government employee for a short period of time) and as a result this sub-set of some incredibly awesome photos by a genuine master are now in the public domain. They are worth trying to look up and even print out with as high of quality printing medium that you can find.
This has nothing to do with the artistic value of the content, of which some U.S. government content (like the Earthrise photo... to name just one) can be genuinely considered artistic and even groundbreaking. Most of it is boring as heck, such as the 1860 U.S. Census data for Dekalb County, Iowa or Senate hearings on the 1956 appropriation bill for the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Is the museum claiming copyright on the individual photographs or on the collection as a whole? It's long since been established that images which can individually not be copyrighted, can be copyrighted as part of a collection. The originality required for copyright lies within establishing the collection. The individual images from such a collection may still be freely copied, but one cannot take the entire collection and present them to the public as a singular collection.
It's kind of like how copyright can protect collections of otherwise public data such as telephone books.
The assertion of copyright is on the photographs themselves, not the paintings. The issue with the "collection" is interesting, but I believe it to be moot in this case, as the collection is not presented as a singular collection, but rather a few examples of a great many more similar kinds of photos from many other museums in many other cities and locations around the world.
This certainly is a very weak point to stand on... and IMHO it would be in the interest of a group like the EFF (or even the Wikimedia Foundation directly) to pick up the baton in this case and fight back to establish legal precedence in this situation with competent lawyers familiar with international copyright issues. The enabling law here is the Berne Convention (not just UK or US law) and perhaps to a lesser degree the U.S. Copyright code (with the Wikimedia servers in the USA).
There would be money riding on both sides of this legal fight, so it would be in the interests of both parties to see to it that this case come to some kind of formal conclusion.
Ahem...your employer definitely has a legitimate need for that information since they're taking money out of your paycheck to pay your Social Security. You won't get a job without an SSN, so write "N/A" all you like - makes the job market larger for the rest of us.
The SSN should not be on the employment application.... which was the point. Once you have been hired and are filling things out like I-9 documention and the W-4 forms that are explicitly for taxation purposes would the information have to actually be disclosed to an employer. Until then, the only legitimate purpose of asking for the SSN would be to use it for identification purposes... or to do things like performing a credit check on a future employee without their consent.
Still, it is something that would make you stick out as a potential troublemaker when applying for a job, and something that may be used as rationale for not hiring a potential candidate... even if demanding the information is illegal and could land the potential employer in legal trouble if a consistent pattern of turning down applications was based on this criteria.
Social Security "chose" nothing, its an elected congress that passes these rules.
That isn't entirely true. The Social Security Administration (as political appointees on the top tier, but this includes career civil employees as well) often does involve itself in legislative matters that involve that agency. This is true of all governmental bodies... just watch how crowded city hall gets when pay schedules for police or fire fighters is being discussed.
The point is that many of the changes to expand the scope and range of SSNs happened with not just the consultation of SSA employees, but that many of those suggestions came from that organization as well. Not all of them, and yes some congressmen were involved with these decisions, but they can't be completely absolved from this discussion either.
Well yes. There certainly is a chilling effect. You can't publicly make these tools and try to sell them. Which is what his employer was doing. But everyone knew this, long before the DMCA came into effect. It really does nothing to change the "scene", and that's where the cracks come from.
Why not? Where the tools were being made and sold (the Russian Republic.... not even in US jurisdiction or the jurisdiction of the court under question) the "tools" were perfectly legal.
In this case it was also about academic freedom and being able to make commentary about perhaps a sensitive subject to peers who are engaged in similar research (in this case cryptology). Ultimately what happened was that this person was arrested purely because of his speech, in an academic forum no less, but on the grounds of violations of the DMCA.
This legal issue, together with 1st amendment conflicts and other similar problems with the DMCA, still hasn't been completely resolved in a legal sense, nor has SCOTUS had their crack at trying to form an opinion on the topic either. The point here really is that this law continues to be a potential sword to hang over the heads of software developers that might seem to piss off a U.S. Attorney... for whatever reason that may be.
BTW, you asked if anybody had been prosecuted, and the answer was given to the affirmative. It doesn't matter if eventually the DOJ was embarrassed to the point of dropping charges in this case, it still was used and can be used in a heavy handed manner as demonstrated with this example.
Camp Williams is a big place, and it should be noted that about two-thirds of Utah is federal property of one sort or another (including quite a bit of land around Camp Williams). Quite a bit of the nearby property is even formally controlled by the Department of Defense, most of which is usually considered to be otherwise wilderness.
What I'm trying to say here is that by saying something is located at Utah's Camp Williams is about like saying a secret military installation is located in New England. It covers about the same amount of territory with other similar "restricted" territory that you must get military permission to enter. The 9/11 hijackers would have run out of fuel over the Great Salt Lake trying to find the place.
You are mistaken. You are operating under the assumption that we're a nation of laws.
I have to assume that you are:
1) American 2) Have never lived for substantial periods of time somewhere other than in North America (and possibly the more stable parts of Europe)
I say this because in spite of all of the problems that the USA has, and the inward naval gazing that often seems to happen from time to time like this article, the USA is a nation of laws that for the most part seem to work, where most people generally are treated equally in the law. Also, most law enforcement people that I've met, in spite of some abusive individuals who do cross the line from time to time, generally are professionals in the true sense of the word and stay within the rules they are given.
If you lived somewhere else and had to experience watching a guy with a sub-machine gun walk next to you and wonder if you are going to live until tomorrow... you might have a very different attitude about what a nation of laws really could be like. Worse yet, experiencing a general strike (where the citizens go on strike against the government.... not a pretty thing to behold) is something that I hope to never be in again for as long as I live. Such an event wouldn't even begin to be considered by the average U.S. citizen.
We, as American citizens (I am an American) do have control over our government and can stop many of these abuses from happening. It is, however, why elections matter and why you need to get involved politically if you have concerns about these problems. By refusing to be involved, you are letting those who are left to take the reins and ignore your apathy.
Ha! That's the first thing I thought of -- LDS linguists as intelligence moles at the NSA, able (required?) to report back to the LDS leadership council what they find.
If only the LDS Church were that efficient. BTW, I am curious about what "LDS leadership council" you are referring to here? The one headed by Warren Jeffs? I thought so.
That is entirely incorrect. The US makes no requests or demands with regards to other citizenships, in fact policy is to pretend that they don't exist.
The U.S. government doesn't care about citizenship in other countries... if you are visiting (for the most part). Having somewhat recently been with my brother-in-law when he became a naturalized citizen, I know for a fact that you have to renounce your ties including citizenship to any other country in order to be granted U.S. citizenship. This also includes any titles of nobility and resigning from official positions in another government that may compromise your role as a citizen.
Simply put, your are flat out and 100% wrong with your assertion here, and it is not based on any kind of knowledge of U.S. immigration policy. As to what other countries may do in terms of asserting citizenship rights on what they perceive to be their citizens, that is another story.
One of the problems with the suggestion of moving through the galactic plane being a major issue is that the Sun is currently very close to the main galactic plane at the moment. That is something that has to be explained if you want to use this concept to prove or disprove a hypothesis regarding the orbit our solar system takes through the galaxy.
What I would be curious about is the "CO2 data" that they are using, and the assumption that global temperatures have a direct correlation to this substance, not to mention the reliability of the measurement process over the scale of billions of years to calculate what levels of this gas were through more than just a couple of galactic years. Yes, I know there are attempts to measure global temperatures over time using the geologic record, but it seems to me that both the CO2 measurements as well as measurements of the orbit of the solar system have such huge margins of error that doing a statistical comparison of the two could give you virtually any kind of conclusion that you want.
I have to assume that this paper addresses these issues in some detail (I would love to read the original paper).
One other thing that struck me, in looking at the supposed solar system orbit that they plotted in this paper, is if they have accounted for the fact that the galaxy is a dynamic and not a static place? They calculated the path of the Sun over apparently three galactic years, but at the same time all of the objects that they used for measuring protuberance of the orbit are also moving in their own galactic orbits. If there is a model that they were able to develop that shows the galactic evolution of the Milky Way over the past 500 million years. Seriously, I had no idea that stellar parallax measurements (to accurately plot the positions of stars) were so accurate and have been for long enough to not only get a good fix on the position of a large number of stars in the Milky Way to be able to also plot the apparent trajectories of this many stars and galactic nebulae. That is some trick, and such a model would have a great many other uses besides trying to prove anthropogenic global warming (or disproving an alternative hypothesis).
My understanding was that stellar parallax measurements were only good to about 1 or 2 significant digits and getting the order of magnitude down. That may have improved with the Hubble and some other star surveys with really accurate telescopes, but I don't think it is too much better than that.
This may be true for US citizens, but for UK ones, the whole EU is a free reign, they can go and live in the country, and get a job there for many years, and then become a citizen simply by pointing out they've been there for a long time.
I happen to know many UK citizens in the USA right now.... several that even still have British passports for various reasons. Still, if it is emmigration to North America from the UK that you are looking for, Canada (or so I've been told) is a much easier to get into and has much less red tape.
Don't even get me started with Canadians living in the USA.... prior to 9/11 you wouldn't have even known that your neighbor was Canadian unless you explicitly asked, and getting the answer that they were from casual conversation would get the same reaction as saying they were from Texas or New York. Most Americans considered Canada to be merely another state that figured out a cute trick to avoid paying taxes to Washington, DC.
The point being here is that somebody deliberately trying to move to the USA could go through Canada if they are from one of the commonwealth countries, although times are changing along those lines and I will admit that movement within the EU is now much easier than movement within the former British Empire of old (aka the "Commonwealth" countries). It still is a unique situation for people from the UK that their status as both a EU country and ties to their former colonies give many options if you want to move on and go somewhere else because you don't like the political philosophies that have crept into your local government, and are trying to "vote with your feet".
This is, unfortunately, not something as easily done in America once you get here, and the number of options for emmigration are practically none once you get an American passport.
If there is ever going to be a "replacement" for the LHC... it would have to be something like a particle accelerator that would go around the equator (or something equivalent) around the Moon. Condemning that much real estate here on the Earth would simply put too much people out... even in some place like Texas (where the SCSC was supposed to be built).
There are some unique scientific endeavors that would be almost perfectly suited for being done on the Moon. Most significant off the top of my head is to put a large astronomy radio telescope somewhere on the "dark" side of the Moon where it continuously faces away from the Earth. Using the bulk mass of the Moon as a giant shield to radio frequencies seems like a nearly ideal use of the place. This is something that couldn't even be done on Phobos without at least noting the Earth when it comes into "view". Deep, and I mean "DEEP" space probes as a part of a larger Deep-Space Network (or the "interplanetary internet" as an alternative) using nodes on the Moon would be of similar value... where faint signals could be identified and separated from those coming from the Earth. Even satellites in GEOS wouldn't be nearly as effective.
Also, almost any oxygen reducing process that at least can be enhanced by having *some* gravity is useful to be done on the Moon. I would venture to guess that some metalurgy could happen on the Moon and be more effective than being done on the Earth.... including having to ship it back to the Earth. The vacuum you can get for "free" on the Moon is far more effective than the best laboratory vacuums you can get on the Earth.
Along a similar vein, a rocket propulsion laboratory on the Moon would also be something worth perhaps the cost and expense of getting the personnel and technical equipment necessary to perform the task. Measuring ISP and rocket performance in a vacuum on the Earth is a real pain in the behind... and often major assumptions and mistakes are made from when those tests are performed. Firing up the rockets on a test stand that is by definition in a vacuum could be something quite interesting... without having to worry about all of the other plumbing that comes from vacuum chambers here on the Earth doing similar kinds of tests. This may require the cost of getting to the Moon to be reduced an order of magnitude or more to be cost effective, but there certainly would be a point that having a lunar laboratory for stuff like this could be justified... for pure economic reasons.
I will say that the British government in the 18th Century did seemingly piss off some of the worst kinds of people (from a public relations viewpoint): Taverns, Tea Houses, and Newspaper Publishers. When referring to tea houses, think of your local Starbucks and you get a kind of idea of how common they were in the 18th Century American Colonies of Brittan.
Still, I'd have to agree with you on calling the above AC poster on his B.S. There certainly was much more involved than a few tea merchants... and the involvement fiscally (and militarily) by the French certainly had a much stronger impact than anything the tea merchants of Venice may have had on American society.
The stellar spectrum would only tell you what is present in both the outer layers of the star and the "atmosphere" that surrounds the star.
We can identify the elements of the Sun in this fashion, where both incandescent gasses (glowing because they are hot) and absorption of the light takes place. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_analysis
What we do know, however, is that Betelgeuse is no longer a main sequence star on the HR Diagram and is clearly a dying star. The question here is to determine how far along the path of stellar core depletion has taken place, and if tertiary fusion reactions beyond the carbon burning is happening. As each successive element "ignites" on the way to an iron core, the star becomes increasingly hotter in its core.
That is where knowing the "color" of the star is useful, but it won't give away the details of the interior in such an elegant fashion. Nice try, however.
If you carefully plot this star on the HR diagram and notice a substantial change over time, now that would be something worth paying attention to, and could be a warning that the star is about to go supernova. That is in part what the New Scientist article is trying to describe... and that the star is close enough that high resolution telescopes can pick out details beyond treating the star like a point-source of light, so we can glean a little more information than similar stars that are much more distant.
I can imagine several ways to work around this "issue" through IP packet forwarding and other related methods to get around this sort of blocking and fee schedule. I would imagine that to do this would result in legal actions of various sorts and regulating how you can access stuff like this through "terms of service" agreements that are draconian.
The big issue here... and hit squarely on with the original/. posting here... is that this is a business model for getting somebody to pay for content. They are certainly free to try different business models, but IMHO it is flat-out wrong for the government to guarantee that a particular business model will work. If folks can find a way to work around this and ensure that this particular business model isn't profitable, it shouldn't be tried.
I could say the same thing about P2P networks, and in a funny way it is. Forwarding content of this nature would merely be another "service" provided by P2P networks, as just one more example of how this could be worked around. Disney is trying to find a technological solution to a social problem... which never works in the first place.
First of all, California has long been on the forefront to creating "open source" textbooks. See The California Open Source Textbook Project for more details, and it is something at least worth looking at. This is a several year old effort, so it isn't really newsworthy except in context with a story like this. Educators are trying... and fighting an uphill battle in this regard. But the effort is there.
Also, California has long been their own author of textbooks as well, where nearly every textbook used in the California public school system has been created for the schools in that state.
I'd agree with you, however, that the licensing costs and the publisher's money getting flung around the curriculum review board on the state level are things that should be eliminated. The amount of lobbying money dumped each year just on the state officials in California deciding what new textbooks should be adopted is enough to buy several new print on demand machines that could put a new edition of every text book in the hands each student each year.
If you get books once in a decade wouldn't it be nice to be able to have a new book every year?
Not particularly. Mathematics at the high school level has not changed much in the last 100 years. New books serve basically two purposes: they include new pedagogical ideas (sometimes good, sometimes bad), and they contain new problem sets. In terms of pedagogy, I can get the same information by attending in-service and university classes.
I have seen a change in mathematics over the past couple of decades.... both from the perspective of pushing those students who excel to harder levels of mathematics and improved advance placement curriculum to doing stuff on the middle school level that was previously only done in high schools (and correspondingly tougher content in high school). Yes, this is subtle and not quite so obvious, but it is there.
On the whole, the introduction of computers and advanced calculators (heck, just calculators instead of slide rules) has also made a huge impact in terms of how the material in most textbooks has been presented. Much more emphasis has been placed on understanding the processes of how to come up with the answers than trying to necessarily become human computers (an actual career path before the 1940's). If you grabbed a high school textbook from the 1920's, you would note some substantial differences between what is presented there vs. what is currently taught. Yeah, you might lament that some theory and practice from back then is lost, but I think you might be surprised.
All this said, most of the major differences over the past 30 years or so have been with style over substance in terms of the textbook industry. Color printing has become incredibly cheap (compared to 40 years ago) where every page of modern textbooks has gone through a 4-color printing process. With this, for mathematical textbooks, is increased use of multi-colored graphs and charts, textbooks that have a much more free-flowing form (math textbooks from the 1920's were incredibly terse and from a modern perspective very difficult to read), and include "politically correct" commentaries that are often biographies of minorities and things that might even be called social studies that are found in the middle of a math textbook.
Do I think that all of this change has been for the better? No. I do think some things have been watered down and lost over the last century. But a textbook printed 100 years ago certainly wouldn't work in today's education market based on the goals of current school boards and state standards of curriculum.
BTW, I do agree with you on the general premise that most mathematical textbooks don't need to be updated nearly so often as the publishers try to cram down a new edition, and that the basic concepts of mathematics are timeless and aren't going to be changed on the high school level due to new discoveries by full time mathematical researchers (they do exist). Some minor tweaks to high school mathematical curricula might include increased emphasis on discrete mathematics, set and graph theory, but that is something you could debate in general and isn't necessarily going to be something that has to be changed every year.
If just losing editing rights is as bad as Nazi prosecution then by comparison other forms of prosecution must be like killing kittens with sledgehammers.
I hate to be a grammar nazi here, but I think the word you were looking for was persecution not prosecution
Although, I suppose there are many district attorneys and other government lawyers that can prosecute somebody to death.... and I suppose that Nazi prosecutors often led to capital punishment as well, and prosecutors can persecute based on several concepts of bigotry.
BTW, there were criminals in Nazi Germany during the 1940's that under the laws of most countries would be considered to be wrongful behavior deserving punishment of some variety. The differences is that much of the Nazi prosecution also involved prosecuting innocent people as well, and a government that didn't care (too much) if the innocent were found guilty. Not that that happens today in America.
If what the U.S. Air Force is does is restricted only to the Defense Mapping Agency, I guess I live in a different universe than you do. It goes much more beyond that.
As for the NRO, yes, I'm willing to admit it is its own beast. No, that isn't the Air Force space program either.
I'll also admit that most of what goes on in the Department of Defense is mostly classified, even though quite a bit of it is related to intelligence gathering equipment and assets. That, of course, is mostly why the money spent on space related activities there is ignored, as it is small potatoes compared to the rest of the budget of the DoD.
BTW, you also have NOAA that has a rather significant (including jurisdictional authority) presence in space, not to mention the Department of Agriculture and other federal departments/agencies including the Department of Interior. Yeah, it depends on what "American space program" you really are talking about, and NASA is but one of many that put stuff into space.
NASA is the one that gets all the credit, good or ill, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that the Ares/Constellation program has already spent about $50 billion and is projected to have spent another $50 billion before somebody new steps on the Moon, I'd have to say that the $20 billion is pie in the sky and a generous offer for a government operation.
That said, if instead NASA offered $20 billion as a sort of X-Prize type contest for the first vehicle back to the Moon and an additional $1 billion per return trip (up to say 10 trips)... and keeping the original Constellation 6-passenger requirement (5 on the surface in a lander).... you would find a whole bunch of people that would be takers on the idea. Mars might be a little harder, but not too much for a similar amount of money.
Too bad that would never happen, and several times that potential prize is going to be spent on a bureaucratic black hole that will likely not go anywhere in the first place.
Most of the Russian "half" (a little less than half now) of the ISS was originally built to be added onto the original MIR spacecraft in the first place. Believe it or not, some of it was built with Soviet funds back in the good old days.
I have heard some discussion that perhaps the Russians will take their modules from the ISS and use them as a core to a completely new space station.... essentially MIR-II. If that is the case, I wish the Russian Republic luck and success in the future. An American partner like the ones supposedly running this program deserve no better.
I doubt if the public will get a say in it.
But did you notice the last line in TFA? I found it a bit chilling: "Give it to China. Let them support the damn thing."
Now I could be coming across as overly paranoid here, but the Chinese Government has its own agenda (a fact that is typically overlooked by the West as it scrambles slavishly for every trade dollar it can scavenge) and the record amply shows that does not necessarily include the welfare of anyone else. They certainly don't feel the need to recognise anyone else's laws, as we can see from the current fiasco over the detention of an Australian company executive when they didn't get the iron ore deal they wanted.
Handing them something like the ISS seems incredbly stupid to me.
While the typical American citizen has generally stayed aloof in terms of their support for NASA and the ISS, I think this is one of those thing that is going to cause ordinary folks to write... often for the first time... to their respective congressmen and demand that something be done. To say that the public will not get a say in this matter is to completely ignore that America is a representative republic.
Then again, you may be onto something that America is just a titular republic with an oligarchy represented by the "New World Order" that actually controls everything. If so, opinions don't matter anyway and this is just a sport to see what will happen next. I'll leave that to the conspiracy theory nuts to take it further.
This said, handing the thing over to the Chinese is the last thing that will happen. Sometimes I don't know where folks like a supposedly respectable newspaper like the "Washington Post" comes up with quotes like this, nor why a reporter who even remotely claims journalistic integrity would even put something like that into an article of this nature. Not only will such a thing never happen, but the individual being quoted has no more say on what is going to happen than you or I. Likely to have ultimately even less of an impact on the future of the ISS based solely on a stupid and asinine comment of that nature which is only intended to provide shock value.
The Chinese have made repeated requests to join into the consortium of nations that have contributed to the ISS, and there may be some rationale for including them in the mix... but that doesn't mean we should simply hand the whole thing over to them. Why both Russia and the USA don't want them involved (the key decision makers if you have to ask) is another matter, and it should be noted that the Chinese haven't even been given permission to board as a temporary guest. Simply put, if they aren't made an ISS partner, they never will get access to the ISS.
It would be a real stretch for Jimmy Wales to be held as a defendant in this situation. He is but one member of the board of trustees, and not even the chair any more. Liability would have to be proven, and Wales has the additional protection of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides for protections for ISPs (which arguably the Wikimedia Foundation would act as in this case) as a common carrier. Presumably a take-down notice can be made to the WMF, and the user (meaning anybody using the service) can demand that the information be restored.... leaving the issue to be settled in court.
That formal policy on the part of the WMF might show cause.... it wouldn't be an easy thing to prove even under English law. A judge with common sense would throw out any sort of case against Jimmy Wales for a good reason.
UK law in this area is still iffy. Which is going to be a problem here.
That this involves potentially an American defendant who performed all said acts on U.S. soil and that the servers that are holding the images (the Wikimedia servers) are also located in the USA is another fly in the ointment. IF extradition for a civil lawsuit can be made in this case, and if English law applies as well, there may be an attempt to get this tried in an English court. As to what possible action can be done even assuming a positive verdict... or even a default judgment assuming the defendant refuses to even recognize English law in this case... can be pure speculation.
At best, all that has happened is that this individual should avoid going to England in the near future. Generally that isn't a hard thing to do if you are an American.
Let's start at the top. You think there is justification for having no law prohibiting murder?
Interesting point. If you happen to have a remote "drone" that has the capability of firing a missile or causing a death, and happen to be piloting this aircraft in, say, Miami Florida, and you kill somebody in London (England... to note a distinction to the clueless), is the person guilty of murder?
I'd have to say, yes. The real question is who have jurisdiction on the matter. Is it Florida law or English law that prevails here for prosecution? I don't think the answer is as clear-cut as everybody would have you believe it to be.
Look at NASA - they take a huge volume of photographs (also paid for with tax dollars) which are all in the public domain!
The issue with NASA is something completely different. By statutory law and common law practices of U.S. courts, all content produced by U.S. Government employees while performing official job duties is considered to be in the public domain. There are some Ansel Adams photographs, for example, that were done as a work for hire by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) (meaning that Mr. Adams was a government employee for a short period of time) and as a result this sub-set of some incredibly awesome photos by a genuine master are now in the public domain. They are worth trying to look up and even print out with as high of quality printing medium that you can find.
This has nothing to do with the artistic value of the content, of which some U.S. government content (like the Earthrise photo... to name just one) can be genuinely considered artistic and even groundbreaking. Most of it is boring as heck, such as the 1860 U.S. Census data for Dekalb County, Iowa or Senate hearings on the 1956 appropriation bill for the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Is the museum claiming copyright on the individual photographs or on the collection as a whole?
It's long since been established that images which can individually not be copyrighted, can be copyrighted as part of a collection.
The originality required for copyright lies within establishing the collection.
The individual images from such a collection may still be freely copied, but one cannot take the entire collection and present them to the public as a singular collection.
It's kind of like how copyright can protect collections of otherwise public data such as telephone books.
The assertion of copyright is on the photographs themselves, not the paintings. The issue with the "collection" is interesting, but I believe it to be moot in this case, as the collection is not presented as a singular collection, but rather a few examples of a great many more similar kinds of photos from many other museums in many other cities and locations around the world.
This certainly is a very weak point to stand on... and IMHO it would be in the interest of a group like the EFF (or even the Wikimedia Foundation directly) to pick up the baton in this case and fight back to establish legal precedence in this situation with competent lawyers familiar with international copyright issues. The enabling law here is the Berne Convention (not just UK or US law) and perhaps to a lesser degree the U.S. Copyright code (with the Wikimedia servers in the USA).
There would be money riding on both sides of this legal fight, so it would be in the interests of both parties to see to it that this case come to some kind of formal conclusion.
Ahem...your employer definitely has a legitimate need for that information since they're taking money out of your paycheck to pay your Social Security. You won't get a job without an SSN, so write "N/A" all you like - makes the job market larger for the rest of us.
The SSN should not be on the employment application.... which was the point. Once you have been hired and are filling things out like I-9 documention and the W-4 forms that are explicitly for taxation purposes would the information have to actually be disclosed to an employer. Until then, the only legitimate purpose of asking for the SSN would be to use it for identification purposes... or to do things like performing a credit check on a future employee without their consent.
Still, it is something that would make you stick out as a potential troublemaker when applying for a job, and something that may be used as rationale for not hiring a potential candidate... even if demanding the information is illegal and could land the potential employer in legal trouble if a consistent pattern of turning down applications was based on this criteria.
Social Security "chose" nothing, its an elected congress that passes these rules.
That isn't entirely true. The Social Security Administration (as political appointees on the top tier, but this includes career civil employees as well) often does involve itself in legislative matters that involve that agency. This is true of all governmental bodies... just watch how crowded city hall gets when pay schedules for police or fire fighters is being discussed.
The point is that many of the changes to expand the scope and range of SSNs happened with not just the consultation of SSA employees, but that many of those suggestions came from that organization as well. Not all of them, and yes some congressmen were involved with these decisions, but they can't be completely absolved from this discussion either.
Well yes. There certainly is a chilling effect. You can't publicly make these tools and try to sell them. Which is what his employer was doing. But everyone knew this, long before the DMCA came into effect. It really does nothing to change the "scene", and that's where the cracks come from.
Why not? Where the tools were being made and sold (the Russian Republic.... not even in US jurisdiction or the jurisdiction of the court under question) the "tools" were perfectly legal.
In this case it was also about academic freedom and being able to make commentary about perhaps a sensitive subject to peers who are engaged in similar research (in this case cryptology). Ultimately what happened was that this person was arrested purely because of his speech, in an academic forum no less, but on the grounds of violations of the DMCA.
This legal issue, together with 1st amendment conflicts and other similar problems with the DMCA, still hasn't been completely resolved in a legal sense, nor has SCOTUS had their crack at trying to form an opinion on the topic either. The point here really is that this law continues to be a potential sword to hang over the heads of software developers that might seem to piss off a U.S. Attorney... for whatever reason that may be.
BTW, you asked if anybody had been prosecuted, and the answer was given to the affirmative. It doesn't matter if eventually the DOJ was embarrassed to the point of dropping charges in this case, it still was used and can be used in a heavy handed manner as demonstrated with this example.
Camp Williams is a big place, and it should be noted that about two-thirds of Utah is federal property of one sort or another (including quite a bit of land around Camp Williams). Quite a bit of the nearby property is even formally controlled by the Department of Defense, most of which is usually considered to be otherwise wilderness.
What I'm trying to say here is that by saying something is located at Utah's Camp Williams is about like saying a secret military installation is located in New England. It covers about the same amount of territory with other similar "restricted" territory that you must get military permission to enter. The 9/11 hijackers would have run out of fuel over the Great Salt Lake trying to find the place.
You are mistaken. You are operating under the assumption that we're a nation of laws.
I have to assume that you are:
1) American
2) Have never lived for substantial periods of time somewhere other than in North America (and possibly the more stable parts of Europe)
I say this because in spite of all of the problems that the USA has, and the inward naval gazing that often seems to happen from time to time like this article, the USA is a nation of laws that for the most part seem to work, where most people generally are treated equally in the law. Also, most law enforcement people that I've met, in spite of some abusive individuals who do cross the line from time to time, generally are professionals in the true sense of the word and stay within the rules they are given.
If you lived somewhere else and had to experience watching a guy with a sub-machine gun walk next to you and wonder if you are going to live until tomorrow... you might have a very different attitude about what a nation of laws really could be like. Worse yet, experiencing a general strike (where the citizens go on strike against the government.... not a pretty thing to behold) is something that I hope to never be in again for as long as I live. Such an event wouldn't even begin to be considered by the average U.S. citizen.
We, as American citizens (I am an American) do have control over our government and can stop many of these abuses from happening. It is, however, why elections matter and why you need to get involved politically if you have concerns about these problems. By refusing to be involved, you are letting those who are left to take the reins and ignore your apathy.
Ha! That's the first thing I thought of -- LDS linguists as intelligence moles at the NSA, able (required?) to report back to the LDS leadership council what they find.
If only the LDS Church were that efficient. BTW, I am curious about what "LDS leadership council" you are referring to here? The one headed by Warren Jeffs? I thought so.
That is entirely incorrect. The US makes no requests or demands with regards to other citizenships, in fact policy is to pretend that they don't exist.
The U.S. government doesn't care about citizenship in other countries... if you are visiting (for the most part). Having somewhat recently been with my brother-in-law when he became a naturalized citizen, I know for a fact that you have to renounce your ties including citizenship to any other country in order to be granted U.S. citizenship. This also includes any titles of nobility and resigning from official positions in another government that may compromise your role as a citizen.
Simply put, your are flat out and 100% wrong with your assertion here, and it is not based on any kind of knowledge of U.S. immigration policy. As to what other countries may do in terms of asserting citizenship rights on what they perceive to be their citizens, that is another story.
One of the problems with the suggestion of moving through the galactic plane being a major issue is that the Sun is currently very close to the main galactic plane at the moment. That is something that has to be explained if you want to use this concept to prove or disprove a hypothesis regarding the orbit our solar system takes through the galaxy.
What I would be curious about is the "CO2 data" that they are using, and the assumption that global temperatures have a direct correlation to this substance, not to mention the reliability of the measurement process over the scale of billions of years to calculate what levels of this gas were through more than just a couple of galactic years. Yes, I know there are attempts to measure global temperatures over time using the geologic record, but it seems to me that both the CO2 measurements as well as measurements of the orbit of the solar system have such huge margins of error that doing a statistical comparison of the two could give you virtually any kind of conclusion that you want.
I have to assume that this paper addresses these issues in some detail (I would love to read the original paper).
One other thing that struck me, in looking at the supposed solar system orbit that they plotted in this paper, is if they have accounted for the fact that the galaxy is a dynamic and not a static place? They calculated the path of the Sun over apparently three galactic years, but at the same time all of the objects that they used for measuring protuberance of the orbit are also moving in their own galactic orbits. If there is a model that they were able to develop that shows the galactic evolution of the Milky Way over the past 500 million years. Seriously, I had no idea that stellar parallax measurements (to accurately plot the positions of stars) were so accurate and have been for long enough to not only get a good fix on the position of a large number of stars in the Milky Way to be able to also plot the apparent trajectories of this many stars and galactic nebulae. That is some trick, and such a model would have a great many other uses besides trying to prove anthropogenic global warming (or disproving an alternative hypothesis).
My understanding was that stellar parallax measurements were only good to about 1 or 2 significant digits and getting the order of magnitude down. That may have improved with the Hubble and some other star surveys with really accurate telescopes, but I don't think it is too much better than that.
This may be true for US citizens, but for UK ones, the whole EU is a free reign, they can go and live in the country, and get a job there for many years, and then become a citizen simply by pointing out they've been there for a long time.
I happen to know many UK citizens in the USA right now.... several that even still have British passports for various reasons. Still, if it is emmigration to North America from the UK that you are looking for, Canada (or so I've been told) is a much easier to get into and has much less red tape.
Don't even get me started with Canadians living in the USA.... prior to 9/11 you wouldn't have even known that your neighbor was Canadian unless you explicitly asked, and getting the answer that they were from casual conversation would get the same reaction as saying they were from Texas or New York. Most Americans considered Canada to be merely another state that figured out a cute trick to avoid paying taxes to Washington, DC.
The point being here is that somebody deliberately trying to move to the USA could go through Canada if they are from one of the commonwealth countries, although times are changing along those lines and I will admit that movement within the EU is now much easier than movement within the former British Empire of old (aka the "Commonwealth" countries). It still is a unique situation for people from the UK that their status as both a EU country and ties to their former colonies give many options if you want to move on and go somewhere else because you don't like the political philosophies that have crept into your local government, and are trying to "vote with your feet".
This is, unfortunately, not something as easily done in America once you get here, and the number of options for emmigration are practically none once you get an American passport.
If there is ever going to be a "replacement" for the LHC... it would have to be something like a particle accelerator that would go around the equator (or something equivalent) around the Moon. Condemning that much real estate here on the Earth would simply put too much people out... even in some place like Texas (where the SCSC was supposed to be built).
There are some unique scientific endeavors that would be almost perfectly suited for being done on the Moon. Most significant off the top of my head is to put a large astronomy radio telescope somewhere on the "dark" side of the Moon where it continuously faces away from the Earth. Using the bulk mass of the Moon as a giant shield to radio frequencies seems like a nearly ideal use of the place. This is something that couldn't even be done on Phobos without at least noting the Earth when it comes into "view". Deep, and I mean "DEEP" space probes as a part of a larger Deep-Space Network (or the "interplanetary internet" as an alternative) using nodes on the Moon would be of similar value... where faint signals could be identified and separated from those coming from the Earth. Even satellites in GEOS wouldn't be nearly as effective.
Also, almost any oxygen reducing process that at least can be enhanced by having *some* gravity is useful to be done on the Moon. I would venture to guess that some metalurgy could happen on the Moon and be more effective than being done on the Earth.... including having to ship it back to the Earth. The vacuum you can get for "free" on the Moon is far more effective than the best laboratory vacuums you can get on the Earth.
Along a similar vein, a rocket propulsion laboratory on the Moon would also be something worth perhaps the cost and expense of getting the personnel and technical equipment necessary to perform the task. Measuring ISP and rocket performance in a vacuum on the Earth is a real pain in the behind... and often major assumptions and mistakes are made from when those tests are performed. Firing up the rockets on a test stand that is by definition in a vacuum could be something quite interesting... without having to worry about all of the other plumbing that comes from vacuum chambers here on the Earth doing similar kinds of tests. This may require the cost of getting to the Moon to be reduced an order of magnitude or more to be cost effective, but there certainly would be a point that having a lunar laboratory for stuff like this could be justified... for pure economic reasons.
I will say that the British government in the 18th Century did seemingly piss off some of the worst kinds of people (from a public relations viewpoint): Taverns, Tea Houses, and Newspaper Publishers. When referring to tea houses, think of your local Starbucks and you get a kind of idea of how common they were in the 18th Century American Colonies of Brittan.
Still, I'd have to agree with you on calling the above AC poster on his B.S. There certainly was much more involved than a few tea merchants... and the involvement fiscally (and militarily) by the French certainly had a much stronger impact than anything the tea merchants of Venice may have had on American society.
The stellar spectrum would only tell you what is present in both the outer layers of the star and the "atmosphere" that surrounds the star.
We can identify the elements of the Sun in this fashion, where both incandescent gasses (glowing because they are hot) and absorption of the light takes place. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_analysis
What we do know, however, is that Betelgeuse is no longer a main sequence star on the HR Diagram and is clearly a dying star. The question here is to determine how far along the path of stellar core depletion has taken place, and if tertiary fusion reactions beyond the carbon burning is happening. As each successive element "ignites" on the way to an iron core, the star becomes increasingly hotter in its core.
That is where knowing the "color" of the star is useful, but it won't give away the details of the interior in such an elegant fashion. Nice try, however.
If you carefully plot this star on the HR diagram and notice a substantial change over time, now that would be something worth paying attention to, and could be a warning that the star is about to go supernova. That is in part what the New Scientist article is trying to describe... and that the star is close enough that high resolution telescopes can pick out details beyond treating the star like a point-source of light, so we can glean a little more information than similar stars that are much more distant.
I can imagine several ways to work around this "issue" through IP packet forwarding and other related methods to get around this sort of blocking and fee schedule. I would imagine that to do this would result in legal actions of various sorts and regulating how you can access stuff like this through "terms of service" agreements that are draconian.
The big issue here... and hit squarely on with the original /. posting here... is that this is a business model for getting somebody to pay for content. They are certainly free to try different business models, but IMHO it is flat-out wrong for the government to guarantee that a particular business model will work. If folks can find a way to work around this and ensure that this particular business model isn't profitable, it shouldn't be tried.
I could say the same thing about P2P networks, and in a funny way it is. Forwarding content of this nature would merely be another "service" provided by P2P networks, as just one more example of how this could be worked around. Disney is trying to find a technological solution to a social problem... which never works in the first place.
First of all, California has long been on the forefront to creating "open source" textbooks. See The California Open Source Textbook Project for more details, and it is something at least worth looking at. This is a several year old effort, so it isn't really newsworthy except in context with a story like this. Educators are trying... and fighting an uphill battle in this regard. But the effort is there.
Also, California has long been their own author of textbooks as well, where nearly every textbook used in the California public school system has been created for the schools in that state.
I'd agree with you, however, that the licensing costs and the publisher's money getting flung around the curriculum review board on the state level are things that should be eliminated. The amount of lobbying money dumped each year just on the state officials in California deciding what new textbooks should be adopted is enough to buy several new print on demand machines that could put a new edition of every text book in the hands each student each year.
Not particularly. Mathematics at the high school level has not changed much in the last 100 years. New books serve basically two purposes: they include new pedagogical ideas (sometimes good, sometimes bad), and they contain new problem sets. In terms of pedagogy, I can get the same information by attending in-service and university classes.
I have seen a change in mathematics over the past couple of decades.... both from the perspective of pushing those students who excel to harder levels of mathematics and improved advance placement curriculum to doing stuff on the middle school level that was previously only done in high schools (and correspondingly tougher content in high school). Yes, this is subtle and not quite so obvious, but it is there.
On the whole, the introduction of computers and advanced calculators (heck, just calculators instead of slide rules) has also made a huge impact in terms of how the material in most textbooks has been presented. Much more emphasis has been placed on understanding the processes of how to come up with the answers than trying to necessarily become human computers (an actual career path before the 1940's). If you grabbed a high school textbook from the 1920's, you would note some substantial differences between what is presented there vs. what is currently taught. Yeah, you might lament that some theory and practice from back then is lost, but I think you might be surprised.
All this said, most of the major differences over the past 30 years or so have been with style over substance in terms of the textbook industry. Color printing has become incredibly cheap (compared to 40 years ago) where every page of modern textbooks has gone through a 4-color printing process. With this, for mathematical textbooks, is increased use of multi-colored graphs and charts, textbooks that have a much more free-flowing form (math textbooks from the 1920's were incredibly terse and from a modern perspective very difficult to read), and include "politically correct" commentaries that are often biographies of minorities and things that might even be called social studies that are found in the middle of a math textbook.
Do I think that all of this change has been for the better? No. I do think some things have been watered down and lost over the last century. But a textbook printed 100 years ago certainly wouldn't work in today's education market based on the goals of current school boards and state standards of curriculum.
BTW, I do agree with you on the general premise that most mathematical textbooks don't need to be updated nearly so often as the publishers try to cram down a new edition, and that the basic concepts of mathematics are timeless and aren't going to be changed on the high school level due to new discoveries by full time mathematical researchers (they do exist). Some minor tweaks to high school mathematical curricula might include increased emphasis on discrete mathematics, set and graph theory, but that is something you could debate in general and isn't necessarily going to be something that has to be changed every year.
If just losing editing rights is as bad as Nazi prosecution then by comparison other forms of prosecution must be like killing kittens with sledgehammers.
I hate to be a grammar nazi here, but I think the word you were looking for was persecution not prosecution
Although, I suppose there are many district attorneys and other government lawyers that can prosecute somebody to death.... and I suppose that Nazi prosecutors often led to capital punishment as well, and prosecutors can persecute based on several concepts of bigotry.
BTW, there were criminals in Nazi Germany during the 1940's that under the laws of most countries would be considered to be wrongful behavior deserving punishment of some variety. The differences is that much of the Nazi prosecution also involved prosecuting innocent people as well, and a government that didn't care (too much) if the innocent were found guilty. Not that that happens today in America.
If what the U.S. Air Force is does is restricted only to the Defense Mapping Agency, I guess I live in a different universe than you do. It goes much more beyond that.
As for the NRO, yes, I'm willing to admit it is its own beast. No, that isn't the Air Force space program either.
I'll also admit that most of what goes on in the Department of Defense is mostly classified, even though quite a bit of it is related to intelligence gathering equipment and assets. That, of course, is mostly why the money spent on space related activities there is ignored, as it is small potatoes compared to the rest of the budget of the DoD.
BTW, you also have NOAA that has a rather significant (including jurisdictional authority) presence in space, not to mention the Department of Agriculture and other federal departments/agencies including the Department of Interior. Yeah, it depends on what "American space program" you really are talking about, and NASA is but one of many that put stuff into space.
NASA is the one that gets all the credit, good or ill, however.