This isn't an employee-employer relationship, but rather a producer/consumer relationship.
Clearly the storage of the player record is indeed in a physical location and is composed of tangible materials. Yes, it is 1's and 0's as they are interpreted by the software, but it is in the actual location. If you were a competent computer engineer, you might even be able to correctly identify where on the hard disc platter or in what set of memory chips (perhaps both) this player record is being stored.
This is what I'm calling "rental property", and it is yours for the duration of the contract that you have signed. The subscription aspect is to be able to access that record via the rest of the networking architecture. To really complicate things, there is even "virtual property" in some MMORPGs that is also tied to your user record in addition to virtual items.
Furthermore, how content on the player record is treated both within the game and external to it (in the form of sales on Ebay, real world item trading websites, etc.) is to treat the "virtual items" as if they were real property.
I'm just saying this is one sort of argument that could be made in terms of protesting a player ban, and under what circumstances a player may seek formal legal remedies against the game company who tries to block them from accessing "their" hunk of data. This isn't so black and white, and the notion of virtual property belonging to the game company isn't very well established legal precedence either in those systems that use English Common Law and its derivatives (such as the US legal system).
Ultimately a game company in the future is going to have to document what the "cause" of blocking the player really was about. The more you get lawyers and judges who have played these games, the more you will get them interested in regulating it as well. And yes, I do know of a couple lawyers who play MMORPGs and have given the game companies a bit of heartburn as a result.
Because you don't "own" your WoW account. Its not your "property" to start with. You are paying Blizzard for access to THEIR GAME. And according them, everything in your account is THEIRs.
The video game developers would have you believe this, and this point of view is one nice way to legally run roughshod over customers if they are getting annoying. Since it is their game and database servers storing the account information, it belongs to them.
On the other hand, if you are paying a subscription (aka World of Warcraft is a monthly fee service), it could be argued that you are paying "rent" on the physical server and memory chips where this data is being stored and that it in fact does belong to you, the player/consumer.
Unfortunately, all it would take is a sympathetic judge or parliament/congressional representative to start thinking about this as real property in a certain context that would change this. In a great many ways, these "virtual items" are just as real and tangible in terms of how people perceive themselves as a car or house "in real life". In some cases, people have worked harder and longer for some of these virtual items than for some of the real-life one.
If Blizz catches you cheating, and bans you, should you be allowed to sue them for "damages"?
If they assert that you are cheating but you disagree with the ban on the grounds that there are circumstances that weren't weighed by the player moderators.... yeah, perhaps a lawsuit might be in order in some circumstances. I'm not saying it is something that would be pretty, and it would make developers of these game a little cautious if every action they did could be dragged through a courtroom.
I sure hope that MMPORGs don't end up having a legal department larger than their development department, which unfortunately would be the result if players could sue in court over moderation decisions. I also don't see any reason why it wouldn't happen eventually, and there certainly are some grey and fuzzy cases that are sometimes hard to make a clean judgment over. Some players (or network users in general) can be more or less playing by the rules but on occasion try to push the edge for one reason or another.
This isn't entirely true. In the aftermath of the black plague, so many people were wiped out that wilderness areas started to creep back into Europe and there was a decided labor shortage for awhile.
What it ultimately did was to push a great many European governments into paying attention to their subjects and giving them considerably more freedom and latitude in terms of what they could do and where they could live. I am not saying that governments were perfect, and oppression still happened, but you did see "colonization" happen even within Europe in an effort to expand back into those areas that had died off.
The black plague also had the effect of ultimately starting the renaissance movement. But admittedly this was only for a brief period of time, and the tragedy that came from the mass deaths is something that is quite shocking if you put it into a modern context. It was also the only time in the past couple millennia that the population of Europe substantially went down. Not even World War II had the same scale of deaths and widespread loss of population.
While I would have to agree that Mars is going to be a very harsh environment in terms of an incredibly steep learning curve for those who wish to survive and adapt to living there, I have no doubt that in time there will arise a group of individuals who will adapt just fine and be able to thrive in Martian environmental conditions.
In a way those early Martian settlers are going to have to "unlearn" some of the assumptions that we have been making in terms of how we live in a globally integrated economy and will have to learn to be (*gasp*) self-sufficient and be able to make nearly everything they need for themselves.
Having an atmosphere and some quantities of water make Mars certainly much more habitable that places like the Moon in terms of being able to strike out and establish a separate community. Unlike lunar colonies, there will also be such a huge distance issue in terms of re-supply that Martians (meaning the settlers) will by necessity have to come up with solutions to their own problems without relying on "mission control" devising a solution for them.
Unfortunately, the Puritans who woke up one morning, realized "I'm living with a bunch of fucking lunatics!", and then decided to leave and live with the Natives wound up being hunted down and killed by the other Puritans. But you are right. Those that had gumption and some luck, especially as late as the 18th and 19th centuries, could escape and live with one of the Native American tribes.
Does this include Roger Williams? Seriously, learn a little bit of American history and read the article if you've never heard of him. His philosophies can be directly attributed to what later became the 1st Ammendment to the U.S. Constitution, particularly the religious liberty clause, and the lack of this in the Constitution is what caused Rhode Island to be reluctant to ratify that document.
I'm not suggesting that the Puritans weren't pricks and hunted down those who wanted to leave their society, but there were successful groups that basically told the Massachusetts political leaders to "go to hell!" Connecticut and Vermont also had similar histories in terms of people getting out of Massachusetts because they didn't like what was going on there.
There is this strange little document that I realize most U.S. Courts and law enforcement officials tend to think doesn't exist, but is there none the less:
The U.S. Constitution!
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
-- 1st Article of Amendment
While I can understand that perhaps a RICO lawsuit might be able to stop a group like this from making any money from the logo and may simply invalidate the trademark and put it into the public domain, I don't see how it gives police any additional authority to act.
I guess the government is trying to claim the trademark as something owned by the state? I don't think that would pass constitutional muster, but then again who cares.
You may be able to balance the equation merely by making money not inheritable. Want to pass on your millions to your kids? Buy them houses, jets and jewelry and pass that along, not your money. This would have the advantage of at least turning all that money back into capital. (Don't attack me on this one please, as I'm not sure at all it would work, I'm still only toying with the idea)
Even this is a stupid idea in the long run, and shows a decided lack of understanding of what wealth, money, and capital really are. Things like airplanes, jewelry, and houses are just as much capital as a pile of money sitting in a bank. Inheritance taxes only skewer the system even more in terms of forcing those who have wealth to be more "creative" on how they pass that inheritance on to the next generation, and it doesn't really do the job for stopping the uber-rich from passing their wealth onto the next generation. At best, it only screws over ordinary working people who don't have the financial resources to hire accountants or set up dummy corporations to pass that wealth to their kids.
Besides trying to work hard so you kids can have every advantage possible in the future is a basic goal for any parent.
I'm not talking about making a poor person wealthy, I'm talking about making a poor person not starving or malnourished. Making sure poor people are reasonably healthy and have a roof over their heads. Making sure poor people have an education. It doesn't take all that much to make sure everyone has a minimum standard of living. I'm not saying everyone should make the same wage, just that there be a minimum (that supports a decent life) and a maximum (I'm thinking a few hundreds of thousands a year, just not in the millions/year range), and between those two points you're free to compete with your peers. Currently, this isn't possible. Or rather, for the middle class it is (for a few more years anyway) to some extent, and for the poor class it's impossible. You have no idea how hard it is to rise from poverty when you have poor education, poor health, malnourishment, etc.
This whole class thing is something that has been mostly manufactured out of whole cloth and is imaginary rather than something real. While I'll admit that in Europe there is this crazy thing of noble birth and rights to the throne that has existed for centuries, that has little to nothing to do with wealth or the ability to meet basic survival needs.
I have been with and lived among people in abject poverty of the 3rd world variety... where basic food and clothing requirements are hard to acquire and where raw sewage is running in the street (a hard smell to ignore). My experience is that you can't just give somebody in this condition a pile of money or goods in order to get them out of that condition, but rather you have to change who they are and what they think of themselves.
Throwing money at "the poor" only makes them more poor and dependent politically and emotionally on those who are giving the "charity". That is awesome if you are trying to get a huge slave army to do your bidding, but be honest at what you are trying to do and don't try to wrap it up in any nice little catch phrases that disguise this sort of behavior from the despotic regimes of ancient history. All told, I see little between the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt that built the Pyramid in Giza or the Chinese emperors who built the Great Wall and some of the more modern "Marxist" leaders like Castro, Mao, and Stalin. Heck, Saddam Hussein openly bragged that he thought that Stalin was the best political leader that ever existed, and had a picture of Stalin in his bedroom until he had to hide from the Americans in the 21st Century Iraq war.
If you want to make a poor person to avoid malnutrition and have them acquire some clothing, shelter, and other basic minimum requirements to survival, you need to give them the tools to rise above their current condition... and that the
First of all, what is the definition of "basic needs"? That is such a slippery definition that I find it incredibly hard to pin any specific criteria to what that describes.
Yeah, you have the "poverty line" (again, something very subjective) and it could be argued that all you need is some basic clothing for warmth and enough food to give you essential vitamins and calories to go about your daily life. But nobody... and I mean nobody wants to live that way, which isn't even really living.
Perhaps another definition is to be able to do the things you want to do when you want to do them? For some people, that doesn't require too much money. For others, it can extend into the billions of dollars.
The problem with Marxism is that it defines these concepts arbitrarily... and furthermore most implementations of Marxism make this completely involuntary to the point of pointing a gun at your head if you even try to leave the country even without any wealth or possessions that you may have.
While this sounds funny, it isn't really all that unusual... or even an original thought other than rephrasing the idea into modern engineering terms.
The American republic pretty much was an attempt to fork the English government into a new rev.... which even the English government by the 1770's had gone through several revision cycles and a couple "forks" of its own as well with a couple of revolutions and some knights and noblemen who tended (in England) to tell the King off from time to time. Very few English monarchs ever had absolute control over their country.
The point here is that in the late 18th Century, English colonists in America decided to "fork" the government and try a new direction on how things could be run. That process was repeated, at least in America, as new states were created. Whole communities of individuals can and did pack up everything they had and created new cities in what was previously wilderness.
One "luxury" that people in the Americas had (regardless of if you think it was something good or not) is that they had large tracts of land that were populated with only hunter-gatherer nomadic tribes... and a few smallish civilizations compared to Europe. Such major areas for people to expand into are now quite rare... if you can even find them. I can name a few areas around the world, but they do tend to be places that are difficult to live at such as on a steep mountain or in Antarctica.
Assuming that we might become a spacefaring race, forking of governments may once again become fashionable in a big way. It would also be interesting to see what governmental forms would thrive in such an environment.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it is a benevolent dictatorship with a small impression of a small European-style parliament selected by the elite users.
While I have "voted" in Wikimedia Foundation board elections, you have to be a fairly active editor/contributor in order to be given franchise in even that election. Furthermore, the board is still held sway to Jimbo Wales and whatever he suggests, although not everybody is giving in like they did before... or is Jimbo pushing the issue either.
While it is nice to have project leaders, it is the hierarchial nature of the Wikimedia projects that gives rise to the pettiness and abuses that happen in Wikipedia. That and a tendency for admins to not push back against abusive adminisrators.... for fear that they'll get burned trying.
I don't know of a much better alternative for Wikipedia either, and I guess that is what stinks even more. Ordinary people that aren't a part of the inner clique can "advance" and make real changes to Wikipedia, but it takes incredibly thick skin and a strong command of writing skills necessary to convey any ideas you may have clearly and completely.
Of course that is true in almost any organization.
There are three things about Armadillo Aerospace to remember:
They have (comparatively) low overhead for their facilities and personnel. While I think they now have a couple of full-time employees, it is just a couple of them... plus a couple of aeronautical engineering interns and others who are all making peanuts. John Carmack's salary doesn't figure into the equation (yet). Being in Texas and Oklahoma doesn't hurt either, especially with the decommissioned air base in Oklahoma that is desperate for customers and practically subsidizing Armadillo's efforts.
They have been doing a couple of smallish contracts for NASA and a few other companies that are mainly propulsion studies. Armadillo is widely acknowledged as having the most practical experience with smaller liquid-fueled engines than almost anybody in the industry at the moment, where the cost of the rocket fuel is one of the major budget items for them, which is generally something most rocket launchers typically ignore due to how insignificant it is compared to operations and vehicle costs.
Armadillo engines are being used with the Rocket Racing League, where at least six of them have been sold to paying customers. I believe this is the largest source of money at the moment, and something that looks like a steady source of future income.
John does post on here occasionally, so he might fill in some details, but there is a source of income for the company. They are also not stopping with these few revenue streams either, but have some huge ambitions for the future.
It isn't that Mars "has no magnetic field"... the problem with the magnetic field of Mars is that it seems to be stuck in between cycles like what happens when the Earth goes through a magnetic pole reversal.
In other words, there are hundreds of "magnetic north poles" on Mars. That makes it tough for navigation and to help protect the planet from solar storms... as all of the magnetic polar regions get slammed at the same time. On the Earth, it is a remote spot in Canada and Antarctica that get hit, sparing most of the rest of the planet.
There are other surprises on the Red Planet that await us there, and finding out how the Martian "aereology" (as opposed to geology) works is going to be something fun over the next couple of centuries.
These are not government cost plus contracts, and certainly the government didn't act as anything other than a normal customer for SpaceX. The COTS funding is a little bit different, but even that is a really unusual method of government financing... even if it is much more typical in ordinary business purchases.
This certainly isn't something exclusive for government service, and while the government money is going to help provide a valuable market, it certainly isn't the only market that SpaceX is aiming for.
The U.S. Government certainly didn't provide the seed money to get the rocket development started.
Here are a few things that I'm aware of that NASA did to help build and develop the computer industry:
* Developed the first timeshare/multi user real-time operating system. It was also the first "real-time" operating system in terms of having hardware interrupts like are found on modern CPUs and multi-tasking operating systems. One of the first of these computers was used for launch control at Kennedy Space Center, and another early one at Johnson in Houston.
* Provided much of the early seed money and capital for integrated chip manufacturers. While there were other customers, NASA at one time was purchasing some insane quantities of the early chip fabs... something like close to 80% of all world-wide production at the time. A great many of these ended up in the Apollo Guidance Computer (mostly discrete gates like the 7400 series) but they did end up in other projects as well.
* Pushed computer technology in general. While they certainly weren't the only employer or organization using computers in the late 1950's and 1960's, NASA and their contractors did employ a significant fraction of the total number of electrical engineers and software developers in America at the time. NASA contracts helped to develop some of the first FORTRAN compilers (COBOL was a Navy project).
* Indirectly started the personal computer revolution. I say this sort of tongue in cheek here, as it was the shut down of NASA and the huge layoffs resulting in the cancellation of Apollo that pushed Silicon Valley into trying to find another venue to absorb all of the talent that had previously been tied up in building spacecraft and support systems. Bright, intelligent, but unemployed people often are quite successful in terms of finding a new niche. This may have happened anyway, but the push from having a huge glut of engineers (10's of thousands were laid off from Apollo) all wanting to do something new and exciting... just like they got through doing by sending people to the Moon.
On the whole, I'd have to agree that America "got its money back.... with interest" from the Apollo program. While the Shuttle program hasn't been nearly so successful in terms of getting a return on investment, it still hasn't been terrible and on the whole has been quite beneficial to America in a whole bunch of ways.
My #1 complaint about NASA right now is that they want to re-create Apollo and do it all over again. The first time was useful, but I'm not so sure about the second act. Unfortunately, they really aren't pioneering new techniques or really doing much in terms of original design either... other that minor variations of the same old theme.
If NASA got back into the serious space exploration business... by aggressively exploring the rest of the solar system (including exploring many more asteroids, landers on all of the major moons, underwater vehicles on Europa, etc.), getting people to Mars, establishing international spaceflight standards such as vehicle docking systems, and manned spaceflight well above low-earth orbit.... yeah, I think such a program would have tremendous value to the American people and continue to be a leader in technological ideas in the world.
Unfortunately, that is not what I see in NASA today. It is unfortunate as well.
Hardly. The bulk of the satellites that went into space that have been sent up by the USA were developed and paid for by military contracts. All of the major branches (yes, even the Marine Corp) have been involved with spaceflight to some extent or another. While the U.S. Army isn't directly involved too much any more, the bulk of the Marshall Spaceflight Center (including Werner Von Braun) came from the earlier Army rocket program. Both the U.S. Navy and the Air Force are even today heavily involved in spaceflight.... so much so that their budgets for spaceflight are even today larger than NASA's.
Yeah, I'll admit that NASA did get involved with developing quite a bit of the science about the environment of what it is like in space, and took many of the early risks. But it wasn't just NASA either.
BTW, the one unsung private company that did most of the early pioneering for private spaceflight? AT&T (the old pre-DOJ breakup Ma Bell). They got into the game so early that they had to get special permission just to build a satellite in the form of a congressional resolution. In spite of what Elon Musk and others in the current spaceflight industry think of government regulations in their field, nobody had to go through a harder time than AT&T and the Telestar satellite.
The efforts of AT&T (and the huge amounts of money they dumped into their program... not being subsidized but in fact underwriting NASA's programs at the time) are one of several companies that you should be also looking at in terms of who has paid for this. NASA hasn't ever been nor even today is the only game in town for spaceflight in America.
I know there are a whole bunch of folks interested in when SpaceX is going to IPO (if it ever will). Certainly such a public issue of stock, given a strong launch record and successful docking to the ISS would be a Wall Street darling.
It might give Elon the opportunity to get to Mars... which is one of his long term goals. I'm not just talking putting a spacecraft there, but he wants to walk on Mars for real himself. Since NASA won't send him there, he figures he has to build the company that can get him there.
There are some other aspects to this mission that haven't been publicized too much yet, like the second stage engine cold restart (manuvering the payload to a higher orbit), and the parachute recovery of the 1st stage.
Apparently the first stage parachute did deploy, but I'm not sure if it was recovered. That was a secondary issue and something that didn't directly impact simply getting the spacecraft to orbit.
There is an intention to attempt to refurbish the 1st stage for re-launch, together with overhauling the Merlin engines for re-use as well. The 2nd stage can't be recovered so easily, as it gets to orbital velocities and requires atmospheric re-entry.
The business model for the Falcon 1 is, however, to treat the 1st stage as expendable, and assume that if it does get recovered that the employees of SpaceX just got a Christmas bonus. From a business viewpoint, this is a healthy attitude to have.
On the other hand.... if the current delays and typical government mis-management along with normal NASA-style bloated overhead continue to plague the Ares development process, that rocket isn't going to be ready for it first flight for nearly a decade. In that period of time, it is likely that nearly a dozen different private spaceflight companies are going to come to the surface, and the Falcon 9 is certainly going to be ready and capable of manned spaceflight well before the Ares I is even ready.
Companies to watch include Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Scaled Composites, and Bigelow Aerospace (who've given up on even developing the rockets... they're just making spacecraft and flying the hardware on other people's rockets).
Solving the Ares pogo issue with shock absorbers is IMHO an awful hack to an already bastard rocket system that has too many congressional fingers in its pot... even if one of those congressional fingers is my own district. I will be shocked if the Ares I even flies at all.... and NASA is going to have some congressmen asking tough questions about what they are doing if SpaceX continues with their successful record.
I give it at best a 50/50 chance that the Ares rocket system is going to even make it onto a launch pad right now. But I'm a major critic of the program and not a "True Believer"(tm) in NASA.
I do think there are a number of things that NASA has and is doing wrong in terms of its general attitude toward spaceflight development and its focus towards a useful mission that NASA can play.
NASA can and should be in the space exploration business, not the business of providing space transportation services. Travel to low-earth orbit may have been remarkable back in the 1950's, but it isn't even news any more. Heck, even this launch... which I do believe to be not just newsworthy but down right historic... is just a footnote in science columns right now if it is being covered by "mainstream" news media at all.
Recent announcements by Mike Griffin and NASA that the new Ares V rocket is going to be in the commercial spaceflight business makes me really question what, if anything, NASA really intends to do in the near future. Perhaps that was just a mistake on a power-point slide I was looking at, but the "mission" of NASA certainly not very well defined at the moment.
No, this isn't contradictory. It is just that you need to understand where the vote is going to, and what contest you are actually voting in.
Individual voters do matter so far as deciding what the outcome of the electoral votes for each state are concerned. While there have been some exceptions in the past, all 50 U.S. States (and DC) use popular vote for the allocation of electoral votes. There is nothing contradictory here at all.
You are presuming that because the vote for president in your own state is decided by widespread support for a certain candidate (due to widespread popularity of that candidate/political philosophy in that state) that your vote doesn't count. Does your vote count even in a purely popular vote process where the decision to elect somebody is by a wide margin?
I still say every vote counts. What you are debating here is what it counts for.
Your vote is not ignored in the electoral college system, Furthermore, there are numerous changes that can be made to modify the winner-take-all system that you have a stronger voice in changing... if you care to take up that political challenge. Abolition of the electoral college doesn't have to be the only option here.
This is where you have to have "virgin" developers working on the software that is being developed. In other words, the software can only be developed based on specifications and not on actually observing the software in operation... or worse yet reading the de-compiled/disassembled software (and even worse still, proprietary source code) that made the product.
I do think EULA's that insist upon a "no reverse engineering" clause ought to be found illegal... and on that point I don't know of any firm legal precedent on that topic to suggest that such a clause is enforceable.
On the other hand, I know of no open source projects (I may be mistaken... but they are few and far between at most) that works hard to separate those who are doing the development work and those who are obtaining the specification via observation and documentation. This may have also been a huge problem the the BNETD case as well. Once you have been "contaminated" with the original software or device, it becomes much harder to prove that you are merely providing interoperability.
There are private universities and private sources of funding for research... and frankly I don't have a problem with a private university with a private grant taking some research and trying to make a profit from it in some way. Universities are by definition where you can find a concentration of incredibly bright people and talent that often has untapped potential.
In other words, such a situation merely is another way to establish an R&D department for a well-run corporation... and will also benefit the students of those professors (and often many students themselves) to participate in ground-breaking research.
The problem does come with public universities, and even more so when tax dollars that were confiscated at gunpoint from widows and orphans (try to convince me taxes are anything other than oppressive... I dare you) are used to fund research that is then used to make the researcher who benefited from that money the sole controller of that knowledge. Publicly funded research ought to belong to the public at large... and those who help to finance the work should also get the benefits from that research. On this point I completely agree... and placing such knowledge in the public domain is one of the ways that can and should happen.
I'm not entirely sure myself of what private research happening at public universities should be as open or not. It can be prudent policy to encourage private donors and benefactors to even such public institutions to help defray some of the costs of running those organizations. If there is such private donations, there ought to be a strong accounting wall set up to separate those "private" activities from the publicly funded activities (such as educational instruction and academic development). Better-run public universities do indeed have these fiscal barriers in place, but it is something that needs to be worked on... and watched for.
What good does the current patent system really do? Are there really garage tinkerers that actually make some real money off of some cool idea that hasn't been thought of before... and certified by the government? Are you sure?
Supposedly the current system is set up to "protect the little guy" from getting trampled over by a big, evil, rich, and mean mega-corporation that is scheming to steal the ideas from this stalwart and noble but perhaps naive individual inventor, or perhaps even small business. If you know anything about patent law at all, you also know that this is so far from the truth about the system that it hurts to even mention it.
I certainly know some very personal examples of the "lone inventor" who has been screwed over by the legal system... and I've even had employers who were taken to court over patent issues that were total nonsense... where the patent system was the source of the abuse, not the protection from abuse.
I don't think there is even a baby to throw out with the bathwater in this case. If the whole patent system were abolished, normal businesses who actually produce stuff would continue to do so. There would still be trade secret laws to protect ideas from being copied by competitors, and the lone inventor starting his own company to start making the cool device would still happen. Indeed, this lone inventor would be more likely hired at some larger company because of his ability to think and come up with ideas... knowing that there wouldn't have to be the huge legal mess to deal with patent issues.
I seriously don't see any down side to abolishing the patent system entirely, and I have far too many stories of people's lives that have been wrecked by the patent system to consider it actually doing any good at all. This isn't stories from the internet, but close friends and family members... and unfortunately personal experiences having to fight against patents where the patent claim is abusive and possibly illegal.
What good would even a reformed patent system offer?
While I generally agree with you that patents are nearly useless and certainly don't perform the task that they are designed to encourage (aka... promote the development of useful ideas), the issue here is:
If an employer decides to give you some sort of compensation for developing patentable ideas, how much should you be getting for that idea?
Not everybody views the patent system to be as corrupt as you do. Even if it may be broken and a horrible idea on the whole, it is the way business is done today... and unfortunately we do have to work within the system even if we want to get rid of it eventually.
I look at the compensation of the employee in this case as peanuts... on the notion that successfully pushing through an idea to become a patent is going to be paying far more in legal fees than the paltry $5k that is being offered. Why not at least offer the same amount of money that will be going to the patent attorney + filing fees (unless it is an in-house corporate attorney with experience in patent law).
Most patents that are filed in current business practice are defensive patents anyway. They don't intend to actually make money off of them, but they do intend to use them if a lawsuit is dumped in their direction and they can burn their opponent first. What that says about American business practices and business tort law is something best deserved for a whole other thread/article.
Only two states have a different voting method: Maine and Nebraska. And those are still winner-take-all but are modified to be decided at the congressional district level instead of at the state level.
Colorado experimented with a proportional voting system, but the referendum about it failed in the 2004 election. A few other states like California have also tried, but have also found it difficult for political parties to give up temporary advantages of the current system.
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This isn't an employee-employer relationship, but rather a producer/consumer relationship.
Clearly the storage of the player record is indeed in a physical location and is composed of tangible materials. Yes, it is 1's and 0's as they are interpreted by the software, but it is in the actual location. If you were a competent computer engineer, you might even be able to correctly identify where on the hard disc platter or in what set of memory chips (perhaps both) this player record is being stored.
This is what I'm calling "rental property", and it is yours for the duration of the contract that you have signed. The subscription aspect is to be able to access that record via the rest of the networking architecture. To really complicate things, there is even "virtual property" in some MMORPGs that is also tied to your user record in addition to virtual items.
Furthermore, how content on the player record is treated both within the game and external to it (in the form of sales on Ebay, real world item trading websites, etc.) is to treat the "virtual items" as if they were real property.
I'm just saying this is one sort of argument that could be made in terms of protesting a player ban, and under what circumstances a player may seek formal legal remedies against the game company who tries to block them from accessing "their" hunk of data. This isn't so black and white, and the notion of virtual property belonging to the game company isn't very well established legal precedence either in those systems that use English Common Law and its derivatives (such as the US legal system).
Ultimately a game company in the future is going to have to document what the "cause" of blocking the player really was about. The more you get lawyers and judges who have played these games, the more you will get them interested in regulating it as well. And yes, I do know of a couple lawyers who play MMORPGs and have given the game companies a bit of heartburn as a result.
The video game developers would have you believe this, and this point of view is one nice way to legally run roughshod over customers if they are getting annoying. Since it is their game and database servers storing the account information, it belongs to them.
On the other hand, if you are paying a subscription (aka World of Warcraft is a monthly fee service), it could be argued that you are paying "rent" on the physical server and memory chips where this data is being stored and that it in fact does belong to you, the player/consumer.
Unfortunately, all it would take is a sympathetic judge or parliament/congressional representative to start thinking about this as real property in a certain context that would change this. In a great many ways, these "virtual items" are just as real and tangible in terms of how people perceive themselves as a car or house "in real life". In some cases, people have worked harder and longer for some of these virtual items than for some of the real-life one.
If they assert that you are cheating but you disagree with the ban on the grounds that there are circumstances that weren't weighed by the player moderators.... yeah, perhaps a lawsuit might be in order in some circumstances. I'm not saying it is something that would be pretty, and it would make developers of these game a little cautious if every action they did could be dragged through a courtroom.
I sure hope that MMPORGs don't end up having a legal department larger than their development department, which unfortunately would be the result if players could sue in court over moderation decisions. I also don't see any reason why it wouldn't happen eventually, and there certainly are some grey and fuzzy cases that are sometimes hard to make a clean judgment over. Some players (or network users in general) can be more or less playing by the rules but on occasion try to push the edge for one reason or another.
This isn't entirely true. In the aftermath of the black plague, so many people were wiped out that wilderness areas started to creep back into Europe and there was a decided labor shortage for awhile.
What it ultimately did was to push a great many European governments into paying attention to their subjects and giving them considerably more freedom and latitude in terms of what they could do and where they could live. I am not saying that governments were perfect, and oppression still happened, but you did see "colonization" happen even within Europe in an effort to expand back into those areas that had died off.
The black plague also had the effect of ultimately starting the renaissance movement. But admittedly this was only for a brief period of time, and the tragedy that came from the mass deaths is something that is quite shocking if you put it into a modern context. It was also the only time in the past couple millennia that the population of Europe substantially went down. Not even World War II had the same scale of deaths and widespread loss of population.
While I would have to agree that Mars is going to be a very harsh environment in terms of an incredibly steep learning curve for those who wish to survive and adapt to living there, I have no doubt that in time there will arise a group of individuals who will adapt just fine and be able to thrive in Martian environmental conditions.
In a way those early Martian settlers are going to have to "unlearn" some of the assumptions that we have been making in terms of how we live in a globally integrated economy and will have to learn to be (*gasp*) self-sufficient and be able to make nearly everything they need for themselves.
Having an atmosphere and some quantities of water make Mars certainly much more habitable that places like the Moon in terms of being able to strike out and establish a separate community. Unlike lunar colonies, there will also be such a huge distance issue in terms of re-supply that Martians (meaning the settlers) will by necessity have to come up with solutions to their own problems without relying on "mission control" devising a solution for them.
Does this include Roger Williams? Seriously, learn a little bit of American history and read the article if you've never heard of him. His philosophies can be directly attributed to what later became the 1st Ammendment to the U.S. Constitution, particularly the religious liberty clause, and the lack of this in the Constitution is what caused Rhode Island to be reluctant to ratify that document.
I'm not suggesting that the Puritans weren't pricks and hunted down those who wanted to leave their society, but there were successful groups that basically told the Massachusetts political leaders to "go to hell!" Connecticut and Vermont also had similar histories in terms of people getting out of Massachusetts because they didn't like what was going on there.
There is this strange little document that I realize most U.S. Courts and law enforcement officials tend to think doesn't exist, but is there none the less:
The U.S. Constitution!
While I can understand that perhaps a RICO lawsuit might be able to stop a group like this from making any money from the logo and may simply invalidate the trademark and put it into the public domain, I don't see how it gives police any additional authority to act.
I guess the government is trying to claim the trademark as something owned by the state? I don't think that would pass constitutional muster, but then again who cares.
Even this is a stupid idea in the long run, and shows a decided lack of understanding of what wealth, money, and capital really are. Things like airplanes, jewelry, and houses are just as much capital as a pile of money sitting in a bank. Inheritance taxes only skewer the system even more in terms of forcing those who have wealth to be more "creative" on how they pass that inheritance on to the next generation, and it doesn't really do the job for stopping the uber-rich from passing their wealth onto the next generation. At best, it only screws over ordinary working people who don't have the financial resources to hire accountants or set up dummy corporations to pass that wealth to their kids.
Besides trying to work hard so you kids can have every advantage possible in the future is a basic goal for any parent.
This whole class thing is something that has been mostly manufactured out of whole cloth and is imaginary rather than something real. While I'll admit that in Europe there is this crazy thing of noble birth and rights to the throne that has existed for centuries, that has little to nothing to do with wealth or the ability to meet basic survival needs.
I have been with and lived among people in abject poverty of the 3rd world variety... where basic food and clothing requirements are hard to acquire and where raw sewage is running in the street (a hard smell to ignore). My experience is that you can't just give somebody in this condition a pile of money or goods in order to get them out of that condition, but rather you have to change who they are and what they think of themselves.
Throwing money at "the poor" only makes them more poor and dependent politically and emotionally on those who are giving the "charity". That is awesome if you are trying to get a huge slave army to do your bidding, but be honest at what you are trying to do and don't try to wrap it up in any nice little catch phrases that disguise this sort of behavior from the despotic regimes of ancient history. All told, I see little between the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt that built the Pyramid in Giza or the Chinese emperors who built the Great Wall and some of the more modern "Marxist" leaders like Castro, Mao, and Stalin. Heck, Saddam Hussein openly bragged that he thought that Stalin was the best political leader that ever existed, and had a picture of Stalin in his bedroom until he had to hide from the Americans in the 21st Century Iraq war.
If you want to make a poor person to avoid malnutrition and have them acquire some clothing, shelter, and other basic minimum requirements to survival, you need to give them the tools to rise above their current condition... and that the
First of all, what is the definition of "basic needs"? That is such a slippery definition that I find it incredibly hard to pin any specific criteria to what that describes.
Yeah, you have the "poverty line" (again, something very subjective) and it could be argued that all you need is some basic clothing for warmth and enough food to give you essential vitamins and calories to go about your daily life. But nobody... and I mean nobody wants to live that way, which isn't even really living.
Perhaps another definition is to be able to do the things you want to do when you want to do them? For some people, that doesn't require too much money. For others, it can extend into the billions of dollars.
The problem with Marxism is that it defines these concepts arbitrarily... and furthermore most implementations of Marxism make this completely involuntary to the point of pointing a gun at your head if you even try to leave the country even without any wealth or possessions that you may have.
While this sounds funny, it isn't really all that unusual... or even an original thought other than rephrasing the idea into modern engineering terms.
The American republic pretty much was an attempt to fork the English government into a new rev.... which even the English government by the 1770's had gone through several revision cycles and a couple "forks" of its own as well with a couple of revolutions and some knights and noblemen who tended (in England) to tell the King off from time to time. Very few English monarchs ever had absolute control over their country.
The point here is that in the late 18th Century, English colonists in America decided to "fork" the government and try a new direction on how things could be run. That process was repeated, at least in America, as new states were created. Whole communities of individuals can and did pack up everything they had and created new cities in what was previously wilderness.
One "luxury" that people in the Americas had (regardless of if you think it was something good or not) is that they had large tracts of land that were populated with only hunter-gatherer nomadic tribes... and a few smallish civilizations compared to Europe. Such major areas for people to expand into are now quite rare... if you can even find them. I can name a few areas around the world, but they do tend to be places that are difficult to live at such as on a steep mountain or in Antarctica.
Assuming that we might become a spacefaring race, forking of governments may once again become fashionable in a big way. It would also be interesting to see what governmental forms would thrive in such an environment.
The problem with Wikipedia is that it is a benevolent dictatorship with a small impression of a small European-style parliament selected by the elite users.
While I have "voted" in Wikimedia Foundation board elections, you have to be a fairly active editor/contributor in order to be given franchise in even that election. Furthermore, the board is still held sway to Jimbo Wales and whatever he suggests, although not everybody is giving in like they did before... or is Jimbo pushing the issue either.
While it is nice to have project leaders, it is the hierarchial nature of the Wikimedia projects that gives rise to the pettiness and abuses that happen in Wikipedia. That and a tendency for admins to not push back against abusive adminisrators.... for fear that they'll get burned trying.
I don't know of a much better alternative for Wikipedia either, and I guess that is what stinks even more. Ordinary people that aren't a part of the inner clique can "advance" and make real changes to Wikipedia, but it takes incredibly thick skin and a strong command of writing skills necessary to convey any ideas you may have clearly and completely.
Of course that is true in almost any organization.
There are three things about Armadillo Aerospace to remember:
John does post on here occasionally, so he might fill in some details, but there is a source of income for the company. They are also not stopping with these few revenue streams either, but have some huge ambitions for the future.
It isn't that Mars "has no magnetic field"... the problem with the magnetic field of Mars is that it seems to be stuck in between cycles like what happens when the Earth goes through a magnetic pole reversal.
In other words, there are hundreds of "magnetic north poles" on Mars. That makes it tough for navigation and to help protect the planet from solar storms... as all of the magnetic polar regions get slammed at the same time. On the Earth, it is a remote spot in Canada and Antarctica that get hit, sparing most of the rest of the planet.
There are other surprises on the Red Planet that await us there, and finding out how the Martian "aereology" (as opposed to geology) works is going to be something fun over the next couple of centuries.
These are not government cost plus contracts, and certainly the government didn't act as anything other than a normal customer for SpaceX. The COTS funding is a little bit different, but even that is a really unusual method of government financing... even if it is much more typical in ordinary business purchases.
This certainly isn't something exclusive for government service, and while the government money is going to help provide a valuable market, it certainly isn't the only market that SpaceX is aiming for.
The U.S. Government certainly didn't provide the seed money to get the rocket development started.
Here are a few things that I'm aware of that NASA did to help build and develop the computer industry:
* Developed the first timeshare/multi user real-time operating system. It was also the first "real-time" operating system in terms of having hardware interrupts like are found on modern CPUs and multi-tasking operating systems. One of the first of these computers was used for launch control at Kennedy Space Center, and another early one at Johnson in Houston.
* Provided much of the early seed money and capital for integrated chip manufacturers. While there were other customers, NASA at one time was purchasing some insane quantities of the early chip fabs... something like close to 80% of all world-wide production at the time. A great many of these ended up in the Apollo Guidance Computer (mostly discrete gates like the 7400 series) but they did end up in other projects as well.
* Pushed computer technology in general. While they certainly weren't the only employer or organization using computers in the late 1950's and 1960's, NASA and their contractors did employ a significant fraction of the total number of electrical engineers and software developers in America at the time. NASA contracts helped to develop some of the first FORTRAN compilers (COBOL was a Navy project).
* Indirectly started the personal computer revolution. I say this sort of tongue in cheek here, as it was the shut down of NASA and the huge layoffs resulting in the cancellation of Apollo that pushed Silicon Valley into trying to find another venue to absorb all of the talent that had previously been tied up in building spacecraft and support systems. Bright, intelligent, but unemployed people often are quite successful in terms of finding a new niche. This may have happened anyway, but the push from having a huge glut of engineers (10's of thousands were laid off from Apollo) all wanting to do something new and exciting... just like they got through doing by sending people to the Moon.
On the whole, I'd have to agree that America "got its money back.... with interest" from the Apollo program. While the Shuttle program hasn't been nearly so successful in terms of getting a return on investment, it still hasn't been terrible and on the whole has been quite beneficial to America in a whole bunch of ways.
My #1 complaint about NASA right now is that they want to re-create Apollo and do it all over again. The first time was useful, but I'm not so sure about the second act. Unfortunately, they really aren't pioneering new techniques or really doing much in terms of original design either... other that minor variations of the same old theme.
If NASA got back into the serious space exploration business... by aggressively exploring the rest of the solar system (including exploring many more asteroids, landers on all of the major moons, underwater vehicles on Europa, etc.), getting people to Mars, establishing international spaceflight standards such as vehicle docking systems, and manned spaceflight well above low-earth orbit.... yeah, I think such a program would have tremendous value to the American people and continue to be a leader in technological ideas in the world.
Unfortunately, that is not what I see in NASA today. It is unfortunate as well.
Hardly. The bulk of the satellites that went into space that have been sent up by the USA were developed and paid for by military contracts. All of the major branches (yes, even the Marine Corp) have been involved with spaceflight to some extent or another. While the U.S. Army isn't directly involved too much any more, the bulk of the Marshall Spaceflight Center (including Werner Von Braun) came from the earlier Army rocket program. Both the U.S. Navy and the Air Force are even today heavily involved in spaceflight.... so much so that their budgets for spaceflight are even today larger than NASA's.
Yeah, I'll admit that NASA did get involved with developing quite a bit of the science about the environment of what it is like in space, and took many of the early risks. But it wasn't just NASA either.
BTW, the one unsung private company that did most of the early pioneering for private spaceflight? AT&T (the old pre-DOJ breakup Ma Bell). They got into the game so early that they had to get special permission just to build a satellite in the form of a congressional resolution. In spite of what Elon Musk and others in the current spaceflight industry think of government regulations in their field, nobody had to go through a harder time than AT&T and the Telestar satellite.
The efforts of AT&T (and the huge amounts of money they dumped into their program... not being subsidized but in fact underwriting NASA's programs at the time) are one of several companies that you should be also looking at in terms of who has paid for this. NASA hasn't ever been nor even today is the only game in town for spaceflight in America.
I know there are a whole bunch of folks interested in when SpaceX is going to IPO (if it ever will). Certainly such a public issue of stock, given a strong launch record and successful docking to the ISS would be a Wall Street darling.
It might give Elon the opportunity to get to Mars... which is one of his long term goals. I'm not just talking putting a spacecraft there, but he wants to walk on Mars for real himself. Since NASA won't send him there, he figures he has to build the company that can get him there.
D. Delos Harriman.... eat your heart out!
There are some other aspects to this mission that haven't been publicized too much yet, like the second stage engine cold restart (manuvering the payload to a higher orbit), and the parachute recovery of the 1st stage.
Apparently the first stage parachute did deploy, but I'm not sure if it was recovered. That was a secondary issue and something that didn't directly impact simply getting the spacecraft to orbit.
There is an intention to attempt to refurbish the 1st stage for re-launch, together with overhauling the Merlin engines for re-use as well. The 2nd stage can't be recovered so easily, as it gets to orbital velocities and requires atmospheric re-entry.
The business model for the Falcon 1 is, however, to treat the 1st stage as expendable, and assume that if it does get recovered that the employees of SpaceX just got a Christmas bonus. From a business viewpoint, this is a healthy attitude to have.
On the other hand.... if the current delays and typical government mis-management along with normal NASA-style bloated overhead continue to plague the Ares development process, that rocket isn't going to be ready for it first flight for nearly a decade. In that period of time, it is likely that nearly a dozen different private spaceflight companies are going to come to the surface, and the Falcon 9 is certainly going to be ready and capable of manned spaceflight well before the Ares I is even ready.
Companies to watch include Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Scaled Composites, and Bigelow Aerospace (who've given up on even developing the rockets... they're just making spacecraft and flying the hardware on other people's rockets).
Solving the Ares pogo issue with shock absorbers is IMHO an awful hack to an already bastard rocket system that has too many congressional fingers in its pot... even if one of those congressional fingers is my own district. I will be shocked if the Ares I even flies at all.... and NASA is going to have some congressmen asking tough questions about what they are doing if SpaceX continues with their successful record.
I give it at best a 50/50 chance that the Ares rocket system is going to even make it onto a launch pad right now. But I'm a major critic of the program and not a "True Believer"(tm) in NASA.
I do think there are a number of things that NASA has and is doing wrong in terms of its general attitude toward spaceflight development and its focus towards a useful mission that NASA can play.
NASA can and should be in the space exploration business, not the business of providing space transportation services. Travel to low-earth orbit may have been remarkable back in the 1950's, but it isn't even news any more. Heck, even this launch... which I do believe to be not just newsworthy but down right historic... is just a footnote in science columns right now if it is being covered by "mainstream" news media at all.
Recent announcements by Mike Griffin and NASA that the new Ares V rocket is going to be in the commercial spaceflight business makes me really question what, if anything, NASA really intends to do in the near future. Perhaps that was just a mistake on a power-point slide I was looking at, but the "mission" of NASA certainly not very well defined at the moment.
No, this isn't contradictory. It is just that you need to understand where the vote is going to, and what contest you are actually voting in.
Individual voters do matter so far as deciding what the outcome of the electoral votes for each state are concerned. While there have been some exceptions in the past, all 50 U.S. States (and DC) use popular vote for the allocation of electoral votes. There is nothing contradictory here at all.
You are presuming that because the vote for president in your own state is decided by widespread support for a certain candidate (due to widespread popularity of that candidate/political philosophy in that state) that your vote doesn't count. Does your vote count even in a purely popular vote process where the decision to elect somebody is by a wide margin?
I still say every vote counts. What you are debating here is what it counts for.
Your vote is not ignored in the electoral college system, Furthermore, there are numerous changes that can be made to modify the winner-take-all system that you have a stronger voice in changing... if you care to take up that political challenge. Abolition of the electoral college doesn't have to be the only option here.
This is where you have to have "virgin" developers working on the software that is being developed. In other words, the software can only be developed based on specifications and not on actually observing the software in operation... or worse yet reading the de-compiled/disassembled software (and even worse still, proprietary source code) that made the product.
I do think EULA's that insist upon a "no reverse engineering" clause ought to be found illegal... and on that point I don't know of any firm legal precedent on that topic to suggest that such a clause is enforceable.
On the other hand, I know of no open source projects (I may be mistaken... but they are few and far between at most) that works hard to separate those who are doing the development work and those who are obtaining the specification via observation and documentation. This may have also been a huge problem the the BNETD case as well. Once you have been "contaminated" with the original software or device, it becomes much harder to prove that you are merely providing interoperability.
There are private universities and private sources of funding for research... and frankly I don't have a problem with a private university with a private grant taking some research and trying to make a profit from it in some way. Universities are by definition where you can find a concentration of incredibly bright people and talent that often has untapped potential.
In other words, such a situation merely is another way to establish an R&D department for a well-run corporation... and will also benefit the students of those professors (and often many students themselves) to participate in ground-breaking research.
The problem does come with public universities, and even more so when tax dollars that were confiscated at gunpoint from widows and orphans (try to convince me taxes are anything other than oppressive... I dare you) are used to fund research that is then used to make the researcher who benefited from that money the sole controller of that knowledge. Publicly funded research ought to belong to the public at large... and those who help to finance the work should also get the benefits from that research. On this point I completely agree... and placing such knowledge in the public domain is one of the ways that can and should happen.
I'm not entirely sure myself of what private research happening at public universities should be as open or not. It can be prudent policy to encourage private donors and benefactors to even such public institutions to help defray some of the costs of running those organizations. If there is such private donations, there ought to be a strong accounting wall set up to separate those "private" activities from the publicly funded activities (such as educational instruction and academic development). Better-run public universities do indeed have these fiscal barriers in place, but it is something that needs to be worked on... and watched for.
What good does the current patent system really do? Are there really garage tinkerers that actually make some real money off of some cool idea that hasn't been thought of before... and certified by the government? Are you sure?
Supposedly the current system is set up to "protect the little guy" from getting trampled over by a big, evil, rich, and mean mega-corporation that is scheming to steal the ideas from this stalwart and noble but perhaps naive individual inventor, or perhaps even small business. If you know anything about patent law at all, you also know that this is so far from the truth about the system that it hurts to even mention it.
I certainly know some very personal examples of the "lone inventor" who has been screwed over by the legal system... and I've even had employers who were taken to court over patent issues that were total nonsense... where the patent system was the source of the abuse, not the protection from abuse.
I don't think there is even a baby to throw out with the bathwater in this case. If the whole patent system were abolished, normal businesses who actually produce stuff would continue to do so. There would still be trade secret laws to protect ideas from being copied by competitors, and the lone inventor starting his own company to start making the cool device would still happen. Indeed, this lone inventor would be more likely hired at some larger company because of his ability to think and come up with ideas... knowing that there wouldn't have to be the huge legal mess to deal with patent issues.
I seriously don't see any down side to abolishing the patent system entirely, and I have far too many stories of people's lives that have been wrecked by the patent system to consider it actually doing any good at all. This isn't stories from the internet, but close friends and family members... and unfortunately personal experiences having to fight against patents where the patent claim is abusive and possibly illegal.
What good would even a reformed patent system offer?
While I generally agree with you that patents are nearly useless and certainly don't perform the task that they are designed to encourage (aka... promote the development of useful ideas), the issue here is:
If an employer decides to give you some sort of compensation for developing patentable ideas, how much should you be getting for that idea?
Not everybody views the patent system to be as corrupt as you do. Even if it may be broken and a horrible idea on the whole, it is the way business is done today... and unfortunately we do have to work within the system even if we want to get rid of it eventually.
I look at the compensation of the employee in this case as peanuts... on the notion that successfully pushing through an idea to become a patent is going to be paying far more in legal fees than the paltry $5k that is being offered. Why not at least offer the same amount of money that will be going to the patent attorney + filing fees (unless it is an in-house corporate attorney with experience in patent law).
Most patents that are filed in current business practice are defensive patents anyway. They don't intend to actually make money off of them, but they do intend to use them if a lawsuit is dumped in their direction and they can burn their opponent first. What that says about American business practices and business tort law is something best deserved for a whole other thread/article.
Only two states have a different voting method: Maine and Nebraska. And those are still winner-take-all but are modified to be decided at the congressional district level instead of at the state level.
Colorado experimented with a proportional voting system, but the referendum about it failed in the 2004 election. A few other states like California have also tried, but have also found it difficult for political parties to give up temporary advantages of the current system.