You could also count the local acceleration due to the mass of the ISS itself. That is not completely zero either, especially when NASA and its "partners" keep adding additional mass in the form of new modules.
Certainly it is something that would be important to take into consideration if you are trying to do some calculations for very low gravity research, such as metallurgy and other similar activities. Of course, this is but another reason why some consider the ISS platform to be a horrible way to do most of the "science" that it was originally claimed to be built for.
I would generally agree with this sentiment, however it would have been nice had the ISS been equipped with something like a "space drydock" facility or something similar.
For crying out loud, there is a real need to do in orbit repairs on the Space Shuttle, and the ISS would be an ideal way to test out such repair techniques rather than some sort of ad hoc patch job that is the current method.
Of course Skylab had nearly as much working space and volume as the current ISS configuration has right now... even with the addition of the current module. Imagine what the ISS could have been looking like had they been using Saturn V engines instead of the shuttle... at likely a fraction of the cost ass well.
As far as I can tell, the only real advantage of using a shuttle for ISS construction would be to bring a module back to the Earth for repairs. While this has certainly been done in the past (to bring back some satellites), that is a shuttle mission that has been underutilized.
I would agree that the sort of speech regulation that you are talking about is crossing the line, but you are missing the point of the parent in this case.
Far too often a "peacable" counter demonstration turns into something that is far more than just a few individuals exercising their ability to respond, but instead engage in activities that are in and of themselves illegal as well, such as vandalism, theft, and even murder/manslaughter. There reaches a point where police simply do need to step in an restore order when such people take advantage of such "free speech" opportunities and abuse that opportunity.
Also, as pointed out, you don't have a "right" to disrupt others who are also exercising their rights to assemble, nor insist that you gain entrance if those who are organizing an event don't want you to be there. Yet that is precisely what you seem to be advocating, NMerriam.
You are not free to give whatever money you want to any candidate you wish. This proves the point precisely, and it is not up to the federal government to determine eligibility of a particular candidate. Or at least it shouldn't.
McCain-Feingold and other similar kinds of campaign regulations are attempts explicitly to regulate speech, and it is but a small step from "politically neutral" sorts of regulations to things that are overtly political like what is happening in Russia and Venezuela. It is this kinds of speech regulation that the founding fathers were dearly worried about, as they had seen similar kinds of regulations of speech coming from the English government, both during the late 18th Century as well as earlier in British history.
When the constitution says "congress shall make no law..." what happens when a law is made? Should you even respect that law, as a citizen? At the very least, isn't the role of civil disobedience an appropriate means to demonstrate the absurdity of that law?
This would be a perfect constitutional challenge for these laws too!
Frankly, I hope the FEC decides to go after Cobert, as this would slam shut the idea that these kind of elections can be regulated in this fashion. McCain-Feingold is certainly one of those laws that needs to be declared unconstitutional, and should never have been passed or signed into law in the first place.
There is no reason why Cobert should be in trouble at all, or even not win the Presidency, unless he doesn't meet the constitutional requirements of being a "native-born citizen", is over the age of 40, and other requirements spelled out in Article I. But that still shouldn't land him in jail, it would simply make any votes for him cast as invalid/spoiled.
This is just too many lawyers who are concerned about saving their behinds rather than trying to stand up for things they know are correct principles.
I would have to agree... although you can't forget people like Philo Farnsworth either. Fortunately he has had some high schools named after him, but he still isn't as well regarded as he should be. Besides inventing a common household appliance that is in nearly every home around the world, he also came up with some of the original line of research that Dr. Bussard used to follow up on when the Polywell was built.
Farnsworth was a researcher who knew vacuum tube electronics better than nearly any other engineer/researcher that I've ever read about, and was in a position to see the potential of taking the same knowledge that he used to build the first scanning CRTs (Cathode-ray tubes... aka the monitor you may be reading this post with, if it isn't LED or plasma) and in turn figure out how to make a fusion device with the same technology. Unfortunately, people with the skill sets necessary to explore other concepts from vacuum tubes simply don't exist any more, as it isn't a "cool" or interesting area of research any more.
Bussard certainly knew about Farnsworth, and his Polywell reactor was designed explicitly to overcome some of the limitations of the IEC reactor that Farnsworth built, but to follow the same general line of reasoning for how fusion could occur. Polywell certainly is a different concept, but it is something that has been built on previous research.
While I havn't been quite as fanatical as you seem to be on the idea of Polywell/IEC fusion (I know, Polywell isn't exactly the same as IEC, but they are related concepts), but I have been following this general line of research for a number of years now as well. There certainly have been some amazing advances by Dr. Bussard, and I hope that his research team can carry on his legacy as well.
It will be very interesting if they can get the WB 7 going. It seems as though there were two huge issues with the WB 6 that they need to worry about with the WB 7... one is comparatively easy and the other is simply having a good source of money to help out.
Quality Control - I have no doubt that if/when a Polywell reactor goes into some sort of mass production situation, this is something that can be easily dealt with, but for a bunch of researchers using comparatively simple hand tools, this is something that is often difficult to achieve. Essentially process engineering, the components of the Polywell reactor have several components with low tolerances for error and a high need for consistency of each part. This is nothing compared to microprocessors or even optical storage devices, so it is certainly something in the realm of possibility, but something that Bussard wasn't ready for when he first started out. This is also one area where a modest amount of financial investment can be useful, if you get the proper machining tools necessary to create the parts in the first place. It is also a good example of how you need to draw from outside of academia if you want a project like this to succeed, as any good engineer who has worked in a manufacturing plant would be able to offer some good suggestions on how to improve over what they have done so far.
Raw Power - That is energy writ large, or simple mega-watt-hours of power from the local electrical company. Bussard used a capacitor bank to power his devices, and then ran those devices for a short period of time. But it takes time to charge up those capacitors, and more raw power can make that happen faster, as can a larger capacitor bank. It does get tricky when you are in the megafarad realm of capacitance, but nothing that a good electrical engineer can't solve if they have money to fix the problem. This is one problem that deep pockets can solve easier than somebody on a shoestring budget.
I think Bussard had the costs down pretty well for this domain as well, and it is on the order of magnitude that you can legitimately say that it can be accomplished, but hasn't yet because this is a tough science/engineering problem that is more than something somebody in a garage hasn't been able to do yet.
I don't know where this "$2 million" for a proof of concept comes from, but that is on the order of magnitude that can be found at an ordinary land-grant university. If a fusion concept could be developed for that amount of money, it would likely have already been done. For that reason, I am highly skeptical of anybody claiming an easy road to fusion unless they are building on research done by people like Feynmann, Farnsworth, and Bussard in particular. Bussard was very much indebted to those who came before him, and he certainly understood the physics of the Farnsworth IEC devices completely.... something that I don't find even from most Physics PhDs who study fusion research... for example.
If there is another approach to fusion besides the Tokamak, I certainly am interested in the idea. I certainly think the Tokamak is a dead-end research line, where the billions spent in that direction could have been much more productively spent elsewhere. Certainly some good research has come from it, but it has also chewed up far too many promising grad students who had the brains to study other concepts and make some genuine breakthroughs as well.
I said nothing explicitly about the constitutionality of the EPA, but the same logic that you are applying here could also be extended substantially further.
Does sulfur dioxide produced in Chinese power plants affect Hawaii or even Oregon? Does toxic waste dumped into the Ganges River affect Australia?
You know the answer to that one, and certainly these issues are something that have a broader scope to them than can even be addressed by a single nation, even one as large as the United States of America.
But I do have a strong opinion about somebody extending the constitution way beyond its intended limits and trying to impose legislation through judicial action, which is precisely what is being suggested by this lawsuit. And I do believe that some actions that are performed by the EPA may in fact be deemed unconstutional, and certainly EPA interference in local matters.... when good faith efforts are being done to help improve the local environment by local governments... is often counter productive to the overall goal of having a clean environment for everybody.
It is far and away much better for elected officials to make major policy changes than to rely upon unelected bureaucrats who don't have any accountability to anybody other than themselves and some bribed officials above them. And that is often what I've seen the EPA do far too often.
From both a liberal as well as conservative viewpoint, is precisely lawsuits like this.
For those of a conservative viewpoint, this is precisely the kind of thing that has been the worst of nightmares regarding the debate, where this is an attempt to broaden the power of the federal government and to enact legislation through judicial case law rather than through a body like the U.S. Congress.
From a strict constitutionalist viewpoint, state regulations are precisely what was envisioned by the founding fathers for issues like this. When faddish things like Global Warming (and concern about Global Warming is a fad right now, at least from a political perspective) come up, they should be debated by individual states and citizens of those states.
If left to develop on its own, without somebody crying "fowl" and demanding federal intervention, this "laboratory of American states" is precisely what is envisioned by the founders to see how political ideas like regulation of industries for CO2 gases was intended to develop. Legislation based upon the current wind of political thought was something the early founders of the American Republic feared the most, and it was intended to be a long and difficult process for a good reason, particularly when it governed the actions of individual citizens in relationship to each other, such as this sort of regulation is doing.
From a politically conservative viewpoint, you can still suggest environmental legislation. There is common ground that can come from this sort of debate and help us to genuinely protect the environment. But you need to frame it from a conservative viewpoint in terms of stewardship, liability, and responsibility. Cut the emotional garbage out about rising sea levels, rising temperatures, and a fear of the future. If you produce pollution, you need to clean up your own messes and be nice to your neighbors. You also shouldn't be wasteful of those resources that God has given to you, because ultimately you will be held responsible for your actions before HIM. Even if you dismiss God as a human construct, there is still the more vague "being held responsible by humanity as a whole" that still applies on some sort of level. I certainly don't mind government regulation that helps to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources and lowering of a trade deficit.
I also realize that some of this is about legislation that has already been through the meat grinder of Washington D.C., and these states are "merely" asking for those laws to be enforced. A problem here is that the legislation was deliberately vague, and the actual enforcement of these laws left to such broad interpretation, that nearly anything could be suggested in terms of what they really meant or how they can be put together. This lawsuit is a political move to force these national regulations (which arguably may not even be constitutional) to conform to a specific viewpoint that runs counter to the current presidential administration. A U.S. President shouldn't have even had this sort of authority delegated to him in the first place, but of course those pushing in support of this lawsuit already knew that, didn't they? So why should it be moved to the authority of nine men in black robes?
It is poor law and shouldn't have been enacted in the first place, no matter how lofty the goals were made. Going to the courts is just going to make an awful law even worse. It would be far better to go to the national legislature (aka Congress) and get new legislation passed that deals with this issue, if that is the ultimate goal.
I highly doubt that any substantial copyright extension in terms of term duration is going to happen, at least in America, without a huge political fight happening at the same time. Certainly it is getting to the point of absurdity, and it is possible that if a bill comes up before congress to change the length of the copyright term, that it might even result in a reduction of the length of the copyright instead of an increase... if only because the issue will be put before congressmen with people who are being harmed by lengthy copyright terms.
I for one favor the 17+17 copyright term (aka 17 years + 17 years if the copyright is "renewed" formally). A "compromise" solution for those requesting a copyright extension may only end up keeping current legislation in place and not permitting an extension at all.
This becomes even more interesting when you consider that some musicians have been able to, successfully, sue for copyright infringement based upon copying six notes from another song. They didn't even have the same tempo or rhythm, just the same six notes played in order. So how many combinations of six notes can you come up with that havn't already been done before?
I thought that this was an absurd legal opinion, and if really pushed it may eventually be overturned... at least with some future court case that tries the same kind of stunt. Still, it does beg the question to ask when something ought to enter the public domain.
Another interesting thing to think about: The King James Version of the Christian Bible, who some suspect may have had parts written/translated by William Shakespeare, is still under copyright. I admit that this is an exception among books, but doesn't this seem to be something that should have its copyright expire and simply placed in the hands of the rest of mankind to work with, rather than trying to see if you might step on somebody's toes accidentally in a legal sense?
I don't know how this applies to UK law, but in America that would still be illegal. It would be called a "derivative work", and you would still have to get the copyright permission from the original photographer in order to publicly display such an image. In the case of a painting of a photograph, you would need the copyright permission of both the photographer as well as the artist who made the painting.
There aren't easy "loopholes" for copyright law, and attempts to do so like you are mentioning are going to get you into legal trouble.... perhaps even more so because you are demonstrating that you know something about copyright law but are demonstrating ignorance at the whole of the law. Or deliberately flaunting that law.
The whole point of making the 6502 was to put microprocessor power into the hands of the masses
The whole point of the 6502 as well as the 8080 chip was to create a device that could serve the emerging calculator market. Several large contracts landed for the Intel hardware (aka the 8080 chip and the sister 8008 chip) and Motorola was left hanging in the wind trying to figure out how to dump a supply of 6502 chips.
The reason why Woz and presumably Peddle choose the 6502 chip was cost.... it was incredibly cheap (at the time) and could get the job done. In fact, that seems to be virtually the only reason reason it was selected, perhaps besides the fact it could also be purchased in comparatively large quantities.
As a matter of fact, many other micros of the era did end up using the 8080 chip set, including a now famous operating system known as CP/M (and the systems that ran CP/M) that eventually after a torturous and perhaps dubious route ended up becoming what we know today as Windows Vista.
Still, I would have to agree that there was more than just Woz that were involved with the development of the microcomputer, and I would give far more credit to the Altair 8800 and Forrest Mims if there had to be somebody to really point at. Even this is technically a dubious point for something as complex as a microcomputer, but it is a place to start. Certainly Mims, Peddle, and Woz were contemporary engineers during a very exciting period in the history of computing, and they all deserve credit for pushing the industry in new directions when such innovation was needed.
Chuck Peddle was a contemporary to Woz, I will admit.
As far as which computer, the Pet or the Apple II was a superior computer, that could be debated. It was at the time and it will likely be done in the future. Both computers did rather well, although the Apple II did penetrate the business market much more strongly than nearly any Commodore computer.
But to imply, as you seem to here, that Woz somehow "stole" the ideas from Chuck Peddle is simply ludicrous. They were business competitors and made competing products that IMHO were of similar value.
Wozniak was the "first out of the gate" and also came up with the idea that a microcomputer should have something more than a cassette tape mass storage device. There were several innovations in the Apple II that Commodore in fact "copied" from Apple, including the graphics capabilities and disc controllers.
More importantly, Apple Computer survived the introduction of the IBM-PC, and Commodore didn't. Had the Amiga been more successful (better marketed... I think it was a superior product to the Macintosh), it would be something completely different today. But this is sour grapes at best.
If this was his only claim to fame.... I'd be much more sympathetic of your point of view.
But Woz did far more than just hand assemble BASIC. Adding BASIC to the Apple II was not really where the innovation was recognized, nor what was the major accomplishment to developing the Apple II either. A floppy disc controller using just a couple of chips was far more impressive, as was the chip count for the original Apple II motherboard.
And BTW, not "everyone coded in assembly or machine language" in the 1970's, as you implied. Yes, nearly everybody who was a professional software developer or computer engineer (the term really didn't exist then, but there were people who did this) could develop software using an assembler, but it wasn't nearly as pervasive as you seem to indicate. FORTRAN assemblers had been used extensively since the early 1960's, and this was the era of PDP-11's and IBM mainframes running COBOL. Most software developers did their stuff in high level languages and only dabbled in assembly when critical timing issues needed to be dealt with, or for system programming.
Or perhaps designing a computer motherboard in an era when discrete transistors were still commonplace is something that you think nearly anybody can do too? Much of what Woz accomplished is dismissed now in part because many have seen his designed and tried to emulate that philosophy in other areas... now that somebody has done it first.
Nothing about computers in general is really that difficult.... if you are dealing with it one piece at a time. The BASIC interpreter is but one piece of a much larger picture. But the real trick is putting together the whole package. And Woz was able to get that accomplished in an era when it simply wasn't really done. Those other individuals like Nolan Bushnell and others who were able to put together whole computers did so, but it was a very small handful, and certainly wasn't "everybody" in the computer industry.
Woz never even had a chance to be boss of Apple, or even head the engineering division. He was essentially kicked out of the company when he was trying to "rock the boat" a little too strongly, primarily because Apple wouldn't let him publish engineering notes about some of the equipment he was making, among other things. There was also friction within Apple because he didn't really want to be the boss.... he just wanted room to continue inventing things and making stuff, as a genuine engineer.
Among other things he accomplished, after he made his millions, he went back to school and finished his degree, then became a school teacher. Teaching 5th grade, of all things. And that isn't relevant to future engineers? He also started a summer camp teaching computer basics to grade school children. This is almost like Elvis Presley becoming a high school music teacher.
I'm not saying that he has become a phenomenal success like Edison to keep turning out invention after invention, but I'd say that he has had a pretty full and amazing life.... something far more interesting than most people ever have in a lifetime. And he does the things he really wants to do, ignoring "conventional wisdom".
BTW, Woz did continue to make some rather amazing things while he was still a full-time engineer at Apple, including an amazing "controller on a chip" called the IWM - integrated "Woz" machine, that was on the Apple IIc. Had he been given more freedom to develop other products and ideas, I can't even imagine what else he could have accomplished, but that really wasn't something that happened. Woz is an engineer, not a businessman, and that shows. But he did far more than produce a single invention, and he did know his technology cold.
When was the last time that you assembled a complete operating system (even for an 8-bit computer) by hand with nothing other than a pad of paper and a pencil? Woz did that for both the Apple I and the Apple II, BTW. I doubt there are many software developers who would even know how to start such a task, much less even accomplish it.
I take it that you never saw the original Apple ][ technical reference manual
You could buy the thing for about $10 from an Apple dealership, or even get it "free" when you purchased an Apple II.
It had literally a complete technical description of the Apple II, from a full memory map, tutorial on 6502 assembly, user guide to the "mini assembler" built into the Apple II, 6502 opcodes, pin out diagrams for the expansion bus and what each pin represented, "API" hooks... heck the full source code for the operating system fully commented, interrupt vectors, and much more. Essentially anything you ever wanted to know about the Apple II, but never thought you would ever want to know, including weird quirks that were clearly unique to the Apple II design.
I do not know of a single computer manufacturer that offers such a document for their systems at any price, much less for essentially the cost to print the thing in the first place. And Woz is the person to give 100% credit for the existence of this document in the first place. IMHO this openness to the architecture is precisely why the Apple II caught on and was as much of a success as it became, encouraging 3rd party development of their system. The closest you get to this from Microsoft is the MSDN-Universal license, but that is an annual subscription that costs thousands of dollars each year.... per developer. Not what I consider to be something open about what you are doing, and even that falls quite short of what I was describing (on admittedly a much simplier computer and OS).
What sucked was when Woz was marginalized with the Apple corporate hierarchy and increasingly pushed onto side projects that did not have anything to do with the "mainline" company products. I don't know how much of this had to do with Jobs, or if it was something that came from the MBA's that eventually took over Apple Computer and nearly killed it (that Jobs has been steadily removing since, but ever so slowly). There are several reasons why Woz is not the VP of Engineering at Apple, not the least of which is that Woz didn't really want to be a paper pusher.
I'm not crying for Woz in the sense that he did get compensated handsomely for what work he did with Apple Computer, and widely recognized for what he did accomplish. But what I'm trying to say is that the current corporate culture at Apple and its friendliness toward ideas like F/OSS has nothing to do with Woz... or if it does, it is because Woz was one of those who pushed for open platforms and transparency of interfaces. Something that Apple is notorious at not providing. Note that it was "news" that sometime in the future Apple will provide the API for the iPhone. Yeah, right! And why is that even news again?
As far as the anti-capitalism sentimentality that comes from those like Richard Stallman, that is something that is strongly pervasive throughout the whole of the open source movement. There are many who simply "don't get it". In defense of Stallman, I will acknowledge that he does fight for the ability to at least earn a living off of developing hardware and software, and rails against "non-commercial use only" licenses for several sound reasons. But I do understand where Woz is coming from for those who don't understand the difference between open architectures and free (as in beer) software. Or that it isn't simply one or the other situation of completely closed and sealed environments like the Xbox vs. something completely open like the OLPC laptop.
I'm going to echo the AC response to this posting, and re-emphasis an unanswered question I've posted on earlier threads about Jammie:
Is this the RIAA you are talking about, or is this the supposed pirates?
Or more specific and to the point, assuming either compensatory claim is made (either the $200,000 fine or a much reduced $200 fine) will any of the actual musicians who produced the music Jammie is alleged to have offered to be copied receive even a single penny from the settlement? Does the RIAA even have an accounting mechanism to determine who should get the money, presuming that Jammie is being convicted of a copyright violation of several explicit songs that can be named by both title and artist, including song writer and performer?
If the RIAA is truly acting as an agent for and in behalf of these musicians and seeking compensation directly for them in terms of violating the copyright of these genuine artists, I would completely agree with your statement you have made. I do not condone Jammie, but at the same time I question the legal standing of the RIAA, who only represents the record labels... and even that indirectly. A class-action lawsuit (which this court case seems to fit the rough definition of one... the class being defined as the musicians whose music was distributed illegally by Jammie) in any other industry would be considering these settlement terms to be unconscionable and unconstitutional just from the standpoint that those "harmed" have not been fairly compensated at all. It would be like an ACLU lawsuit where the lawyers kept 100% of the settlement.
All this said, there should be some mechanism in place where an ordinary musician can actually make some kind of financial compensation for electronic distribution of their music. From nearly everything I've read regarding the current state of the music industry, this mechanism simply is not in place at all, so there is little incentive for new and emerging musicians to really care about the RIAA cartel. By far the worst thing a new musician can do is sign a contract with an RIAA company, except for the hope that you can eventually hit the major leagues of the top musicians. But don't expect the label to assist you in that journey.
American Idol, Pop Idol, and other similar music competition are a symptom of an industry falling apart: The system is so rigid and unable to be able to find new talent that they have to go through gimicks like a national talent search. For every Ruben Stoddard and Kelly Clarkston that has been found by the major labels, hundreds of otherwise good musicians were passed over and thrown overboard, many of whom could have earned a professional wage to perform music, even if it wasn't necessarily living life as millionaires. It is this level of talent that the current RIAA system has completely failed.
Please explain this one in detail, unless you are truly without a clue on how microwave transmissions occur.
The microwaves in your typical microwave oven are tuned to the natural resonance frequency of water.... which is why they happen to do a good job of cooking food. However, if you want to transmit power through the atmosphere, this is precisely the worst possible frequency to use, as the atmosphere would absorb all of the energy in the clouds as heat.
If you are worried about RF waves bombarding you, please move out of any industrial/post-industrial society right now and run! Seriously!
The engineers who design these things would have a bit better control over not only a "safe" frequency, but also where this power is being beamed. Safeguards to stop "hackers" from burning the landscape... even if it were possible... would certainly be put into place and be designed to simply turn the power transmission off in the worst case. A hacker might be able to "shut down" the transmission, but they couldn't possibly be able to cause any real damage otherwise.
If you flew in a private plane through one of these beams, and assuming it was dangerous to do that kind of action, I'm sure the FAA would be involved in terms of regulating where these power beams would be located and it would be well marked on aviation charts. Basically you would have to be an idiot to fly into one of these beams... not something necessarily unheard of either. I've seen private airplanes fly into municipal-grade 4th of July fireworks deliberately so they could recreate a WWII scene of flying through flak at night.
Being married to someone gives me no special legal rights, except inheritance (and that part should be removed as well). All marriage means is that two individuals promise each other eternal loyalty. Nothing else.
Being married is from a certain point of view another form of a corporation. To those "inside" of the marriage, financial transactions are essentially irrelevant, as are most liability issues as well. All that matters are how fiscal and liability issues affect the marriage as a whole. Just like any sort of corporate partnership, a marriage can have "pre-nuptial" arrangements, that is just dodging the issue for if/when a marriage breaks up.
The real issue for homosexuals is that they want to have those kind of benefits that come from a marriage, and are seeking official sanction when they are living together to form such a partnership. It is a wonder, therefore, that you don't see more homosexual couples trying to simply form a more traditional joint-stock corporation of jointly held assets like houses, automobiles, furniture, and even insurance policies.
I don't know why you want to deride the concept of a marriage to strip it of these kinds of benefits, but at the same time you are missing why a marriage occurs. Most young couples who are in lust with each other usually don't think about the legal implications of the marriage, but that is mostly because it is those who have been married for 30 years are the ones who decide to take the issue much more seriously and try to protect their grandkids when they pass laws about marriage.
Marriage has a critical place in legal codes and textbooks, and it is you who is mistaken about why the state needs to get involved in deciding who may or may not be married. Just as the state is involved on who can enter into a corporate relationship of any kind.
While this discussion certainly is interesting from a fiction writer's standpoint to use the concept of a human/artificial person union of some sort, I think David Levy is stroking something here to drum up support for a new book or do something else of a publicity stunt seeking attention.
This simply won't happen any time soon, because Artificial Intelligence or any other sort of artificial organism including genetically engineered "beings" is centuries away.
I speak about Artificial Intelligence from a position of authority, as I am a software engineer and very much informed about what the current "state of the art" is about this field. Levy, Minsky, and several other MIT professors have hit the drumbeat of the potential of AI, and that is all it has been for decades. There was some very interesting initial proof that eventually something like true Turing-test AI could be developed eventually, but so far that has been something far more along the lines of science fiction than anything that has ever been developed in a computer lab. Even research into things like neural networks and "expert systems", with perhaps systems like A.L.I.C.E. proving to be quite interesting, they still fall well short of the mark to even be compared to the intelligence of a dog or cat. At best they show the intelligence of a Venus Flytrap. I'm serious here. Human-level intelligence is not even something that can be realistically extrapolated from any kind of AI research at all.
I'm not suggesting that somebody might come up with an Einsteinian-type reorganization of the field of AI that could actually get us there, but that person does not currently exist. Right now AI researchers are at the technological equivalent of medieval alchemists who are trying to turn lead into gold. Unfortunately they are going down the wrong path on how to accomplish the task of achieving this goal of true machine sentience, and I expect that it will be centuries before the task will be accomplished. Also, it will come from some other completely different field than current AI researchers, just as lead-gold alchemy finally did occur with nuclear physicists, not chemists.
I'm not even sure if Von Neumann architecture (aka CPUs like exist on most computers at the moment, even if hybridized with other ideas) is even capable of AI. There are some strong reasons to think it is not capable and there may even be a mathematical proof demonstrating that idea.
Or more to the point here: This is putting the cart before the horse. Get the AI or "artificial person" built first, and then debate whether a marriage with that person is something that will happen later. I highly doubt that this is something that can even happen in the first place at all, and certainly won't happen if true AI never exists.
This is an explicit set of laws that are by design written to seek prosecution against Muslims, Mormons, and any other religion that does not conform to the "standard Christian" philosophies. As to why they are still enforced in the 21st Century is mind boggling, but I don't know of any state that has enacted an anti-polygamy statute in the 21st Century.
I disagree with you that marriage is something that has been gradually invented over the years. Marriage, in whatever form you can imagine (gay, plural, monogamous, group, etc.) has been a part of human culture since as long as historical records have been kept, and some strong evidence that some sort of marriage customs occurred in paleolithic times. It is a part of who we are and how our brains are wired, and a part of our evolution as a species. The formalisms may have changed, I will agree.
And how a marriage is performed, what happens at a funeral, and childhood introduction rites are some of the most fundamental measures of a culture that can possibly be found in any society. They are also something that varies quite substantially even within a single nation-state if you start to note differences in religious philosohpies. Comparing a Jewish, Catholic, and Mormon wedding, for instance, will lead to some huge and stark contrasts over what is said, what is worn by the officiator and marriage couple, and the physical actions of all involved. Yet in all cases it is a celebration by the families involved that such a union did occur. I've attended Wiccan weddings and even a "geek" wedding where the wedding guests "logged in" before the ceremony that were quite interested.
Another nearly universal theme about weddings is that in nearly all cases the couple getting married has to seek permission from some outside authority. This can be a tribal elder, the priest, or county clerk. Parents are usually involved in the decision making as well, even if there is no "legal" requirement for such involvement. Those that choose to ignore this "authority" usually have some substantial consequences for ignoring such permission, either social stigma or legal consequences upon death or dissolving the "marriage". The forms and consequences vary from one culture to another, but the broad picture has been nearly the same in nearly all cases.
Marriage is one of the things that simply defines what it means to be human. Don't get caught up in the details, as that is not the real issue here.
I have tried to push for FA status on articles, and that is as much political as nearly anything else on Wikipedia.
I'll admit that a very controversial article will have its own set of problems, and a very well written article is more likely to get the FA status, but it is still something that has to go through several rounds of edits before it gets to that point, with a nearly constant bar-raising over what is indeed something worthy of FA status.
It is too bad that New Horizons can't get to Saturn in a "grand tour" arrangement with Pluto, but I do understand that such situations are rather unusual. The Voyager opportunity was rather unusual in terms of how the planets seemed to line up for a perfect low delta-v opportunity to visit all of them. I'm not sure how hard a Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto arrangement would be, but I can't imagine it happens that often either... I'm not ready to do the math to predict the resonance of those three bodies at the moment. An Earth-Jupiter-Pluto arrangement happens a bit more often, and that I do understand.
Even so, it is seemingly common now for probes to get to Jupiter, where a visit like New Horizons getting to the Jovian system is not only not front page news, I'm not even sure it got into my hometown newspaper or made it onto the television news. This is good for science in general, as scientists can get their job done now to study these objects without becoming rock stars like Carl Sagan. (multiple meanings of that term, BTW) Unfortunately it is also jading the public and congress that missions like this have been done and all of the science that is needed for space exploration has been done. Senator Proxmire's legacy at attacking NASA and being highly critical of its funding is finally starting to pay off, unfortunately.
That may be true, so it means that the existence of the RIAA adds yet another layer of responsibility (and hands in the cookie jar from the settlement) for the recording artist and songwriter to make anything resembling a profit.
Or to put this much more clearly: Will the performer & songwriter (separate copyright issues here, even if it is the same person) of any of the songs that were supposedly "infringed" upon?
Remember, at least for American law (which applies here), copyright is granted "to promote the useful arts and sciences" (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8).
If I could be convinced that:
The RIAA is really acting as an agent for and in behalf of the artist themselves (aka like the EFF or the ACLU does when they represent clients)
The RIAA is only accepting reasonable "attorney's fees" for prosecuting this case
The recording labels themselves, if they get any money out of this, would again be a reasonable percentage of this settlement, with the lions share of the money going to the artists themselves.
I would support this kind of action against would be violators of copyright law. And to make sure that such actions are also consistently done in all similar situations.
But that does not appear to be the case here, as all the RIAA really cares to accomplish is to scare people into thinking they may be next, and to extort money from them as a settlement rather than take this to trial.
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You could also count the local acceleration due to the mass of the ISS itself. That is not completely zero either, especially when NASA and its "partners" keep adding additional mass in the form of new modules.
Certainly it is something that would be important to take into consideration if you are trying to do some calculations for very low gravity research, such as metallurgy and other similar activities. Of course, this is but another reason why some consider the ISS platform to be a horrible way to do most of the "science" that it was originally claimed to be built for.
I would generally agree with this sentiment, however it would have been nice had the ISS been equipped with something like a "space drydock" facility or something similar.
For crying out loud, there is a real need to do in orbit repairs on the Space Shuttle, and the ISS would be an ideal way to test out such repair techniques rather than some sort of ad hoc patch job that is the current method.
Of course Skylab had nearly as much working space and volume as the current ISS configuration has right now... even with the addition of the current module. Imagine what the ISS could have been looking like had they been using Saturn V engines instead of the shuttle... at likely a fraction of the cost ass well.
As far as I can tell, the only real advantage of using a shuttle for ISS construction would be to bring a module back to the Earth for repairs. While this has certainly been done in the past (to bring back some satellites), that is a shuttle mission that has been underutilized.
I would agree that the sort of speech regulation that you are talking about is crossing the line, but you are missing the point of the parent in this case.
Far too often a "peacable" counter demonstration turns into something that is far more than just a few individuals exercising their ability to respond, but instead engage in activities that are in and of themselves illegal as well, such as vandalism, theft, and even murder/manslaughter. There reaches a point where police simply do need to step in an restore order when such people take advantage of such "free speech" opportunities and abuse that opportunity.
Also, as pointed out, you don't have a "right" to disrupt others who are also exercising their rights to assemble, nor insist that you gain entrance if those who are organizing an event don't want you to be there. Yet that is precisely what you seem to be advocating, NMerriam.
You are not free to give whatever money you want to any candidate you wish. This proves the point precisely, and it is not up to the federal government to determine eligibility of a particular candidate. Or at least it shouldn't.
McCain-Feingold and other similar kinds of campaign regulations are attempts explicitly to regulate speech, and it is but a small step from "politically neutral" sorts of regulations to things that are overtly political like what is happening in Russia and Venezuela. It is this kinds of speech regulation that the founding fathers were dearly worried about, as they had seen similar kinds of regulations of speech coming from the English government, both during the late 18th Century as well as earlier in British history.
When the constitution says "congress shall make no law..." what happens when a law is made? Should you even respect that law, as a citizen? At the very least, isn't the role of civil disobedience an appropriate means to demonstrate the absurdity of that law?
This would be a perfect constitutional challenge for these laws too!
Frankly, I hope the FEC decides to go after Cobert, as this would slam shut the idea that these kind of elections can be regulated in this fashion. McCain-Feingold is certainly one of those laws that needs to be declared unconstitutional, and should never have been passed or signed into law in the first place.
There is no reason why Cobert should be in trouble at all, or even not win the Presidency, unless he doesn't meet the constitutional requirements of being a "native-born citizen", is over the age of 40, and other requirements spelled out in Article I. But that still shouldn't land him in jail, it would simply make any votes for him cast as invalid/spoiled.
This is just too many lawyers who are concerned about saving their behinds rather than trying to stand up for things they know are correct principles.
I would have to agree... although you can't forget people like Philo Farnsworth either. Fortunately he has had some high schools named after him, but he still isn't as well regarded as he should be. Besides inventing a common household appliance that is in nearly every home around the world, he also came up with some of the original line of research that Dr. Bussard used to follow up on when the Polywell was built.
Farnsworth was a researcher who knew vacuum tube electronics better than nearly any other engineer/researcher that I've ever read about, and was in a position to see the potential of taking the same knowledge that he used to build the first scanning CRTs (Cathode-ray tubes... aka the monitor you may be reading this post with, if it isn't LED or plasma) and in turn figure out how to make a fusion device with the same technology. Unfortunately, people with the skill sets necessary to explore other concepts from vacuum tubes simply don't exist any more, as it isn't a "cool" or interesting area of research any more.
Bussard certainly knew about Farnsworth, and his Polywell reactor was designed explicitly to overcome some of the limitations of the IEC reactor that Farnsworth built, but to follow the same general line of reasoning for how fusion could occur. Polywell certainly is a different concept, but it is something that has been built on previous research.
It will be very interesting if they can get the WB 7 going. It seems as though there were two huge issues with the WB 6 that they need to worry about with the WB 7... one is comparatively easy and the other is simply having a good source of money to help out.
I think Bussard had the costs down pretty well for this domain as well, and it is on the order of magnitude that you can legitimately say that it can be accomplished, but hasn't yet because this is a tough science/engineering problem that is more than something somebody in a garage hasn't been able to do yet.
I don't know where this "$2 million" for a proof of concept comes from, but that is on the order of magnitude that can be found at an ordinary land-grant university. If a fusion concept could be developed for that amount of money, it would likely have already been done. For that reason, I am highly skeptical of anybody claiming an easy road to fusion unless they are building on research done by people like Feynmann, Farnsworth, and Bussard in particular. Bussard was very much indebted to those who came before him, and he certainly understood the physics of the Farnsworth IEC devices completely.... something that I don't find even from most Physics PhDs who study fusion research... for example.
If there is another approach to fusion besides the Tokamak, I certainly am interested in the idea. I certainly think the Tokamak is a dead-end research line, where the billions spent in that direction could have been much more productively spent elsewhere. Certainly some good research has come from it, but it has also chewed up far too many promising grad students who had the brains to study other concepts and make some genuine breakthroughs as well.
I said nothing explicitly about the constitutionality of the EPA, but the same logic that you are applying here could also be extended substantially further.
Does sulfur dioxide produced in Chinese power plants affect Hawaii or even Oregon? Does toxic waste dumped into the Ganges River affect Australia?
You know the answer to that one, and certainly these issues are something that have a broader scope to them than can even be addressed by a single nation, even one as large as the United States of America.
But I do have a strong opinion about somebody extending the constitution way beyond its intended limits and trying to impose legislation through judicial action, which is precisely what is being suggested by this lawsuit. And I do believe that some actions that are performed by the EPA may in fact be deemed unconstutional, and certainly EPA interference in local matters.... when good faith efforts are being done to help improve the local environment by local governments... is often counter productive to the overall goal of having a clean environment for everybody.
It is far and away much better for elected officials to make major policy changes than to rely upon unelected bureaucrats who don't have any accountability to anybody other than themselves and some bribed officials above them. And that is often what I've seen the EPA do far too often.
From both a liberal as well as conservative viewpoint, is precisely lawsuits like this.
For those of a conservative viewpoint, this is precisely the kind of thing that has been the worst of nightmares regarding the debate, where this is an attempt to broaden the power of the federal government and to enact legislation through judicial case law rather than through a body like the U.S. Congress.
From a strict constitutionalist viewpoint, state regulations are precisely what was envisioned by the founding fathers for issues like this. When faddish things like Global Warming (and concern about Global Warming is a fad right now, at least from a political perspective) come up, they should be debated by individual states and citizens of those states.
If left to develop on its own, without somebody crying "fowl" and demanding federal intervention, this "laboratory of American states" is precisely what is envisioned by the founders to see how political ideas like regulation of industries for CO2 gases was intended to develop. Legislation based upon the current wind of political thought was something the early founders of the American Republic feared the most, and it was intended to be a long and difficult process for a good reason, particularly when it governed the actions of individual citizens in relationship to each other, such as this sort of regulation is doing.
From a politically conservative viewpoint, you can still suggest environmental legislation. There is common ground that can come from this sort of debate and help us to genuinely protect the environment. But you need to frame it from a conservative viewpoint in terms of stewardship, liability, and responsibility. Cut the emotional garbage out about rising sea levels, rising temperatures, and a fear of the future. If you produce pollution, you need to clean up your own messes and be nice to your neighbors. You also shouldn't be wasteful of those resources that God has given to you, because ultimately you will be held responsible for your actions before HIM. Even if you dismiss God as a human construct, there is still the more vague "being held responsible by humanity as a whole" that still applies on some sort of level. I certainly don't mind government regulation that helps to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources and lowering of a trade deficit.
I also realize that some of this is about legislation that has already been through the meat grinder of Washington D.C., and these states are "merely" asking for those laws to be enforced. A problem here is that the legislation was deliberately vague, and the actual enforcement of these laws left to such broad interpretation, that nearly anything could be suggested in terms of what they really meant or how they can be put together. This lawsuit is a political move to force these national regulations (which arguably may not even be constitutional) to conform to a specific viewpoint that runs counter to the current presidential administration. A U.S. President shouldn't have even had this sort of authority delegated to him in the first place, but of course those pushing in support of this lawsuit already knew that, didn't they? So why should it be moved to the authority of nine men in black robes?
It is poor law and shouldn't have been enacted in the first place, no matter how lofty the goals were made. Going to the courts is just going to make an awful law even worse. It would be far better to go to the national legislature (aka Congress) and get new legislation passed that deals with this issue, if that is the ultimate goal.
I highly doubt that any substantial copyright extension in terms of term duration is going to happen, at least in America, without a huge political fight happening at the same time. Certainly it is getting to the point of absurdity, and it is possible that if a bill comes up before congress to change the length of the copyright term, that it might even result in a reduction of the length of the copyright instead of an increase... if only because the issue will be put before congressmen with people who are being harmed by lengthy copyright terms.
I for one favor the 17+17 copyright term (aka 17 years + 17 years if the copyright is "renewed" formally). A "compromise" solution for those requesting a copyright extension may only end up keeping current legislation in place and not permitting an extension at all.
This becomes even more interesting when you consider that some musicians have been able to, successfully, sue for copyright infringement based upon copying six notes from another song. They didn't even have the same tempo or rhythm, just the same six notes played in order. So how many combinations of six notes can you come up with that havn't already been done before?
I thought that this was an absurd legal opinion, and if really pushed it may eventually be overturned... at least with some future court case that tries the same kind of stunt. Still, it does beg the question to ask when something ought to enter the public domain.
Another interesting thing to think about: The King James Version of the Christian Bible, who some suspect may have had parts written/translated by William Shakespeare, is still under copyright. I admit that this is an exception among books, but doesn't this seem to be something that should have its copyright expire and simply placed in the hands of the rest of mankind to work with, rather than trying to see if you might step on somebody's toes accidentally in a legal sense?
I don't know how this applies to UK law, but in America that would still be illegal. It would be called a "derivative work", and you would still have to get the copyright permission from the original photographer in order to publicly display such an image. In the case of a painting of a photograph, you would need the copyright permission of both the photographer as well as the artist who made the painting.
There aren't easy "loopholes" for copyright law, and attempts to do so like you are mentioning are going to get you into legal trouble.... perhaps even more so because you are demonstrating that you know something about copyright law but are demonstrating ignorance at the whole of the law. Or deliberately flaunting that law.
The whole point of the 6502 as well as the 8080 chip was to create a device that could serve the emerging calculator market. Several large contracts landed for the Intel hardware (aka the 8080 chip and the sister 8008 chip) and Motorola was left hanging in the wind trying to figure out how to dump a supply of 6502 chips.
The reason why Woz and presumably Peddle choose the 6502 chip was cost.... it was incredibly cheap (at the time) and could get the job done. In fact, that seems to be virtually the only reason reason it was selected, perhaps besides the fact it could also be purchased in comparatively large quantities.
As a matter of fact, many other micros of the era did end up using the 8080 chip set, including a now famous operating system known as CP/M (and the systems that ran CP/M) that eventually after a torturous and perhaps dubious route ended up becoming what we know today as Windows Vista.
Still, I would have to agree that there was more than just Woz that were involved with the development of the microcomputer, and I would give far more credit to the Altair 8800 and Forrest Mims if there had to be somebody to really point at. Even this is technically a dubious point for something as complex as a microcomputer, but it is a place to start. Certainly Mims, Peddle, and Woz were contemporary engineers during a very exciting period in the history of computing, and they all deserve credit for pushing the industry in new directions when such innovation was needed.
Chuck Peddle was a contemporary to Woz, I will admit.
As far as which computer, the Pet or the Apple II was a superior computer, that could be debated. It was at the time and it will likely be done in the future. Both computers did rather well, although the Apple II did penetrate the business market much more strongly than nearly any Commodore computer.
But to imply, as you seem to here, that Woz somehow "stole" the ideas from Chuck Peddle is simply ludicrous. They were business competitors and made competing products that IMHO were of similar value.
Wozniak was the "first out of the gate" and also came up with the idea that a microcomputer should have something more than a cassette tape mass storage device. There were several innovations in the Apple II that Commodore in fact "copied" from Apple, including the graphics capabilities and disc controllers.
More importantly, Apple Computer survived the introduction of the IBM-PC, and Commodore didn't. Had the Amiga been more successful (better marketed... I think it was a superior product to the Macintosh), it would be something completely different today. But this is sour grapes at best.
If this was his only claim to fame.... I'd be much more sympathetic of your point of view.
But Woz did far more than just hand assemble BASIC. Adding BASIC to the Apple II was not really where the innovation was recognized, nor what was the major accomplishment to developing the Apple II either. A floppy disc controller using just a couple of chips was far more impressive, as was the chip count for the original Apple II motherboard.
And BTW, not "everyone coded in assembly or machine language" in the 1970's, as you implied. Yes, nearly everybody who was a professional software developer or computer engineer (the term really didn't exist then, but there were people who did this) could develop software using an assembler, but it wasn't nearly as pervasive as you seem to indicate. FORTRAN assemblers had been used extensively since the early 1960's, and this was the era of PDP-11's and IBM mainframes running COBOL. Most software developers did their stuff in high level languages and only dabbled in assembly when critical timing issues needed to be dealt with, or for system programming.
Or perhaps designing a computer motherboard in an era when discrete transistors were still commonplace is something that you think nearly anybody can do too? Much of what Woz accomplished is dismissed now in part because many have seen his designed and tried to emulate that philosophy in other areas... now that somebody has done it first.
Nothing about computers in general is really that difficult.... if you are dealing with it one piece at a time. The BASIC interpreter is but one piece of a much larger picture. But the real trick is putting together the whole package. And Woz was able to get that accomplished in an era when it simply wasn't really done. Those other individuals like Nolan Bushnell and others who were able to put together whole computers did so, but it was a very small handful, and certainly wasn't "everybody" in the computer industry.
Have you ever read a biography about Woz?
Do you even know what you are talking about?
Woz never even had a chance to be boss of Apple, or even head the engineering division. He was essentially kicked out of the company when he was trying to "rock the boat" a little too strongly, primarily because Apple wouldn't let him publish engineering notes about some of the equipment he was making, among other things. There was also friction within Apple because he didn't really want to be the boss.... he just wanted room to continue inventing things and making stuff, as a genuine engineer.
Among other things he accomplished, after he made his millions, he went back to school and finished his degree, then became a school teacher. Teaching 5th grade, of all things. And that isn't relevant to future engineers? He also started a summer camp teaching computer basics to grade school children. This is almost like Elvis Presley becoming a high school music teacher.
I'm not saying that he has become a phenomenal success like Edison to keep turning out invention after invention, but I'd say that he has had a pretty full and amazing life.... something far more interesting than most people ever have in a lifetime. And he does the things he really wants to do, ignoring "conventional wisdom".
BTW, Woz did continue to make some rather amazing things while he was still a full-time engineer at Apple, including an amazing "controller on a chip" called the IWM - integrated "Woz" machine, that was on the Apple IIc. Had he been given more freedom to develop other products and ideas, I can't even imagine what else he could have accomplished, but that really wasn't something that happened. Woz is an engineer, not a businessman, and that shows. But he did far more than produce a single invention, and he did know his technology cold.
When was the last time that you assembled a complete operating system (even for an 8-bit computer) by hand with nothing other than a pad of paper and a pencil? Woz did that for both the Apple I and the Apple II, BTW. I doubt there are many software developers who would even know how to start such a task, much less even accomplish it.
I take it that you never saw the original Apple ][ technical reference manual
You could buy the thing for about $10 from an Apple dealership, or even get it "free" when you purchased an Apple II.
It had literally a complete technical description of the Apple II, from a full memory map, tutorial on 6502 assembly, user guide to the "mini assembler" built into the Apple II, 6502 opcodes, pin out diagrams for the expansion bus and what each pin represented, "API" hooks... heck the full source code for the operating system fully commented, interrupt vectors, and much more. Essentially anything you ever wanted to know about the Apple II, but never thought you would ever want to know, including weird quirks that were clearly unique to the Apple II design.
I do not know of a single computer manufacturer that offers such a document for their systems at any price, much less for essentially the cost to print the thing in the first place. And Woz is the person to give 100% credit for the existence of this document in the first place. IMHO this openness to the architecture is precisely why the Apple II caught on and was as much of a success as it became, encouraging 3rd party development of their system. The closest you get to this from Microsoft is the MSDN-Universal license, but that is an annual subscription that costs thousands of dollars each year.... per developer. Not what I consider to be something open about what you are doing, and even that falls quite short of what I was describing (on admittedly a much simplier computer and OS).
What sucked was when Woz was marginalized with the Apple corporate hierarchy and increasingly pushed onto side projects that did not have anything to do with the "mainline" company products. I don't know how much of this had to do with Jobs, or if it was something that came from the MBA's that eventually took over Apple Computer and nearly killed it (that Jobs has been steadily removing since, but ever so slowly). There are several reasons why Woz is not the VP of Engineering at Apple, not the least of which is that Woz didn't really want to be a paper pusher.
I'm not crying for Woz in the sense that he did get compensated handsomely for what work he did with Apple Computer, and widely recognized for what he did accomplish. But what I'm trying to say is that the current corporate culture at Apple and its friendliness toward ideas like F/OSS has nothing to do with Woz... or if it does, it is because Woz was one of those who pushed for open platforms and transparency of interfaces. Something that Apple is notorious at not providing. Note that it was "news" that sometime in the future Apple will provide the API for the iPhone. Yeah, right! And why is that even news again?
As far as the anti-capitalism sentimentality that comes from those like Richard Stallman, that is something that is strongly pervasive throughout the whole of the open source movement. There are many who simply "don't get it". In defense of Stallman, I will acknowledge that he does fight for the ability to at least earn a living off of developing hardware and software, and rails against "non-commercial use only" licenses for several sound reasons. But I do understand where Woz is coming from for those who don't understand the difference between open architectures and free (as in beer) software. Or that it isn't simply one or the other situation of completely closed and sealed environments like the Xbox vs. something completely open like the OLPC laptop.
I'm going to echo the AC response to this posting, and re-emphasis an unanswered question I've posted on earlier threads about Jammie:
Is this the RIAA you are talking about, or is this the supposed pirates?
Or more specific and to the point, assuming either compensatory claim is made (either the $200,000 fine or a much reduced $200 fine) will any of the actual musicians who produced the music Jammie is alleged to have offered to be copied receive even a single penny from the settlement? Does the RIAA even have an accounting mechanism to determine who should get the money, presuming that Jammie is being convicted of a copyright violation of several explicit songs that can be named by both title and artist, including song writer and performer?
If the RIAA is truly acting as an agent for and in behalf of these musicians and seeking compensation directly for them in terms of violating the copyright of these genuine artists, I would completely agree with your statement you have made. I do not condone Jammie, but at the same time I question the legal standing of the RIAA, who only represents the record labels... and even that indirectly. A class-action lawsuit (which this court case seems to fit the rough definition of one... the class being defined as the musicians whose music was distributed illegally by Jammie) in any other industry would be considering these settlement terms to be unconscionable and unconstitutional just from the standpoint that those "harmed" have not been fairly compensated at all. It would be like an ACLU lawsuit where the lawyers kept 100% of the settlement.
All this said, there should be some mechanism in place where an ordinary musician can actually make some kind of financial compensation for electronic distribution of their music. From nearly everything I've read regarding the current state of the music industry, this mechanism simply is not in place at all, so there is little incentive for new and emerging musicians to really care about the RIAA cartel. By far the worst thing a new musician can do is sign a contract with an RIAA company, except for the hope that you can eventually hit the major leagues of the top musicians. But don't expect the label to assist you in that journey.
American Idol, Pop Idol, and other similar music competition are a symptom of an industry falling apart: The system is so rigid and unable to be able to find new talent that they have to go through gimicks like a national talent search. For every Ruben Stoddard and Kelly Clarkston that has been found by the major labels, hundreds of otherwise good musicians were passed over and thrown overboard, many of whom could have earned a professional wage to perform music, even if it wasn't necessarily living life as millionaires. It is this level of talent that the current RIAA system has completely failed.
Please explain this one in detail, unless you are truly without a clue on how microwave transmissions occur.
The microwaves in your typical microwave oven are tuned to the natural resonance frequency of water.... which is why they happen to do a good job of cooking food. However, if you want to transmit power through the atmosphere, this is precisely the worst possible frequency to use, as the atmosphere would absorb all of the energy in the clouds as heat.
If you are worried about RF waves bombarding you, please move out of any industrial/post-industrial society right now and run! Seriously!
The engineers who design these things would have a bit better control over not only a "safe" frequency, but also where this power is being beamed. Safeguards to stop "hackers" from burning the landscape... even if it were possible... would certainly be put into place and be designed to simply turn the power transmission off in the worst case. A hacker might be able to "shut down" the transmission, but they couldn't possibly be able to cause any real damage otherwise.
If you flew in a private plane through one of these beams, and assuming it was dangerous to do that kind of action, I'm sure the FAA would be involved in terms of regulating where these power beams would be located and it would be well marked on aviation charts. Basically you would have to be an idiot to fly into one of these beams... not something necessarily unheard of either. I've seen private airplanes fly into municipal-grade 4th of July fireworks deliberately so they could recreate a WWII scene of flying through flak at night.
Being married is from a certain point of view another form of a corporation. To those "inside" of the marriage, financial transactions are essentially irrelevant, as are most liability issues as well. All that matters are how fiscal and liability issues affect the marriage as a whole. Just like any sort of corporate partnership, a marriage can have "pre-nuptial" arrangements, that is just dodging the issue for if/when a marriage breaks up.
The real issue for homosexuals is that they want to have those kind of benefits that come from a marriage, and are seeking official sanction when they are living together to form such a partnership. It is a wonder, therefore, that you don't see more homosexual couples trying to simply form a more traditional joint-stock corporation of jointly held assets like houses, automobiles, furniture, and even insurance policies.
I don't know why you want to deride the concept of a marriage to strip it of these kinds of benefits, but at the same time you are missing why a marriage occurs. Most young couples who are in lust with each other usually don't think about the legal implications of the marriage, but that is mostly because it is those who have been married for 30 years are the ones who decide to take the issue much more seriously and try to protect their grandkids when they pass laws about marriage.
Marriage has a critical place in legal codes and textbooks, and it is you who is mistaken about why the state needs to get involved in deciding who may or may not be married. Just as the state is involved on who can enter into a corporate relationship of any kind.
While this discussion certainly is interesting from a fiction writer's standpoint to use the concept of a human/artificial person union of some sort, I think David Levy is stroking something here to drum up support for a new book or do something else of a publicity stunt seeking attention.
This simply won't happen any time soon, because Artificial Intelligence or any other sort of artificial organism including genetically engineered "beings" is centuries away.
I speak about Artificial Intelligence from a position of authority, as I am a software engineer and very much informed about what the current "state of the art" is about this field. Levy, Minsky, and several other MIT professors have hit the drumbeat of the potential of AI, and that is all it has been for decades. There was some very interesting initial proof that eventually something like true Turing-test AI could be developed eventually, but so far that has been something far more along the lines of science fiction than anything that has ever been developed in a computer lab. Even research into things like neural networks and "expert systems", with perhaps systems like A.L.I.C.E. proving to be quite interesting, they still fall well short of the mark to even be compared to the intelligence of a dog or cat. At best they show the intelligence of a Venus Flytrap. I'm serious here. Human-level intelligence is not even something that can be realistically extrapolated from any kind of AI research at all.
I'm not suggesting that somebody might come up with an Einsteinian-type reorganization of the field of AI that could actually get us there, but that person does not currently exist. Right now AI researchers are at the technological equivalent of medieval alchemists who are trying to turn lead into gold. Unfortunately they are going down the wrong path on how to accomplish the task of achieving this goal of true machine sentience, and I expect that it will be centuries before the task will be accomplished. Also, it will come from some other completely different field than current AI researchers, just as lead-gold alchemy finally did occur with nuclear physicists, not chemists.
I'm not even sure if Von Neumann architecture (aka CPUs like exist on most computers at the moment, even if hybridized with other ideas) is even capable of AI. There are some strong reasons to think it is not capable and there may even be a mathematical proof demonstrating that idea.
Or more to the point here: This is putting the cart before the horse. Get the AI or "artificial person" built first, and then debate whether a marriage with that person is something that will happen later. I highly doubt that this is something that can even happen in the first place at all, and certainly won't happen if true AI never exists.
This is an explicit set of laws that are by design written to seek prosecution against Muslims, Mormons, and any other religion that does not conform to the "standard Christian" philosophies. As to why they are still enforced in the 21st Century is mind boggling, but I don't know of any state that has enacted an anti-polygamy statute in the 21st Century.
I disagree with you that marriage is something that has been gradually invented over the years. Marriage, in whatever form you can imagine (gay, plural, monogamous, group, etc.) has been a part of human culture since as long as historical records have been kept, and some strong evidence that some sort of marriage customs occurred in paleolithic times. It is a part of who we are and how our brains are wired, and a part of our evolution as a species. The formalisms may have changed, I will agree.
And how a marriage is performed, what happens at a funeral, and childhood introduction rites are some of the most fundamental measures of a culture that can possibly be found in any society. They are also something that varies quite substantially even within a single nation-state if you start to note differences in religious philosohpies. Comparing a Jewish, Catholic, and Mormon wedding, for instance, will lead to some huge and stark contrasts over what is said, what is worn by the officiator and marriage couple, and the physical actions of all involved. Yet in all cases it is a celebration by the families involved that such a union did occur. I've attended Wiccan weddings and even a "geek" wedding where the wedding guests "logged in" before the ceremony that were quite interested.
Another nearly universal theme about weddings is that in nearly all cases the couple getting married has to seek permission from some outside authority. This can be a tribal elder, the priest, or county clerk. Parents are usually involved in the decision making as well, even if there is no "legal" requirement for such involvement. Those that choose to ignore this "authority" usually have some substantial consequences for ignoring such permission, either social stigma or legal consequences upon death or dissolving the "marriage". The forms and consequences vary from one culture to another, but the broad picture has been nearly the same in nearly all cases.
Marriage is one of the things that simply defines what it means to be human. Don't get caught up in the details, as that is not the real issue here.
I have tried to push for FA status on articles, and that is as much political as nearly anything else on Wikipedia.
I'll admit that a very controversial article will have its own set of problems, and a very well written article is more likely to get the FA status, but it is still something that has to go through several rounds of edits before it gets to that point, with a nearly constant bar-raising over what is indeed something worthy of FA status.
It is too bad that New Horizons can't get to Saturn in a "grand tour" arrangement with Pluto, but I do understand that such situations are rather unusual. The Voyager opportunity was rather unusual in terms of how the planets seemed to line up for a perfect low delta-v opportunity to visit all of them. I'm not sure how hard a Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto arrangement would be, but I can't imagine it happens that often either... I'm not ready to do the math to predict the resonance of those three bodies at the moment. An Earth-Jupiter-Pluto arrangement happens a bit more often, and that I do understand.
Even so, it is seemingly common now for probes to get to Jupiter, where a visit like New Horizons getting to the Jovian system is not only not front page news, I'm not even sure it got into my hometown newspaper or made it onto the television news. This is good for science in general, as scientists can get their job done now to study these objects without becoming rock stars like Carl Sagan. (multiple meanings of that term, BTW) Unfortunately it is also jading the public and congress that missions like this have been done and all of the science that is needed for space exploration has been done. Senator Proxmire's legacy at attacking NASA and being highly critical of its funding is finally starting to pay off, unfortunately.
Or to put this much more clearly: Will the performer & songwriter (separate copyright issues here, even if it is the same person) of any of the songs that were supposedly "infringed" upon?
Remember, at least for American law (which applies here), copyright is granted "to promote the useful arts and sciences" (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8).
If I could be convinced that:
I would support this kind of action against would be violators of copyright law. And to make sure that such actions are also consistently done in all similar situations.
But that does not appear to be the case here, as all the RIAA really cares to accomplish is to scare people into thinking they may be next, and to extort money from them as a settlement rather than take this to trial.