I would like to start out here that I think the whole notion of NC licenses to be something really silly in the first place, and the debate over NC vs. Commercial content has nearly nothing to do with "open source" or "copyleft". That this issue is dealing with non-commercial licenses seems to be where the real "ethical" questions are being raised, not that it is copyleft content.
All this said, your question about "but what if a hypothetical site abruptly converted to a fee-for-access format?" is a vaild point to look at. And something to not worry too much about either.
If a website that you have been contributing to offers a copyleft license, you should take advantage of that opportunity and attempt to mirror the content whenever you can. Anybody who takes copyleft contributions but doesn't "give back" should be suspected right away. In this I'm referring to Gracenote and the music track databases that were "converted" from a non-profit entity to a very much for-profit corporation where the contributors were screwed over in the process. If you are concerned about copyleft, this is the real concern, where Gracenote even went so far as to assert propritary copyright over the voluntary contributions of others.
In the case of something like a Wiki that has already made explicit claims of all contributions being made through a copyleft license, the content itself is independent of those who actually operate the website. If those who are doing the hosting act like a bunch of idiots and go against the general wishes of the community who has developed the content, it is comparatively trivial to set up a "mirror site" and recruit most of the original content developers to the new website. This constant threat of forking is what keeps most copyleft websites from charging for access (aka Sourceforge, Wikipedia, etc.) even if those involved with the decision making on those websites may even have a motivation to charging for that access. The site owner doesn't really "own" the copyleft content, unlike websites like scientific journals charging $50 per article who do claim copyright and will legally go after those who set up a mirror site which offers those same articles for free.
One particular problem that does need to be addressed by those advocating NEA exploration is how to cut down on the cost of getting equipment into orbit in the first place to make it cheap enough to make NEA minerals valuable enough for extraction.
More to the point.... can we make sending equipment + personnel to an asteroid cheap enough to extract very rare minerals (aka Uranium, Gold, Platinum) at a price that can be competitive with terrestrial-based mining operations? If you can make a business case of this nature, the bootstrapping issues involved with getting people to NEA can be much more easily solved, but unfortuantely at $100,000 per pound to LEO is not going to make economic sense. The Space Shuttle is currently over $1 million/pound right now, although Soyuz spacecraft are close to about $50,000/pound.
Let's just hope that John Carmack can get his spacecraft going where the primary cost is the consumables and not the vehicle cost itself. His latest posting on his blog seems to indicate this may be normal operation for his spacecraft, and it will be awesome if he ever gets to LEO with his spacecraft. Going after the the extreme skydiving market (>> 100,000 feet altitude) sounds like a good place to start.
BTW, my comment about the window of opportunity to approach a NEA being only for a couple of weeks every other year or so is based on the idea that you have established a colony on a particular hunk of rock and you seek to either obtain the "products" from that colony or wish to resupply the original expedition. If anything has been learned from the MIR/ISS experience is that resupply is a huge issue that needs to be considered for any permanent human settlement. I do believe that people living in space will have to learn how to become much more self-sufficient, but it is going to take some time before a body of knowledge is developed that will allow that to happen. Or even more important a culture of people that actually live in space and not stop by for an occasional visit as a government employee. This does not exist yet... although I hope that it may eventually.
Most people of today would starve to death if they couldn't get to the grocery store at least twice a week. They have certainly forgotten the lessons learned from their relatively recent ancestors who often had to go several months without being "resupplied" from outside sources... particularly those of us like you and I, Shadowbearer, who have American ancestors who lived on the American frontier. My great-great grandfather certainly couldn't hit the local grocery store when his family needed some food... he had to grow it himself. Doing this in the space frontier is going to be comparatively similar in difficulty... even with modern technology working on your behalf. And you had better be capable of doing field repairs of all of that technology if your life depends on it.
Please explain even one potential benefit that would result from having a nuke on the Moon... other than to engage in a war against others already on the Moon.
Even orbital nukes, which were discussed and explored as viable options in the 1950's and 1960's as something the U.S. Air Force was strongly considering, is something that has long been discounted and dismissed as both impractical and subject to potential counter measures that would render them useless.
By far and away the most effective device for delivering multiple warheads to a country without any warning would be from a nuclear-powered submarine. And the USA has been the "world class" standard for how that can be accomplished. Try to beat the stealth ability of a Trident sub that is 5 miles from a coastal city that the U.S. President wishes to be destroyed. Good-bye St. Petersburg... or Tehran depending on who is perceived to be hostile. And a nuke can be detonated over those cities in less than 10 minutes after launch.
It would take days for a nuke to travel from the Moon to the Earth. So what is the huge improvement?
Territorial claims on the Moon may be made, but that is precisely why some sort of militarization is inevitable in space. Regardless of how noble and honorable your motives may be, there will be some idiot or two that will try to be a bully and push their way around, demanding all kinds of stupid things. The only way you can stop them is to have a bigger gun and scare the hell out of them to stand down and take the status quo. The question then becomes.... who will have the guns? I would rather that it be in the hands of larger governments like the USA and Russia, who have something to lose on the Earth if things get out of hand. Certainly I wouldn't trust some directorate from the United Nations.
BTW, in regards to Bush.... I would consider him to be a lame-duck President at the moment. He isn't going to be doing much of anything different than what is currently going on. Large quantities of soldiers will still be in Iraq in 2009, oil will still be consumed in large quantities, and the U.S. Government will still be screwed up. The only thing that will change is that George W. Bush will not be President of the USA after January 2009. At that point you can vent your spleen about whoever else picks up the reins and screws up our country, even if you will be denying that they are making a mess of things.
The issue here isn't Lunar vs. Orbital costs of living, but Near-Earth Asteroid costs vs. Lunar costs when you take the whole infrastructure into the equation and large scale mining operations. Also, you have a larger percentage of silicates in Lunar soils compared to the heavier metals you can obtain from the obviously high density asteroids.
I personally think there is a place for Lunar exploration and mining, but it isn't so cut and dried as some would have you think it is. But there are some very definite adantages for Lunar exploration.
One of the most significant is that the Moon is never more than 250,000 miles away. You can't say that about the rest of the Solar System, and nearly any effort to travel to the Moon is more or less trivial with even the current level of rocket travel. There is no need for exotic propulsion methods if you need to travel to the Moon in less than a week. Even the Apollo astronauts got to the Moon in less time than that. Getting to Mars in less than a month is going to be considered an exceptional task worthy of the most exotic propulsion systems that may ever be invented and worked on before the end of this century.... and those may have to be nuclear based at that. Travel to most Near-earth asteroids will be of a similar time span except for very brief windows of opportunity that may only happen once every several years. If a disaster happens on that asteroid when it happens to be on the opposite side of the Solar System from the Earth, anybody who is there will simply be screwed... and likely be dead before anybody gets there to find out what has happened. A similar disaster on the Moon might be able to get a "rescue mission" in a pinch to send extra supplies and get some additional people and resources available to help out and solve problems there.
I have no doubt that once a large and well established infrastructure is developed throughout the Solar System (meaning regular scheduled spaceflight between various planets, and permanent structures on the Moon, L-points, GEO and LEO) that it may prove to be more economical to mine asteroids rather than fight pre-existing claims on the Moon that have taken some of the best spots.
Of course, the Moon has more surface area than North America, so running out of places to go may be a bit of a challenge. Many of those detracting from Lunar exploration tend to forget that the Moon is really a dwarf planet... larger than Pluto and Ceres.
Quibbling over the licensing terms is an issue, however, because better licenses do make a huge difference in terms of how the content is going to be used and reused.... and over how many people will be attracted to using that particular license.
I've been involved with the software development industry for nearly 30 years now, and I will note that there were many software applications I used (and modified) that were in the public domain 30 years ago. But it wasn't until the GPL came out and perhaps even more importantly was widely used by several major players in the computer industry (most notably IBM of all companies) that open source software was perceived to have any real value.
The written word and "open source" textual projects like most wikis are still trying to find out what they can do, and to even understand what the licensing terms really ought to be about. While some projects like Wikipedia have certainly struck a chord with a large group of people, it still hasn't had a huge impact on the much larger general publishing industry yet. I believe this has to do with some of the terms and conditions of those licenses that can be absurd... such as the license republishing provisions of the GFDL and the simply raw confusion over just what is a Creative Commons license. There are so many CC licenses that to all but a hardcore fan it can be very confusing to understand what is what. I'm talking here about trying to introduce the concepts of "open content" licenses at all to people who have never heard about it before in the first place.
I will also note here that in the "marketplace of ideas" that the GPL wasn't alone in terms of license concepts for computer software, and other concepts preceeded the widespread adoption of the GPL as well. Most notably the idea of "shareware", which was a huge hit among many software developers.... even though many of those authors and software publishers rarely even wrote the software for any real intent to make money. The BSD license, in fact, was perceived to be a better license and even now has its hardcore fans that distrust some key aspects of the GPL. It was also widely in use well before the GPL was applied substantially to large numbers of computer software applications.
Perhaps 10% of those 50,000 who downloaded the P2P Britney Spears song decided to shell out the $20 to buy the CD after hearing the song and desired a higher quality version that wasn't the crappy 16 kbps mono version with the last 30 seconds of the song missing that they got from the P2P link. In other words, the P2P version is just a form of advertising. Certainly allowing these "free downloads" can actually increase sales of the music itself.... especially if the music is of high quality. Something you could argue about with Miss Spears.
In terms of the Physics textbook, there are so many ways that the "authors" of the textbook have been "paid" and otherwise compensated for that I don't see what the real problem is anyway. Any university professor who is the lead author of a widely used textbook for their main specialty will likely gain tenure and even a full professorship at whatever school they teach at. How would that change if the distribution model were substantially different? Wouldn't they want to maintain their reputation alone to keep the text up to date?
This isn't to suggest that blatant distribution of copyrighted works without permission over P2P networks is necessarily legal or even ethical, but there are financial incentives in many cases to encourage P2P distribution for those who actually generate the content in the first place.
The situation gets even worse than what you are suggesting here.
In the past, you could clearly identify not only who or what was copyrighted, but you could also get a reasonable expectation of being able to get some identifying information about the copyright registrant to be able to track down the original author or publisher to be able to see "permission" to reproduce the content. Such information was made available in a public forum (the Library of Congress) in a central "database"... even if it was only in a stack of boxes in some government warehouse.
To use the/. example here, you have millions of postings from the nearly 1 million registered users (plus the anonymous cowards). It would be very difficult to be able to track down to actual individuals more than a very small percentage of those registered users.... and that is just to get their actual names. To be able to independently contact them asking for copyright permission to use their comments would be much harder yet. And postings by anonymous cowards are still considered under copyright even though absolutely nobody can be traced to those postings directly.
I've tried (unsuccessfully I might add) to take Wikipedia and other Wikimedia project content and attempt to formally register the material with the Library of Congress as registered copyrighted content. To do so requires those contributing the written content to formally declare some basic information, most notably their nationality (what country they are eligible to get a passport from) and where they are currently living (not necessarily the same thing). Part of this is due to the fact that your nationality actually determines what laws can be applied to content which you write. You are also required to disclose a date of first publication, if it is a work for hire, and if somebody involved with the content has died.
What I discovered is that nearly unanimously the attitude among nearly all participants was that the formal copyright registration was not only unnecessary, but even providing these basic personal details (aka your actual name if you want to claim copyright) is considered a "privacy violation". And keep in mind all I was seeking was a voluntary disclosure of this information where those involved would be very much informed as to why the information was collected, and "anonymous" contributions were still allowed. Even being able to provide a mechanism to disclose this information was met with incredible hostility, and is only now being done on an ad hoc basis.... with repeated policy discussions to completely eliminate these pages where this kind of information has been disclosed.
Basically, under current copyright law, it is nearly impossible to determine what is or is not actually copyrighted, or even to whom it has been copyrighted. This is particularly difficult in "open source" projects like Linux or Wikipedia.
So what is the actual "value" of the complete Beatles music collection? How could it be assessed in terms of a county assessor's office to determine its "property value"?
Keep in mind that "intellectual property" is also a rapidly depreciating kind of "property". It is worth quite a bit when it is first produced, but rapidly approaches worthlessness as time goes on. There are some exceptions like the Beatles, but what about the hundreds of one-hit wonders that may have a couple of decent songs but have been forgotten about for decades? I'm talking something like Bill Hailey and the Comets. How much is his music inventory worth?
Some items like automobiles are assessed for property taxes but at the same time also have depreciating value, so this isn't necessarily something impossible to calculate, but tangible property like a vehicle or house is usually easier to determine an actual value for that item. Loose concepts like the popularity of a particular performer is very hard to determine, except perhaps what has sold over the previous year. And income taxes will soak up most of that money anyway.
So I disagree here even that this is something which is being "missed" by tax assessors. It also isn't tangible property.
The only problem with this line of thinking is this fundamental question:
When exactly was the last time a copyright on anything recently under copyright expired?
It has been several years.... and not since the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act. There is little reason to believe that anything else will be available into the public domain for decades if not simply perpetual copyright.
In terms of patents, I have seen some patents expire. But I've also seen incredible abuse of the patent system to the point I'm a hardcore advocate of its abolition. I see very little financial incentive for a small business or individual innovator to go through the process of seeking a patent beyond just an ego boost, as any patentable idea will likely be stolen by a larger company anyway and you won't really make any sort of substantial sums of money from such a device or concept even if you have something truly unique and original.
Basically, the patent system is only a way for big businesses to protect themselves against other large businesses, and to snuff out the smaller competition that can't compete with the same rate of patent submissions. Oh, and that USPTO is a modest revenue raising mechanism for the U.S. Federal Government, so there is little reason for congressmen to try and kill what is a cash cow for themselves.
... and a much longer time that some people who are touting light pollution as a recent phenomena are willing to admit.
To start out here I want don't want to dismiss that perhaps the growth of some cities, particular in the American south-west, isn't causing problems for observatories, or even for ordinary people to be able to appreciate a star filled night without some significant sources of light pollution being visible from nearly anywhere you go.
What I'm objecting to here is the statement "In Galileo's time, nighttime skies all over the world would have merited the darkest Bortle ranking, Class 1."
I don't think this is the case. Street lighting has been something done in urban environments since from about Roman Imperial times, and certainly during renaissance era... meaning the time of Galileo. Hear me out before your do a knee jerk reply on this.
Larger cities have usually had some source of light, if only kerosene or tallow but sometimes even more. Gas lighting was very common in the 1500's and in some areas even earlier. In Moorish Spain (before the reconquista making Spain a Christian country) some chroniclers noted how the light from Iberian cities glowed like a constellation of stars across the hills. In other words, it wasn't just a single lone candle or two but whole urban environments where there were substantial sources of unshielded light being used to illuminate the city streets and in turn the night time sky.
The point being here, I think it is reasonable to conclude that there were some urban environments even before the birth of Galileo where the visibility of the stars would have been significantly diminished, and certainly not a "Bortle ranking, Class 1" even if you were some distance from that city.
Again, I'm not suggesting that electric lighting hasn't had a significant impact on urban lighting, with certainly Times Square in New York City setting the standard of the worst light pollution possible with perhaps "The Strip" in Las Vegas being in close competition. Certainly suggesting that you can see an astronomical event at Times Square in NYC such as a comet (it has happened) is suggesting that nearly anybody can see what is going on. But keep in mind that electric lighting is not exactly something just created or discovered this past year either. Large scale urban lighting has been going on in Europe and North America for well over a century now, and even "developing countries" have been using electric lighting for decades.
The point being is that those who look fondly to the "good old days" often forget what really happened in the past, and to make arguments about what sorts of things happened in the past and misrepresent that past for the sake of argument is doing both a disservice to your argument in the long run and demonstrating ignorance about the topic. It is clear that the primary poster about this really has no clue what urban conditions may have been like during the time of Galileo and perhaps even earlier. That a star-filled sky where you can touch the center of the Milky Way is an awesome sight, and something that many kids of today never get a chance to see is something I can agree to. That reasonable efforts that don't cost a large sum of money ought to be explored in terms of helping to curb light pollution I would agree as well. But don't go telling me this is a problem that existed only in the 21st Century and not earlier if you want to make this an effective argument to further the goal of allowing future generations to be able to see a star-filled sky.
The Air Force, and the other branches of the U.S. Armed Forces.... the USAF does not exclusively run the nuke program in the USA, routinely moves nuclear weapons across the country all of the time. It is necessary for those involved that they know how to handle the real thing and not just play with dummy warheads all of the time.
Generally speaking, the "live" warheads will only go up when there is a time of increased alert (aka the various DefCon levels) mainly to prevent an accidental detonation, but nukes have additional safeguards well above and beyond normal chemical detonation (gunpowerder and C4 explosives) devices. And even those are safeguarded where during some training flights where true dummy warheads will be used that don't have any of the avionics or any kind of explosive on the airplanes. This would be for demo flights like at an airshow or for a flyby at a stadium for events like the Superbowl. I will note that since 9/11 when I've seen these demo flights in a public venue, the warheads on the fighters doing the flyby seem to me as if they were live warheads and not the standard dummy missiles that were on the fighters before hand, but this is just raw speculation based on relatively non-expert observations.
Even more surprising to me about this particular incident is that it was mentioned in the press at all. It is not our responsibility as citizens to know the status of any aircraft, ship, or other military unit in the U.S. armed forces or citizens of other countries to know about their military like this. Indeed knowing that information and having it publicized can significantly jepordize the lives of those military personnel who serve with that unit. If a reporter does find out this kind of information, they shouldn't publishing it, under threat of being prosecuted under federal espionage laws and divulging classified material. This is not to bury a blunder that some general or admiral made and doesn't want to have ruin his future military career, but to protect the lives of those who serve and to ensure that when the military does go into action that they have every possible advantage against potential enemies, and not to give potential enemies additional information that is not necessary.
This information should simply not be published in any news outlet, and I would have to agree that this is very likely to be a deliberate leak with authorization from a very high level in the military chain of command to let potential enemies know America has nuclear weapons, and routinely make them available to junior officers (aka the pilot of this particular aircraft) and have them available at a moments notice to be delivered nearly anywhere in the world. If this is the message, then the USAF should consider that the message is received, at least by an ordinary American citizen.
If anybody reading this think it is a sign of gross incompetence on the part of the USAF, they are missing the point of what really happened. You shouldn't be hearing about things like this in the news, as it is about unit operations and routine operations at that. If every time a nuclear warhead is moved was published in the news media, you would hear about it every day As such, this isn't really "news", any more than even having the space shuttle be moved to the launch pad. And the USAF has far more than 4 bombers, nor does the USAF do only 3 flights per year with its bomber fleet. If anybody is showing a huge lack of judgement, it is on the part of the editors and reporters involved with this news story, not USAF personnel.
Electronic access still isn't "free" with peer reviewed journals. I get that you think $48 to download a bunch of bytes over the internet is too extravagant. The point I'm making is that for some people that isn't the case, and there can be an economic viewpoint to show that it would be worth it to buy some scientific papers... particularly if you are in that field and have a budget to help pay for those kinds of journals.
I do agree that other alternative publishing systems could be (and are) developed that take advantage of the strengths of the internet that could also be used to help reduce the costs of providing a service like this for much less than most of these journals are charging. But it will take a radical rethinking of the general business model that scientific journals have been using for centuries. Not everybody likes to change overnight to any new concept, even if it means that the information can be spread further and more cheaply.
I would like to correct this fallacy. Iraq really was never an "ally" of the United States.
As "proof" of this, it is important to note that nearly all of the military hardware in the Iraqi inventory prior to the Gulf War (and explicitly the Iran-Iraq War as well.... when supposedly we were "an ally" with Iraq) was of Soviet, not American origin.
Iranian equipment, however, was indeed mostly of American origin as the alliance between Iran under the Shah and the USA was about as strong as between any two countries... like the USA and the UK at the moment. And the Shah used Iranian oil profits to buy some rather extensive weapons systems.
So as a general rule of thumb, the Iran-Iraq War was a battle between Soviet equipment and tactics on the part of Iraq vs. American equipment and tactics on the part of Iran.
The "warming of relations" between the USA and Iraq was really only for a short period of time, mainly due to the fact that they were doing a good job of keeping the post-revolutionary government of Iran in check, and it was not in the interests of the U.S. government to see a collapse of the Iraqi government at the hands of a fanatical Iranian government, only to impose a fundamentalist Islamic government instead.
This is not a rubber stamping of the actions of Hussein, but rather using the philosophy "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Clearly this was a friendship of convenience rather than something of a common culture or historic connection to each other. It didn't really even last that long.... mainly the last few years of the Reagan administration to the first year of the Bush I administration.
To suggest that we had been long-term historic allies of Iraq is a complete misrepresentation of the fact, and even to suggest the USA was a hardcore ally of Iraq at all is a misreading of history and what really happened. It was just a couple of years in a long and gruesome war (the Iran-Iraq war) that the USA offered a very limited amount of assistance on a few technical and logistical points. American troops certainly never participated in any ground offensives against the Iranians during that war, nor was the Air Force involved except for perhaps sending in some minor intelligence information like the locations of some of the Iranian military formations in a few rare cases. I would not call that the actions of a very close ally.
Actually, we are "at war"... but the real question is not if we are at war but against whom?
If you listen to the average conservative radio talk show host, it would seem like it is the Democratic Party.
If you listen to the typical Democratic politician, it is the Republican Party, and G.W. Bush in particular.
I think both of these viewpoints are flat out wrong, and it is unfortunate that the U.S. Senate refused to issue a formal declaration of war against a specific government and country.... which also begs the question about who the real enemy is.
Clearly on 9/11 the USA was attacked by an organization with widespread support from several countries, including the Taliban-led Afghanistan and Hussein's Iraqi government. And Syria, Iran, and some elements of the Saudi Arabian royal family. There is even some minor evidence that the People's Republic of China is supporting al Queida to a small extent, and certainly wouldn't mind if the USA was knocked down a notch or two. There even seem to be some elements of the Russian military who seem to be at least nominally supporting efforts to kick American forces out of the Middle East in some sort of reenactment of Cold War.
What is needed is the current political leadership of the U.S. government (including Senator Reid and Speaker Polisi, not to mention G.W. Bush) to step forward, clearly identify the people who are killing our soldiers in Iraq, and take decisive action against those individuals. The current level of deaths happening in Iraq is not due to unorganized "freedom fighters" seeking to reclaim their homeland, but rather well organized militia groups that are funded by national governments. Iran is one of those countries that are explicitly funding these groups, but other countries are involved as well. It is not an Iraqi "government in exile" that is organizing these efforts, as was the case of the French underground during WWII (which was also explicitly funded substantially by the governments of the USA and Great Brittan as well).
Does this mean that the USA needs to invade Iran? I don't necessarily think that should be the case, but certainly they should be held accountable for their actions and deal with the consequences of those actions. Since the U.S. Embassy in Iran is still not under American control, the ability to perform direct negotiation is significantly hampered, and it is Iran that has the ability to make the first diplomatic move to "normalize" relations by allowing the USA to get bake its embassy.
The U.S. government has at times in the past supported "rebel" groups and militias. Some have been rather overt in nature in terms of American support, such as the Nationalist Chinese movement in China under Japanese occupation, French resistance in WWII, the Afghan "freedom fighters" against Soviet forces, and the Contras in Nicaragua, and even logistical support for the Kuwaiti Army to retake their homeland. Some covert militias have also been supported by the USA as well, with the Contras early efforts being one of them, perhaps support for the Ukrainian "orange revolution", the Irish Republican Army (fundraising was rather blatant in Boston and wasn't officially discouraged by the U.S. government), and certainly the invasion force involved with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So in many ways it is hypocritical of the USA to be against "terrorism". At the same time in nearly every case of supporting these "paramilitary" groups it was fairly obvious that the only reason uniformed military forces of America weren't used was for political reasons alone, and to help augment existing military operations.
While I would agree with your general statement that the largest single expenditure in the U.S. federal budget is for paying interest on the national debt, I disagree with your analogy strongly... and the ultimate conclusion you are coming to here.
In the case of public highways, there is no restriction on who can use them... or even if you have paid highway taxes for their use. You do have a "right" to use a public highway, but there may be some restrictions on its use such as a speed limit, minimum vehicle requirements (such as a certain lighting scheme if you drive it at night, turn signals, etc.), vehicle type restrictions (operating a bicycle on an interstate highway is prohibited), demonstrations of skills required to operate the vehicle you are using (aka a license with endorsements depending on vehicle), and if you have committed various kinds of crimes... particularly traffic law violations. Nearly all traffic laws have been established due to people being idiots and causing substantial harm or even death to other individuals on those highways, or perhaps a sound understanding of the current "state of the art" for a typical vehicle together with mechanical and physiological limits for those who control that machinery. Driving 100 mph on a twisty mountain road is suicide or vehicular manslaughter in most cases... sometimes both.
In terms of access to scientific information, the copyright clause of the U.S. constitution itself is rather clear. Copyright is explicitly set out "to promote the useful arts and sciences". Knowledge and information is something explicitly required if you accept the philosophy that an individual citizen is a joint-sovereign authority over the government together with the rest of their fellow citizens.
When it comes to tax supported research, it seems very reasonable that those "shareholders" who have helped to finance that research ought to be able to get copies of the results of that research, and not have to pay huge fees to be able to access that information.
If a private company were paying for some research and you were a major shareholder, it may be reasonable to expect that as a shareholder you should be entitled to see the results of that research which you have paid for. It would certainly be expected that if a majority of the shareholders (by stock percentage) demanded that research, the board of directors would have to see that published reports of that research were made available. In addition, very few companies, particularly for-profit companies, would give up copyright and IP rights to that research as a "gift" to the researchers, particularly if that company financed the whole research project from the very beginning. This is very common for government research grants.
So why would government-financed research be any different if you can get a large number of citizens who helped pay for that research demand to see what they are paying for... and at a reasonable cost? With reasonable meaning either free or so cheaply that it would be literally the cost of publication and no more. Instead many of these research journals are collecting research, claiming exclusive copyright, and locking up this knowledge to only the elite who have the most immediate need to access the information. The cost of access is so prohibitively high that ordinary people simply can't see the information at all, even if they may have some of the education necessary to understand it. Or even if the information may be valuable to them in some way.
One of the problems with your line of thinking is the presumption of a mass market to help reduce the price through economies of scale. Aka for a mass-market publication like People magazine or even National Geographic (to use something not quite so tabloid in nature).
Many of these scientific journals have "communities" of readers that number in the low thousands or even just a couple hundred potential scientist who might read them. Think real carefully about that. How many scientists, for example, study deep water oceanography? Or semi-conductor material science? It isn't many for either field, and there are journals that cover subjects similar to these, in addition to the more general science publications.
If there is something more responsive to scales of economy (aka prices getting cheaper per unit with high volumes of production) than the print industry, I don't know what it is. Increasing a print publication by 10x only costs about twice the cost, in most casts. And the reverse is also true, like 10th the print run for only 1/2 the price, getting to absurd prices for a single copy print job. Some automation along this line is helping to reduce this "start-up" cost, but even xerography pushes some hard limits on small runs, at least if you want to maintain professional quality of the content.
And mind you, all I've talked about here is the physical printing costs. If you try to include content editors, reviewers, and support staff for these publications, these "fixed" costs can add up to a considerable amount as well. If spread over 1 million copies, it doesn't add up to much, but for only 1000 copies, it can be quite high. Even moving to an "electronic edition" for one of these journals still requires having this full staff... with perhaps even more "fixed costs" due to the requirement of having a technical support staff to keep the servers going, paying for bandwidth, equipment costs, and other related issues.
Basically, I'm suggesting that the $48 cost per copy wasn't necessarily the problem here... if this was the journal of original publication. That may even be a very legitimate cost of distribution if you take all of the costs involved and consider the number of people who may even try to read the paper in this kind of system.
The copyright violation was a big deal, and something which the journal should have been aware of before they accepted the paper for publication. And opportunistic resellers who haven't necessarily been involved with the editorial staff infrastructure are also dubious, but that is a separate issue.
There are some things that the scientific community can do to help reduce this fixed infrastructure cost, including the development of a wiki-like system of peer review with trust metrics and volunteers in the review process. Some of these things are already happening, but have not been accepted by many of the "old school" scientists who still think the internet is a new fangled invention. Traditional scientific journals have to adapt to the new technologies and publishing philosophies if they wish to survive the next century, and that is unfortunately something they are not prepared in most cases to cope with. The entire economic model that they have been operating under since before the time of Isaac Newton and the Royal Science Academy is going through a huge transformation, not just the physical equipment they have used to that point.
I think you missed the point of most of these episodes where this kind of "racism" was portrayed.
Most racism is really an outward expression of trying to cope with clashes of multiple cultures (aka "blacks" or "Mexicans") that have different world views and internal value systems.
By presuming that mankind has figured out how to resolve the issues between the various races (hence the mixed race crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-- both TOS and TNG), they are in turn confronted with further expansions of the definition to even understand what it means to be a bigot, or why being a racist is not necessarily a desirable attribute.
Some of the episodes that dealt with establishing the "citizenship" of Data, the ability of Data to "reproduce" (particularly the episode "Lil" and Data's daughter), and other similar questions do a fantastic job of exploring these questions... and even exploring what it means to even be "human".
Another classic example that I loved about particularly TNG and DN9 episodes is the exploration of Kahless (sp?) and the messianic concepts of religion that were pulled away from discussions of Jerusalem and the Middle East. Instead of talking about Jesus and dealing with Earth religions, bringing in religious concepts from a Klingon culture and discussing how a largely atheistic culture (the Federation doesn't appear to have $any strong religion) can express tolerance towards a strongly religious culture (aka the Klingons) is IMHO something incredible.
In short, it could even be argued that nearly the entire series is about race relations in a context that goes well beyond what continent that your ancestors are from and nearly the entire series portrays that even the planet you were born upon is irrelevant to your value you can provide to the much larger society as a whole. And furthermore each culture and philosophy can add flavor and spice to the community that would actually weaken society as a whole if it were missing. This is one of the philosophical concepts that Gene Roddenberry put into the series that has given Star Trek its appeal over other SciFi universes, and makes people want to come back for more.
Keep in mind that the original TV series first aired in the 1960's, when Jim Crow laws still existed in the USA and it wasn't even a thought for South Africa to get rid of Apartheid. Even having a mixed race cast at all was considered a bold move for any TV network executives.... and mixed race usually meant that a token black person was in the cast. Star Trek went well beyond that.
If you want to know why the Bush administration is against having Iran build breeder reactors and Plutonium enrichment facilities, you need to study up just a little bit more on nuclear physics before you can jump to any conclusion for or against that kind of policy: Having such nuclear reactors (particularly for a country rich in energy resources like Iran) has realistically one goal in mind: The construction of thermo-nuclear bombs. Aka the classic nuke.
If you have the technology necessary to independently build an efficient nuclear fission reactor, you also have the skills necessary to separate elements by isotope at nearly any purity that you desire, including the fabrication of large quantities of bomb-grade Uranium and Plutonium. And it doesn't take that much Uranium in order to get a project like that going... certainly not much for a larger country like Iran to be able to obtain nearly all they need from existing Uranium commodity markets.
I have no doubt that Iran plans on building nukes.... if they haven't already put most of the components to make them in the first place. The question after that is how do they plan on using them? Sending them into Iraq to their soldiers that currently don't exist officially? And what should the American response be if an Iranian nuke ended up taking out the "green zone" in central Bagdad?
Actually, that makes far more sense than you might imagine. Kenya is a country with hardly any electrical power production infrastructure at all, torn by civil war where things like transmission towers would be easy targets for one group or another to tear down and difficult at best for anybody to try and maintain even when trying to deal with natural hazards besides land mines and AK-47s.
Or to use another example, land-line telephone installation in many 3rd world countries (even emerging countries that are clearly going through industrialization like China and India) is virtually non-existant. Instead, cell-phone penetration into the population of these countries is far more extensive than more established industrial nations like the USA or England, where land-line telephone networks are already established and still provide competitive rates compared to cell phone coverage. This isn't to say you can't find a cell phone in the USA (where it is still nearly ubiquitous), but it is still common to also have a land line even if you have a cell phone. That is a rarity in many of these developing nations.
To explain this more in economic terms, consumers in these countries where older technologies didn't have a build-out of infrastrucutre, they are instead building out using the latest technologies instead of having to go through all of the previous communications systems, like telegraphs and TELIX machines. Why bother?
If you are in the position of being able to build an entire electrical infrastructure system from scratch for a whole country, perhaps it would be wise to consider alternative power generation systems like solar panels. This is more of a sign of the future that such steps are even being considered, and proof that perhaps there is hope that solar power might be a very real and viable alternative energy system without having to resort to silly government subsidies.
In terms of an engineering problem, you have no other platform than the International Space Station as a prototype to see just how much energy can be generated and what some initial costs might be to get it there.
Admittedly NASA hasn't been all that efficient with the fiscal resource to get that structure built, but it is a good test of what a 50 kilowatt facility would look like... the current power generation capability of the ISS. Fortunately/unfortunately that energy is being used to maintain the current ISS facilities and "beaming" the power to the ground is not an option at the moment.
If Bigelow Aerospace/SpaceX ever get their acts together (and it looks like they have the finances to make it), this may be a dream closer than you think. At least for an experimental power satellite that could do some more realistic tests than are done on the ISS (which has proven you can generate those kind of energy needs on a satellite and how to deal with that power).
I certainly wouldn't hold my breath for NASA to come up with the funding to make something like that reality, however.
Keep in mind that most of the current breakthroughs for solar cell production are not to improve efficiency in terms of watts/m^2, but rather in terms of $$$/m^2. If you drop the efficiency but significantly reduce the cost of the cell, you can make it much more affordable for an ordinary consumer.
There is no doubt that you could create a "super efficient" solar cell that would take advantage of nearly every watt of solar radiation from ultraviolet to infrared (or even gamma rays to radio waves), and even take advantage of any heat gradient from the front to the back of the cell. But would that be a cell you could afford to cover over a 300 m^2 roof? It may be something worth putting onto a satellite that already costs over $100 million to launch and another $400 million to build that has only 5 m^2 to worry about, but that isn't the same sort of problem.
If Congress could get their head out of their behinds and show some fiscal discipline, balance the budget and pay off the federal debt, they could finance nearly the entire Federal budget (military, NASA, NSF, social programs, even Social Security) off of what is currently spent just to pay interest on the existing debt.
Don't blame the military spending when it isn't even the #2 budget item (even with the Iraq War). There are many other things that could be cut from the budget first, and have a much bigger impact.
Name a commodity oriented manufactured good which has been dropping in price 40% per year. Like manufactured cheese or sugar.
I don't think you can find it. And that is what you should be comparing, not CD players or cell phones.
Solar cells have changed little since the 1960's, and any real reductions in costs have been mainly for economies of scale (more of them are being produced in a slightly more efficient factory with less labor per unit) and some interesting changes in materials that are coping with the fact that solar cells designed for residential usage don't have to have the same watts/m^2 efficiency as a spacecraft. If you reduce the efficiency of a solar cell to 30% of the power but 5% of the cost, that seems like a reasonable approach to take for residential applications. When launching spacecraft at $10,000 per pound (that is even very cheap), tweaking out that last 60% efficiency at slightly higher cost seems much more reasonable... but that is not the application we are talking about here. When it is a choice between a $2 cell and a $10 cell that both weigh 100 grams.
Microminaturazation simply doesn't make sense for solar cell production, where it is an energy collector in the first place. This is where other electronic devices have made gains, because they have eliminated parts and reduced material requirments... passing those savings onto the consumer. There is no need for discrete transistors or even vacuum tubes like existed in early television sets, because those have all be replaced by just a handful of chips... or even just one single well designed chip.
For solar panels, instead the need is to substantially increase the amount of material that is available. That doesn't come cheap, and certainly the Sun hasn't had an increase in solar radiation of 40% per year. There is global warming, but that would simply be global warming at insane levels.
There is also enough competition with cell manufacturers and comparatively minimal barriers of entry (no single country has a monopoly on Silicon for an OPEC type cartel) that I don't see huge price gouging going on, and the basic designs for solar cells are old enough that patent issue aren't even a major problem. What patents exist are for more exotic alloys and perhaps manufacturing processes themselves, not for the basic design of a cell.
In terms of electricity to power the monitoring equipment run the automated controls, and operate the heating elements; it takes much more energy to "manufacture" a gallon of gasoline than is ever released from that gallon of gasoline... even at 100% efficiency.
Yes, I've heard the arguments that solar panels can't be created with purely the energy from other solar panels. That may be true.
But it does allow you to decentralize the energy production and removes the central power generation authority from the equation. Or more to the point, it is very cost effective from both a fiscal as well as energy transmission viewpoint to encourage the introduction and use of solar panels in more rural areas.
And more interestingly, energy production costs (and rising efficiencies) are dropping enough that it may in fact be cost effective in the next few years for solar cell fabs to become completely self-powered. It may require hundreds of acres of solar panels in a desert environment (little or no cloud cover), but it may still be able to happen.
That such panel production isn't happening right now should not be an excuse to use or not use solar panels.
I would note in particular that the motion picture industry had perhaps their largest box office total ever this past summer... over $4 billion dollars worth just in the USA alone. And that little factoid has been in the news quite a bit lately.
More to the point, is this hardcore attitude toward cracking down on somebody who brings a camera into the theater and prosecuting somebody who grabs 3-5 mintues on their their cell phone something really worth prosecuting, or "charging" off to the respective movie studio P.R. budget instead?
Hardcore pirates are more likely to do something more obvious like when a movie theater owner was held up at gunpoint to hand over a complete print of Return of the Jedi on the opening day of wide release. Or simply get a copy from one of the studio production crew members or even studio executives themselves. Does arresting a kid in Podunk, Arkansas really make that much of a dent to stopping movie piracy when these much more obvious forms of piracy are being done (and seldom even prosecuted)?
How about this as a more "friendly" but related question..... what real prosecutions have occurred over the past 10 years to put major pirate groups behind bars? In other words, what real success has the MPAA had to stop piracy besides going after a grandmother who doesn't even have an e-mail address?
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to start out here that I think the whole notion of NC licenses to be something really silly in the first place, and the debate over NC vs. Commercial content has nearly nothing to do with "open source" or "copyleft". That this issue is dealing with non-commercial licenses seems to be where the real "ethical" questions are being raised, not that it is copyleft content.
All this said, your question about "but what if a hypothetical site abruptly converted to a fee-for-access format?" is a vaild point to look at. And something to not worry too much about either.
If a website that you have been contributing to offers a copyleft license, you should take advantage of that opportunity and attempt to mirror the content whenever you can. Anybody who takes copyleft contributions but doesn't "give back" should be suspected right away. In this I'm referring to Gracenote and the music track databases that were "converted" from a non-profit entity to a very much for-profit corporation where the contributors were screwed over in the process. If you are concerned about copyleft, this is the real concern, where Gracenote even went so far as to assert propritary copyright over the voluntary contributions of others.
In the case of something like a Wiki that has already made explicit claims of all contributions being made through a copyleft license, the content itself is independent of those who actually operate the website. If those who are doing the hosting act like a bunch of idiots and go against the general wishes of the community who has developed the content, it is comparatively trivial to set up a "mirror site" and recruit most of the original content developers to the new website. This constant threat of forking is what keeps most copyleft websites from charging for access (aka Sourceforge, Wikipedia, etc.) even if those involved with the decision making on those websites may even have a motivation to charging for that access. The site owner doesn't really "own" the copyleft content, unlike websites like scientific journals charging $50 per article who do claim copyright and will legally go after those who set up a mirror site which offers those same articles for free.
One particular problem that does need to be addressed by those advocating NEA exploration is how to cut down on the cost of getting equipment into orbit in the first place to make it cheap enough to make NEA minerals valuable enough for extraction.
More to the point.... can we make sending equipment + personnel to an asteroid cheap enough to extract very rare minerals (aka Uranium, Gold, Platinum) at a price that can be competitive with terrestrial-based mining operations? If you can make a business case of this nature, the bootstrapping issues involved with getting people to NEA can be much more easily solved, but unfortuantely at $100,000 per pound to LEO is not going to make economic sense. The Space Shuttle is currently over $1 million/pound right now, although Soyuz spacecraft are close to about $50,000/pound.
Let's just hope that John Carmack can get his spacecraft going where the primary cost is the consumables and not the vehicle cost itself. His latest posting on his blog seems to indicate this may be normal operation for his spacecraft, and it will be awesome if he ever gets to LEO with his spacecraft. Going after the the extreme skydiving market (>> 100,000 feet altitude) sounds like a good place to start.
BTW, my comment about the window of opportunity to approach a NEA being only for a couple of weeks every other year or so is based on the idea that you have established a colony on a particular hunk of rock and you seek to either obtain the "products" from that colony or wish to resupply the original expedition. If anything has been learned from the MIR/ISS experience is that resupply is a huge issue that needs to be considered for any permanent human settlement. I do believe that people living in space will have to learn how to become much more self-sufficient, but it is going to take some time before a body of knowledge is developed that will allow that to happen. Or even more important a culture of people that actually live in space and not stop by for an occasional visit as a government employee. This does not exist yet... although I hope that it may eventually.
Most people of today would starve to death if they couldn't get to the grocery store at least twice a week. They have certainly forgotten the lessons learned from their relatively recent ancestors who often had to go several months without being "resupplied" from outside sources... particularly those of us like you and I, Shadowbearer, who have American ancestors who lived on the American frontier. My great-great grandfather certainly couldn't hit the local grocery store when his family needed some food... he had to grow it himself. Doing this in the space frontier is going to be comparatively similar in difficulty... even with modern technology working on your behalf. And you had better be capable of doing field repairs of all of that technology if your life depends on it.
Please explain even one potential benefit that would result from having a nuke on the Moon... other than to engage in a war against others already on the Moon.
Even orbital nukes, which were discussed and explored as viable options in the 1950's and 1960's as something the U.S. Air Force was strongly considering, is something that has long been discounted and dismissed as both impractical and subject to potential counter measures that would render them useless.
By far and away the most effective device for delivering multiple warheads to a country without any warning would be from a nuclear-powered submarine. And the USA has been the "world class" standard for how that can be accomplished. Try to beat the stealth ability of a Trident sub that is 5 miles from a coastal city that the U.S. President wishes to be destroyed. Good-bye St. Petersburg... or Tehran depending on who is perceived to be hostile. And a nuke can be detonated over those cities in less than 10 minutes after launch.
It would take days for a nuke to travel from the Moon to the Earth. So what is the huge improvement?
Territorial claims on the Moon may be made, but that is precisely why some sort of militarization is inevitable in space. Regardless of how noble and honorable your motives may be, there will be some idiot or two that will try to be a bully and push their way around, demanding all kinds of stupid things. The only way you can stop them is to have a bigger gun and scare the hell out of them to stand down and take the status quo. The question then becomes.... who will have the guns? I would rather that it be in the hands of larger governments like the USA and Russia, who have something to lose on the Earth if things get out of hand. Certainly I wouldn't trust some directorate from the United Nations.
BTW, in regards to Bush.... I would consider him to be a lame-duck President at the moment. He isn't going to be doing much of anything different than what is currently going on. Large quantities of soldiers will still be in Iraq in 2009, oil will still be consumed in large quantities, and the U.S. Government will still be screwed up. The only thing that will change is that George W. Bush will not be President of the USA after January 2009. At that point you can vent your spleen about whoever else picks up the reins and screws up our country, even if you will be denying that they are making a mess of things.
The issue here isn't Lunar vs. Orbital costs of living, but Near-Earth Asteroid costs vs. Lunar costs when you take the whole infrastructure into the equation and large scale mining operations. Also, you have a larger percentage of silicates in Lunar soils compared to the heavier metals you can obtain from the obviously high density asteroids.
I personally think there is a place for Lunar exploration and mining, but it isn't so cut and dried as some would have you think it is. But there are some very definite adantages for Lunar exploration.
One of the most significant is that the Moon is never more than 250,000 miles away. You can't say that about the rest of the Solar System, and nearly any effort to travel to the Moon is more or less trivial with even the current level of rocket travel. There is no need for exotic propulsion methods if you need to travel to the Moon in less than a week. Even the Apollo astronauts got to the Moon in less time than that. Getting to Mars in less than a month is going to be considered an exceptional task worthy of the most exotic propulsion systems that may ever be invented and worked on before the end of this century.... and those may have to be nuclear based at that. Travel to most Near-earth asteroids will be of a similar time span except for very brief windows of opportunity that may only happen once every several years. If a disaster happens on that asteroid when it happens to be on the opposite side of the Solar System from the Earth, anybody who is there will simply be screwed... and likely be dead before anybody gets there to find out what has happened. A similar disaster on the Moon might be able to get a "rescue mission" in a pinch to send extra supplies and get some additional people and resources available to help out and solve problems there.
I have no doubt that once a large and well established infrastructure is developed throughout the Solar System (meaning regular scheduled spaceflight between various planets, and permanent structures on the Moon, L-points, GEO and LEO) that it may prove to be more economical to mine asteroids rather than fight pre-existing claims on the Moon that have taken some of the best spots.
Of course, the Moon has more surface area than North America, so running out of places to go may be a bit of a challenge. Many of those detracting from Lunar exploration tend to forget that the Moon is really a dwarf planet... larger than Pluto and Ceres.
Quibbling over the licensing terms is an issue, however, because better licenses do make a huge difference in terms of how the content is going to be used and reused.... and over how many people will be attracted to using that particular license.
I've been involved with the software development industry for nearly 30 years now, and I will note that there were many software applications I used (and modified) that were in the public domain 30 years ago. But it wasn't until the GPL came out and perhaps even more importantly was widely used by several major players in the computer industry (most notably IBM of all companies) that open source software was perceived to have any real value.
The written word and "open source" textual projects like most wikis are still trying to find out what they can do, and to even understand what the licensing terms really ought to be about. While some projects like Wikipedia have certainly struck a chord with a large group of people, it still hasn't had a huge impact on the much larger general publishing industry yet. I believe this has to do with some of the terms and conditions of those licenses that can be absurd... such as the license republishing provisions of the GFDL and the simply raw confusion over just what is a Creative Commons license. There are so many CC licenses that to all but a hardcore fan it can be very confusing to understand what is what. I'm talking here about trying to introduce the concepts of "open content" licenses at all to people who have never heard about it before in the first place.
I will also note here that in the "marketplace of ideas" that the GPL wasn't alone in terms of license concepts for computer software, and other concepts preceeded the widespread adoption of the GPL as well. Most notably the idea of "shareware", which was a huge hit among many software developers.... even though many of those authors and software publishers rarely even wrote the software for any real intent to make money. The BSD license, in fact, was perceived to be a better license and even now has its hardcore fans that distrust some key aspects of the GPL. It was also widely in use well before the GPL was applied substantially to large numbers of computer software applications.
Perhaps 10% of those 50,000 who downloaded the P2P Britney Spears song decided to shell out the $20 to buy the CD after hearing the song and desired a higher quality version that wasn't the crappy 16 kbps mono version with the last 30 seconds of the song missing that they got from the P2P link. In other words, the P2P version is just a form of advertising. Certainly allowing these "free downloads" can actually increase sales of the music itself.... especially if the music is of high quality. Something you could argue about with Miss Spears.
In terms of the Physics textbook, there are so many ways that the "authors" of the textbook have been "paid" and otherwise compensated for that I don't see what the real problem is anyway. Any university professor who is the lead author of a widely used textbook for their main specialty will likely gain tenure and even a full professorship at whatever school they teach at. How would that change if the distribution model were substantially different? Wouldn't they want to maintain their reputation alone to keep the text up to date?
This isn't to suggest that blatant distribution of copyrighted works without permission over P2P networks is necessarily legal or even ethical, but there are financial incentives in many cases to encourage P2P distribution for those who actually generate the content in the first place.
The situation gets even worse than what you are suggesting here.
/. example here, you have millions of postings from the nearly 1 million registered users (plus the anonymous cowards). It would be very difficult to be able to track down to actual individuals more than a very small percentage of those registered users.... and that is just to get their actual names. To be able to independently contact them asking for copyright permission to use their comments would be much harder yet. And postings by anonymous cowards are still considered under copyright even though absolutely nobody can be traced to those postings directly.
In the past, you could clearly identify not only who or what was copyrighted, but you could also get a reasonable expectation of being able to get some identifying information about the copyright registrant to be able to track down the original author or publisher to be able to see "permission" to reproduce the content. Such information was made available in a public forum (the Library of Congress) in a central "database"... even if it was only in a stack of boxes in some government warehouse.
To use the
I've tried (unsuccessfully I might add) to take Wikipedia and other Wikimedia project content and attempt to formally register the material with the Library of Congress as registered copyrighted content. To do so requires those contributing the written content to formally declare some basic information, most notably their nationality (what country they are eligible to get a passport from) and where they are currently living (not necessarily the same thing). Part of this is due to the fact that your nationality actually determines what laws can be applied to content which you write. You are also required to disclose a date of first publication, if it is a work for hire, and if somebody involved with the content has died.
What I discovered is that nearly unanimously the attitude among nearly all participants was that the formal copyright registration was not only unnecessary, but even providing these basic personal details (aka your actual name if you want to claim copyright) is considered a "privacy violation". And keep in mind all I was seeking was a voluntary disclosure of this information where those involved would be very much informed as to why the information was collected, and "anonymous" contributions were still allowed. Even being able to provide a mechanism to disclose this information was met with incredible hostility, and is only now being done on an ad hoc basis.... with repeated policy discussions to completely eliminate these pages where this kind of information has been disclosed.
Basically, under current copyright law, it is nearly impossible to determine what is or is not actually copyrighted, or even to whom it has been copyrighted. This is particularly difficult in "open source" projects like Linux or Wikipedia.
So what is the actual "value" of the complete Beatles music collection? How could it be assessed in terms of a county assessor's office to determine its "property value"?
Keep in mind that "intellectual property" is also a rapidly depreciating kind of "property". It is worth quite a bit when it is first produced, but rapidly approaches worthlessness as time goes on. There are some exceptions like the Beatles, but what about the hundreds of one-hit wonders that may have a couple of decent songs but have been forgotten about for decades? I'm talking something like Bill Hailey and the Comets. How much is his music inventory worth?
Some items like automobiles are assessed for property taxes but at the same time also have depreciating value, so this isn't necessarily something impossible to calculate, but tangible property like a vehicle or house is usually easier to determine an actual value for that item. Loose concepts like the popularity of a particular performer is very hard to determine, except perhaps what has sold over the previous year. And income taxes will soak up most of that money anyway.
So I disagree here even that this is something which is being "missed" by tax assessors. It also isn't tangible property.
The only problem with this line of thinking is this fundamental question:
When exactly was the last time a copyright on anything recently under copyright expired?
It has been several years.... and not since the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act. There is little reason to believe that anything else will be available into the public domain for decades if not simply perpetual copyright.
In terms of patents, I have seen some patents expire. But I've also seen incredible abuse of the patent system to the point I'm a hardcore advocate of its abolition. I see very little financial incentive for a small business or individual innovator to go through the process of seeking a patent beyond just an ego boost, as any patentable idea will likely be stolen by a larger company anyway and you won't really make any sort of substantial sums of money from such a device or concept even if you have something truly unique and original.
Basically, the patent system is only a way for big businesses to protect themselves against other large businesses, and to snuff out the smaller competition that can't compete with the same rate of patent submissions. Oh, and that USPTO is a modest revenue raising mechanism for the U.S. Federal Government, so there is little reason for congressmen to try and kill what is a cash cow for themselves.
... and a much longer time that some people who are touting light pollution as a recent phenomena are willing to admit.
To start out here I want don't want to dismiss that perhaps the growth of some cities, particular in the American south-west, isn't causing problems for observatories, or even for ordinary people to be able to appreciate a star filled night without some significant sources of light pollution being visible from nearly anywhere you go.
What I'm objecting to here is the statement "In Galileo's time, nighttime skies all over the world would have merited the darkest Bortle ranking, Class 1."
I don't think this is the case. Street lighting has been something done in urban environments since from about Roman Imperial times, and certainly during renaissance era... meaning the time of Galileo. Hear me out before your do a knee jerk reply on this.
Larger cities have usually had some source of light, if only kerosene or tallow but sometimes even more. Gas lighting was very common in the 1500's and in some areas even earlier. In Moorish Spain (before the reconquista making Spain a Christian country) some chroniclers noted how the light from Iberian cities glowed like a constellation of stars across the hills. In other words, it wasn't just a single lone candle or two but whole urban environments where there were substantial sources of unshielded light being used to illuminate the city streets and in turn the night time sky.
The point being here, I think it is reasonable to conclude that there were some urban environments even before the birth of Galileo where the visibility of the stars would have been significantly diminished, and certainly not a "Bortle ranking, Class 1" even if you were some distance from that city.
Again, I'm not suggesting that electric lighting hasn't had a significant impact on urban lighting, with certainly Times Square in New York City setting the standard of the worst light pollution possible with perhaps "The Strip" in Las Vegas being in close competition. Certainly suggesting that you can see an astronomical event at Times Square in NYC such as a comet (it has happened) is suggesting that nearly anybody can see what is going on. But keep in mind that electric lighting is not exactly something just created or discovered this past year either. Large scale urban lighting has been going on in Europe and North America for well over a century now, and even "developing countries" have been using electric lighting for decades.
The point being is that those who look fondly to the "good old days" often forget what really happened in the past, and to make arguments about what sorts of things happened in the past and misrepresent that past for the sake of argument is doing both a disservice to your argument in the long run and demonstrating ignorance about the topic. It is clear that the primary poster about this really has no clue what urban conditions may have been like during the time of Galileo and perhaps even earlier. That a star-filled sky where you can touch the center of the Milky Way is an awesome sight, and something that many kids of today never get a chance to see is something I can agree to. That reasonable efforts that don't cost a large sum of money ought to be explored in terms of helping to curb light pollution I would agree as well. But don't go telling me this is a problem that existed only in the 21st Century and not earlier if you want to make this an effective argument to further the goal of allowing future generations to be able to see a star-filled sky.
The Air Force, and the other branches of the U.S. Armed Forces.... the USAF does not exclusively run the nuke program in the USA, routinely moves nuclear weapons across the country all of the time. It is necessary for those involved that they know how to handle the real thing and not just play with dummy warheads all of the time.
Generally speaking, the "live" warheads will only go up when there is a time of increased alert (aka the various DefCon levels) mainly to prevent an accidental detonation, but nukes have additional safeguards well above and beyond normal chemical detonation (gunpowerder and C4 explosives) devices. And even those are safeguarded where during some training flights where true dummy warheads will be used that don't have any of the avionics or any kind of explosive on the airplanes. This would be for demo flights like at an airshow or for a flyby at a stadium for events like the Superbowl. I will note that since 9/11 when I've seen these demo flights in a public venue, the warheads on the fighters doing the flyby seem to me as if they were live warheads and not the standard dummy missiles that were on the fighters before hand, but this is just raw speculation based on relatively non-expert observations.
Even more surprising to me about this particular incident is that it was mentioned in the press at all. It is not our responsibility as citizens to know the status of any aircraft, ship, or other military unit in the U.S. armed forces or citizens of other countries to know about their military like this. Indeed knowing that information and having it publicized can significantly jepordize the lives of those military personnel who serve with that unit. If a reporter does find out this kind of information, they shouldn't publishing it, under threat of being prosecuted under federal espionage laws and divulging classified material. This is not to bury a blunder that some general or admiral made and doesn't want to have ruin his future military career, but to protect the lives of those who serve and to ensure that when the military does go into action that they have every possible advantage against potential enemies, and not to give potential enemies additional information that is not necessary.
This information should simply not be published in any news outlet, and I would have to agree that this is very likely to be a deliberate leak with authorization from a very high level in the military chain of command to let potential enemies know America has nuclear weapons, and routinely make them available to junior officers (aka the pilot of this particular aircraft) and have them available at a moments notice to be delivered nearly anywhere in the world. If this is the message, then the USAF should consider that the message is received, at least by an ordinary American citizen.
If anybody reading this think it is a sign of gross incompetence on the part of the USAF, they are missing the point of what really happened. You shouldn't be hearing about things like this in the news, as it is about unit operations and routine operations at that. If every time a nuclear warhead is moved was published in the news media, you would hear about it every day As such, this isn't really "news", any more than even having the space shuttle be moved to the launch pad. And the USAF has far more than 4 bombers, nor does the USAF do only 3 flights per year with its bomber fleet. If anybody is showing a huge lack of judgement, it is on the part of the editors and reporters involved with this news story, not USAF personnel.
Electronic access still isn't "free" with peer reviewed journals. I get that you think $48 to download a bunch of bytes over the internet is too extravagant. The point I'm making is that for some people that isn't the case, and there can be an economic viewpoint to show that it would be worth it to buy some scientific papers... particularly if you are in that field and have a budget to help pay for those kinds of journals.
I do agree that other alternative publishing systems could be (and are) developed that take advantage of the strengths of the internet that could also be used to help reduce the costs of providing a service like this for much less than most of these journals are charging. But it will take a radical rethinking of the general business model that scientific journals have been using for centuries. Not everybody likes to change overnight to any new concept, even if it means that the information can be spread further and more cheaply.
I would like to correct this fallacy. Iraq really was never an "ally" of the United States.
As "proof" of this, it is important to note that nearly all of the military hardware in the Iraqi inventory prior to the Gulf War (and explicitly the Iran-Iraq War as well.... when supposedly we were "an ally" with Iraq) was of Soviet, not American origin.
Iranian equipment, however, was indeed mostly of American origin as the alliance between Iran under the Shah and the USA was about as strong as between any two countries... like the USA and the UK at the moment. And the Shah used Iranian oil profits to buy some rather extensive weapons systems.
So as a general rule of thumb, the Iran-Iraq War was a battle between Soviet equipment and tactics on the part of Iraq vs. American equipment and tactics on the part of Iran.
The "warming of relations" between the USA and Iraq was really only for a short period of time, mainly due to the fact that they were doing a good job of keeping the post-revolutionary government of Iran in check, and it was not in the interests of the U.S. government to see a collapse of the Iraqi government at the hands of a fanatical Iranian government, only to impose a fundamentalist Islamic government instead.
This is not a rubber stamping of the actions of Hussein, but rather using the philosophy "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Clearly this was a friendship of convenience rather than something of a common culture or historic connection to each other. It didn't really even last that long.... mainly the last few years of the Reagan administration to the first year of the Bush I administration.
To suggest that we had been long-term historic allies of Iraq is a complete misrepresentation of the fact, and even to suggest the USA was a hardcore ally of Iraq at all is a misreading of history and what really happened. It was just a couple of years in a long and gruesome war (the Iran-Iraq war) that the USA offered a very limited amount of assistance on a few technical and logistical points. American troops certainly never participated in any ground offensives against the Iranians during that war, nor was the Air Force involved except for perhaps sending in some minor intelligence information like the locations of some of the Iranian military formations in a few rare cases. I would not call that the actions of a very close ally.
Actually, we are "at war"... but the real question is not if we are at war but against whom?
If you listen to the average conservative radio talk show host, it would seem like it is the Democratic Party.
If you listen to the typical Democratic politician, it is the Republican Party, and G.W. Bush in particular.
I think both of these viewpoints are flat out wrong, and it is unfortunate that the U.S. Senate refused to issue a formal declaration of war against a specific government and country.... which also begs the question about who the real enemy is.
Clearly on 9/11 the USA was attacked by an organization with widespread support from several countries, including the Taliban-led Afghanistan and Hussein's Iraqi government. And Syria, Iran, and some elements of the Saudi Arabian royal family. There is even some minor evidence that the People's Republic of China is supporting al Queida to a small extent, and certainly wouldn't mind if the USA was knocked down a notch or two. There even seem to be some elements of the Russian military who seem to be at least nominally supporting efforts to kick American forces out of the Middle East in some sort of reenactment of Cold War.
What is needed is the current political leadership of the U.S. government (including Senator Reid and Speaker Polisi, not to mention G.W. Bush) to step forward, clearly identify the people who are killing our soldiers in Iraq, and take decisive action against those individuals. The current level of deaths happening in Iraq is not due to unorganized "freedom fighters" seeking to reclaim their homeland, but rather well organized militia groups that are funded by national governments. Iran is one of those countries that are explicitly funding these groups, but other countries are involved as well. It is not an Iraqi "government in exile" that is organizing these efforts, as was the case of the French underground during WWII (which was also explicitly funded substantially by the governments of the USA and Great Brittan as well).
Does this mean that the USA needs to invade Iran? I don't necessarily think that should be the case, but certainly they should be held accountable for their actions and deal with the consequences of those actions. Since the U.S. Embassy in Iran is still not under American control, the ability to perform direct negotiation is significantly hampered, and it is Iran that has the ability to make the first diplomatic move to "normalize" relations by allowing the USA to get bake its embassy.
The U.S. government has at times in the past supported "rebel" groups and militias. Some have been rather overt in nature in terms of American support, such as the Nationalist Chinese movement in China under Japanese occupation, French resistance in WWII, the Afghan "freedom fighters" against Soviet forces, and the Contras in Nicaragua, and even logistical support for the Kuwaiti Army to retake their homeland. Some covert militias have also been supported by the USA as well, with the Contras early efforts being one of them, perhaps support for the Ukrainian "orange revolution", the Irish Republican Army (fundraising was rather blatant in Boston and wasn't officially discouraged by the U.S. government), and certainly the invasion force involved with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So in many ways it is hypocritical of the USA to be against "terrorism". At the same time in nearly every case of supporting these "paramilitary" groups it was fairly obvious that the only reason uniformed military forces of America weren't used was for political reasons alone, and to help augment existing military operations.
While I would agree with your general statement that the largest single expenditure in the U.S. federal budget is for paying interest on the national debt, I disagree with your analogy strongly... and the ultimate conclusion you are coming to here.
In the case of public highways, there is no restriction on who can use them... or even if you have paid highway taxes for their use. You do have a "right" to use a public highway, but there may be some restrictions on its use such as a speed limit, minimum vehicle requirements (such as a certain lighting scheme if you drive it at night, turn signals, etc.), vehicle type restrictions (operating a bicycle on an interstate highway is prohibited), demonstrations of skills required to operate the vehicle you are using (aka a license with endorsements depending on vehicle), and if you have committed various kinds of crimes... particularly traffic law violations. Nearly all traffic laws have been established due to people being idiots and causing substantial harm or even death to other individuals on those highways, or perhaps a sound understanding of the current "state of the art" for a typical vehicle together with mechanical and physiological limits for those who control that machinery. Driving 100 mph on a twisty mountain road is suicide or vehicular manslaughter in most cases... sometimes both.
In terms of access to scientific information, the copyright clause of the U.S. constitution itself is rather clear. Copyright is explicitly set out "to promote the useful arts and sciences". Knowledge and information is something explicitly required if you accept the philosophy that an individual citizen is a joint-sovereign authority over the government together with the rest of their fellow citizens.
When it comes to tax supported research, it seems very reasonable that those "shareholders" who have helped to finance that research ought to be able to get copies of the results of that research, and not have to pay huge fees to be able to access that information.
If a private company were paying for some research and you were a major shareholder, it may be reasonable to expect that as a shareholder you should be entitled to see the results of that research which you have paid for. It would certainly be expected that if a majority of the shareholders (by stock percentage) demanded that research, the board of directors would have to see that published reports of that research were made available. In addition, very few companies, particularly for-profit companies, would give up copyright and IP rights to that research as a "gift" to the researchers, particularly if that company financed the whole research project from the very beginning. This is very common for government research grants.
So why would government-financed research be any different if you can get a large number of citizens who helped pay for that research demand to see what they are paying for... and at a reasonable cost? With reasonable meaning either free or so cheaply that it would be literally the cost of publication and no more. Instead many of these research journals are collecting research, claiming exclusive copyright, and locking up this knowledge to only the elite who have the most immediate need to access the information. The cost of access is so prohibitively high that ordinary people simply can't see the information at all, even if they may have some of the education necessary to understand it. Or even if the information may be valuable to them in some way.
One of the problems with your line of thinking is the presumption of a mass market to help reduce the price through economies of scale. Aka for a mass-market publication like People magazine or even National Geographic (to use something not quite so tabloid in nature).
Many of these scientific journals have "communities" of readers that number in the low thousands or even just a couple hundred potential scientist who might read them. Think real carefully about that. How many scientists, for example, study deep water oceanography? Or semi-conductor material science? It isn't many for either field, and there are journals that cover subjects similar to these, in addition to the more general science publications.
If there is something more responsive to scales of economy (aka prices getting cheaper per unit with high volumes of production) than the print industry, I don't know what it is. Increasing a print publication by 10x only costs about twice the cost, in most casts. And the reverse is also true, like 10th the print run for only 1/2 the price, getting to absurd prices for a single copy print job. Some automation along this line is helping to reduce this "start-up" cost, but even xerography pushes some hard limits on small runs, at least if you want to maintain professional quality of the content.
And mind you, all I've talked about here is the physical printing costs. If you try to include content editors, reviewers, and support staff for these publications, these "fixed" costs can add up to a considerable amount as well. If spread over 1 million copies, it doesn't add up to much, but for only 1000 copies, it can be quite high. Even moving to an "electronic edition" for one of these journals still requires having this full staff... with perhaps even more "fixed costs" due to the requirement of having a technical support staff to keep the servers going, paying for bandwidth, equipment costs, and other related issues.
Basically, I'm suggesting that the $48 cost per copy wasn't necessarily the problem here... if this was the journal of original publication. That may even be a very legitimate cost of distribution if you take all of the costs involved and consider the number of people who may even try to read the paper in this kind of system.
The copyright violation was a big deal, and something which the journal should have been aware of before they accepted the paper for publication. And opportunistic resellers who haven't necessarily been involved with the editorial staff infrastructure are also dubious, but that is a separate issue.
There are some things that the scientific community can do to help reduce this fixed infrastructure cost, including the development of a wiki-like system of peer review with trust metrics and volunteers in the review process. Some of these things are already happening, but have not been accepted by many of the "old school" scientists who still think the internet is a new fangled invention. Traditional scientific journals have to adapt to the new technologies and publishing philosophies if they wish to survive the next century, and that is unfortunately something they are not prepared in most cases to cope with. The entire economic model that they have been operating under since before the time of Isaac Newton and the Royal Science Academy is going through a huge transformation, not just the physical equipment they have used to that point.
I think you missed the point of most of these episodes where this kind of "racism" was portrayed.
Most racism is really an outward expression of trying to cope with clashes of multiple cultures (aka "blacks" or "Mexicans") that have different world views and internal value systems.
By presuming that mankind has figured out how to resolve the issues between the various races (hence the mixed race crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-- both TOS and TNG), they are in turn confronted with further expansions of the definition to even understand what it means to be a bigot, or why being a racist is not necessarily a desirable attribute.
Some of the episodes that dealt with establishing the "citizenship" of Data, the ability of Data to "reproduce" (particularly the episode "Lil" and Data's daughter), and other similar questions do a fantastic job of exploring these questions... and even exploring what it means to even be "human".
Another classic example that I loved about particularly TNG and DN9 episodes is the exploration of Kahless (sp?) and the messianic concepts of religion that were pulled away from discussions of Jerusalem and the Middle East. Instead of talking about Jesus and dealing with Earth religions, bringing in religious concepts from a Klingon culture and discussing how a largely atheistic culture (the Federation doesn't appear to have $any strong religion) can express tolerance towards a strongly religious culture (aka the Klingons) is IMHO something incredible.
In short, it could even be argued that nearly the entire series is about race relations in a context that goes well beyond what continent that your ancestors are from and nearly the entire series portrays that even the planet you were born upon is irrelevant to your value you can provide to the much larger society as a whole. And furthermore each culture and philosophy can add flavor and spice to the community that would actually weaken society as a whole if it were missing. This is one of the philosophical concepts that Gene Roddenberry put into the series that has given Star Trek its appeal over other SciFi universes, and makes people want to come back for more.
Keep in mind that the original TV series first aired in the 1960's, when Jim Crow laws still existed in the USA and it wasn't even a thought for South Africa to get rid of Apartheid. Even having a mixed race cast at all was considered a bold move for any TV network executives.... and mixed race usually meant that a token black person was in the cast. Star Trek went well beyond that.
If you want to know why the Bush administration is against having Iran build breeder reactors and Plutonium enrichment facilities, you need to study up just a little bit more on nuclear physics before you can jump to any conclusion for or against that kind of policy: Having such nuclear reactors (particularly for a country rich in energy resources like Iran) has realistically one goal in mind: The construction of thermo-nuclear bombs. Aka the classic nuke.
If you have the technology necessary to independently build an efficient nuclear fission reactor, you also have the skills necessary to separate elements by isotope at nearly any purity that you desire, including the fabrication of large quantities of bomb-grade Uranium and Plutonium. And it doesn't take that much Uranium in order to get a project like that going... certainly not much for a larger country like Iran to be able to obtain nearly all they need from existing Uranium commodity markets.
I have no doubt that Iran plans on building nukes.... if they haven't already put most of the components to make them in the first place. The question after that is how do they plan on using them? Sending them into Iraq to their soldiers that currently don't exist officially? And what should the American response be if an Iranian nuke ended up taking out the "green zone" in central Bagdad?
Actually, that makes far more sense than you might imagine. Kenya is a country with hardly any electrical power production infrastructure at all, torn by civil war where things like transmission towers would be easy targets for one group or another to tear down and difficult at best for anybody to try and maintain even when trying to deal with natural hazards besides land mines and AK-47s.
Or to use another example, land-line telephone installation in many 3rd world countries (even emerging countries that are clearly going through industrialization like China and India) is virtually non-existant. Instead, cell-phone penetration into the population of these countries is far more extensive than more established industrial nations like the USA or England, where land-line telephone networks are already established and still provide competitive rates compared to cell phone coverage. This isn't to say you can't find a cell phone in the USA (where it is still nearly ubiquitous), but it is still common to also have a land line even if you have a cell phone. That is a rarity in many of these developing nations.
To explain this more in economic terms, consumers in these countries where older technologies didn't have a build-out of infrastrucutre, they are instead building out using the latest technologies instead of having to go through all of the previous communications systems, like telegraphs and TELIX machines. Why bother?
If you are in the position of being able to build an entire electrical infrastructure system from scratch for a whole country, perhaps it would be wise to consider alternative power generation systems like solar panels. This is more of a sign of the future that such steps are even being considered, and proof that perhaps there is hope that solar power might be a very real and viable alternative energy system without having to resort to silly government subsidies.
In terms of an engineering problem, you have no other platform than the International Space Station as a prototype to see just how much energy can be generated and what some initial costs might be to get it there.
Admittedly NASA hasn't been all that efficient with the fiscal resource to get that structure built, but it is a good test of what a 50 kilowatt facility would look like... the current power generation capability of the ISS. Fortunately/unfortunately that energy is being used to maintain the current ISS facilities and "beaming" the power to the ground is not an option at the moment.
If Bigelow Aerospace/SpaceX ever get their acts together (and it looks like they have the finances to make it), this may be a dream closer than you think. At least for an experimental power satellite that could do some more realistic tests than are done on the ISS (which has proven you can generate those kind of energy needs on a satellite and how to deal with that power).
I certainly wouldn't hold my breath for NASA to come up with the funding to make something like that reality, however.
Keep in mind that most of the current breakthroughs for solar cell production are not to improve efficiency in terms of watts/m^2, but rather in terms of $$$/m^2. If you drop the efficiency but significantly reduce the cost of the cell, you can make it much more affordable for an ordinary consumer.
There is no doubt that you could create a "super efficient" solar cell that would take advantage of nearly every watt of solar radiation from ultraviolet to infrared (or even gamma rays to radio waves), and even take advantage of any heat gradient from the front to the back of the cell. But would that be a cell you could afford to cover over a 300 m^2 roof? It may be something worth putting onto a satellite that already costs over $100 million to launch and another $400 million to build that has only 5 m^2 to worry about, but that isn't the same sort of problem.
If Congress could get their head out of their behinds and show some fiscal discipline, balance the budget and pay off the federal debt, they could finance nearly the entire Federal budget (military, NASA, NSF, social programs, even Social Security) off of what is currently spent just to pay interest on the existing debt.
Don't blame the military spending when it isn't even the #2 budget item (even with the Iraq War). There are many other things that could be cut from the budget first, and have a much bigger impact.
Name a commodity oriented manufactured good which has been dropping in price 40% per year. Like manufactured cheese or sugar.
I don't think you can find it. And that is what you should be comparing, not CD players or cell phones.
Solar cells have changed little since the 1960's, and any real reductions in costs have been mainly for economies of scale (more of them are being produced in a slightly more efficient factory with less labor per unit) and some interesting changes in materials that are coping with the fact that solar cells designed for residential usage don't have to have the same watts/m^2 efficiency as a spacecraft. If you reduce the efficiency of a solar cell to 30% of the power but 5% of the cost, that seems like a reasonable approach to take for residential applications. When launching spacecraft at $10,000 per pound (that is even very cheap), tweaking out that last 60% efficiency at slightly higher cost seems much more reasonable... but that is not the application we are talking about here. When it is a choice between a $2 cell and a $10 cell that both weigh 100 grams.
Microminaturazation simply doesn't make sense for solar cell production, where it is an energy collector in the first place. This is where other electronic devices have made gains, because they have eliminated parts and reduced material requirments... passing those savings onto the consumer. There is no need for discrete transistors or even vacuum tubes like existed in early television sets, because those have all be replaced by just a handful of chips... or even just one single well designed chip.
For solar panels, instead the need is to substantially increase the amount of material that is available. That doesn't come cheap, and certainly the Sun hasn't had an increase in solar radiation of 40% per year. There is global warming, but that would simply be global warming at insane levels.
There is also enough competition with cell manufacturers and comparatively minimal barriers of entry (no single country has a monopoly on Silicon for an OPEC type cartel) that I don't see huge price gouging going on, and the basic designs for solar cells are old enough that patent issue aren't even a major problem. What patents exist are for more exotic alloys and perhaps manufacturing processes themselves, not for the basic design of a cell.
An interesting point you should think about here:
In terms of electricity to power the monitoring equipment run the automated controls, and operate the heating elements; it takes much more energy to "manufacture" a gallon of gasoline than is ever released from that gallon of gasoline... even at 100% efficiency.
Yes, I've heard the arguments that solar panels can't be created with purely the energy from other solar panels. That may be true.
But it does allow you to decentralize the energy production and removes the central power generation authority from the equation. Or more to the point, it is very cost effective from both a fiscal as well as energy transmission viewpoint to encourage the introduction and use of solar panels in more rural areas.
And more interestingly, energy production costs (and rising efficiencies) are dropping enough that it may in fact be cost effective in the next few years for solar cell fabs to become completely self-powered. It may require hundreds of acres of solar panels in a desert environment (little or no cloud cover), but it may still be able to happen.
That such panel production isn't happening right now should not be an excuse to use or not use solar panels.
I would note in particular that the motion picture industry had perhaps their largest box office total ever this past summer... over $4 billion dollars worth just in the USA alone. And that little factoid has been in the news quite a bit lately.
More to the point, is this hardcore attitude toward cracking down on somebody who brings a camera into the theater and prosecuting somebody who grabs 3-5 mintues on their their cell phone something really worth prosecuting, or "charging" off to the respective movie studio P.R. budget instead?
Hardcore pirates are more likely to do something more obvious like when a movie theater owner was held up at gunpoint to hand over a complete print of Return of the Jedi on the opening day of wide release. Or simply get a copy from one of the studio production crew members or even studio executives themselves. Does arresting a kid in Podunk, Arkansas really make that much of a dent to stopping movie piracy when these much more obvious forms of piracy are being done (and seldom even prosecuted)?
How about this as a more "friendly" but related question..... what real prosecutions have occurred over the past 10 years to put major pirate groups behind bars? In other words, what real success has the MPAA had to stop piracy besides going after a grandmother who doesn't even have an e-mail address?