You're splitting hairs: Remember in the US people vote for an electoral college who in turn choose the President. Is that to say the President isn't elected either? Now in a Parliamentary Democracy, you vote for your local representative who is a member of the political party who in turn votes for someone from that political party to head it. Different names, but same animal.
I think you miss what the electoral college is and why many in the USA continue to support the electoral college in the first place.
Most importantly, the only function they have is to elect a President, not to enact legislation or perform any other duty, unlike electing somebody to Congress (or a parlimentary seat, for instance). Only on very rare occasions have there been faithless electors (aka voted for somebody other than who they pledged), and there has never been a presidential election overturned by a wayward electoral college that didn't decide the President who represented what the vote tallies recommended they cast their ballots toward. Based on state representation and other election factors and not just raw popular vote.
You can complain about the Bush vs. Gore situation in 2000, but that was a close election by nearly any system you can come up with and did involve some tie breaker issues as well. Certainly the polling was within the margin of error of even the vote gathering techniques, where even innocent (and not so innocent) counting errors could and did influence the final result. Creativly "discovering" new votes that were uncounted and changing the voting rules after the election is over only added to that mess. Frankly, I think the electoral college saved the USA from something even uglier had it not been in place for this election in 2000. Imagine a full nation-wide recount or even a second run-off Presidential election! Neither seem like something comforting to me as an American citizen.
The article does mention that this staff tried to mark a compromise between scanning so finely that they would record noise (a problem when doing analog to digital conversion in any format, but especially image data) and not well enough that you also lose data.
You can debate the choice here in terms of where to draw this line, and to suggest that they use some archival quality file format that does lossless image compression, but this is something that did go into their consideration.
I'm so glad that they have chosen to make this effort now instead of 10 years ago, where the decisions of image quality would have been a bit different (perhaps quite a bit) and the data storage requirements for this project would have been pushing or even beyond the capabilities of technology at the time. Petabyte storage facilities are now starting to be developed (it is still state-of-the-art even now) but it isn't completely unusual. And image processing techniques and storage concepts have matured to the point that you can reasonably determine as an archivist what technological route to take. Ten or twenty years ago that wasn't the case at all.
My largest worry here is that it appears as though only the "normalized" data is going to be preserved. I would strongly urge this staff to keep and preserve the original scanning data along with the normalized data, and store that as two totally different databases. I do understand the research needs for standardizing the brightness data and compensating for different emulsions, viewing conditions, plate making techniques, and even exposure times. But raw data is raw data, and often you can mine that original data for more details later one that sometimes the sanitized data doesn't make out.
I've seen this as a problem with other scientific fields, especially with climatological data. The sanitized version is preserved digitally and only the raw analog data (read here paper records from weather stations) is left in analog form.... only to be left in a warehouse to rot and be eaten by critters. Or even simply destroyed now that the information has been digitized and is stored in a "compressed" form.
I also hope that after an effort like this digitizing project that the original plates are still preserved, so they can be referenced twenty years from now and compared to the digitized data but with the plates scanned with future processing techniques.
What species is this which was the other intelligent species? The Neanderthals? I've seen studies that have suggested they weren't even really a seperate species from homo sapiens. I'm really curious about what other tool making species you are talking about here that was capable of achieving spaceflight without the use of an asteroid slamming into the Earth to dislodge them first.
As far as geting "out there", it has been entirely within my lifetime that mankind has even been able to get up and into space. That may date me somewhat, but I don't consider myself to be that old either. Certainly not to pass judgment about what planets may be habitable with a little technology and what ones aren't. It is another story if you are talking about planets that are able to spontaneously generate complex life from nothing more than a single microbe (assuming panspermia as a philosophy for how life started here on the Earth).
I don't believe that the Earth is necessarily unique even for complex carbon-based life, but it could be argued that intelligent tool-making life is much more rare. I have no idea if the Drake equation is accurate, what is parameters might be, or if there may be missing or extra parameters either. But water-based worlds, at least in our solar system, seem to be fairly common and there is no reason not to believe that there may not be many other worlds like this elsewhere.
I was going to suggest the original Cruther's ADVENT, but Space War does beat ADVENT by almost (not quite) a decade.
The classic Oregon Trail (mentioned just a bit ago here on/.) on a mainframe would be in a similar league of hard core classic games. I also remember another fun one what was global thermonuclear war, where you played the part of the USA going after Russia in a full out nuclear war lanuching MIRVs, ICBMs, and Bombers against Russian cities. You "won" if you could wipe out the Russians before you lost everybody in your own cities, and it introduced to me the ideas of overkill and megatonnage.
This list also missed the whole 8-bit microcomputer era, so I'm not surprised they missed even earlier classics.
BTW, I did say hyper-orbital velocity and not hyper-luminal velocity. There is a huge difference between the two. One can be supported by physics (although it is a huge amount of energy), and the other contradicts basic scientific tenants that have been proven sufficiently that you had better prove a theory of mechanics that will supplant Einstein and Relativity as the primary working theory at the moment for that branch of physics.
Mankind has been able to achieve hyper-orbital velocity (true escape velocity) in even manned spacecraft. There are the footprints of a dozen men on the Moon to prove that point. But we have currently only two human artifacts that have achieved solar escape velocity, plus a couple of other items that some speculation suggests they may also have been touched by homo sapiens at some point and then also left the realm of our Sun. Nothing manned at all, even accidentally.
Still, the energies needed for interplanetary travel are nothing compared to what is needed for interstellar flight, and that is the major problem with the argument that aliens are visiting us. Or if they made it here that they would even care to stick around with primitive folks who are still arguing about merely traveling to our natural satellite again and complaining about how expensive that might be.
The only thing that does ring true to the story is that sometimes shit happens, and happens in a bad way. And to have it happen while flying over what was arguably the most technologically advanced country at the time was additional bad luck. I've heard people complain about the P-51's as lousy fighters, but they were one of the most advanced aircraft of the time and had incredible maneuverability compared to even modern jet fighters. But they were propeller driven, so they didn't have the flat out speed that modern fighters have. Certainly far more sophisticated than what a alien race would have found had they done a survey only 30 years earlier and had seen the joke of a fighter plane used during WWI. Called a kite for a very good reason.
Imagine such an alien race that listed a race of beings (us) in their equivalent of Wikipedia as having just discovered flight through hot air balloons, only to discover a squadron of battle hardened combat fighter pilots flying P-51's and other aircraft found at the end of WWII. That certainly would have been an interesting surprise, particularly if they had detected evidence of surface nuclear weapon detonations in the general area (Roswell isn't that far from Alamogordo where the Trinty tests took place). The change in the level of technology from 1900 to 1950 is far more astonishing than what has happened from 1950 to 2000. 1941 to 1947 was a time of incredible developements of many technologies, particular military hardware. Particularly for a country that in 1940 was actually serious about a proposal to completely eliminate the Army altogether and had some pretty widespread support for the idea.
What Christian insistance? You mean a few vocal literalists who insist that the KJV Bible is a 100% authentic translation from completely accurate records that were preserved unmodified from the hands of the original prophets who uttered the original words, including Jesus Christ himself?
I find that to be as weird as believing anything else like Global Warming or Peak Oil. It is just a variation of religious themes here.
There are many believing Christians (myself included) who don't necessarily take the Bible to be the literal word of God, but do accept it as ancient literature that has some important moral stories that can be applied to ordinary life in a beneficial manner. It is obvious that there have been transcription errors and other problems with propagation of biblical literature, and the translation process from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to German to English has also lost some information along the way. Try to send something through Babelfish that many times and see what you get if you think you can preserve context completely, and keep in mind that some of the stuff in the Old Testament was translated into Hebrew in a few cases (like Daniel, who did most of his writing and speaking in Assyrian). The Bible even has a story about how one of the Israelite kings discovered what was the Old Testament of the time buried in a vault of the Temple (in Jerusalem) and ordered copies of it made for others to read because it was all new stuff to him. And that was about 700 B.C. when it was considered ancient literature to that king.
Stories about Noah, Adam, the "Great Flood", and other very ancient stories were considered ancient history to Moses when supposedly he wrote them down in the first place. The millenia since then, with the only means to propagate the stories was through manual transcription processes until Gutenberg, only scream that some details have been fudged over time. Even if you maintain a belief in God. That doesn't mean there may be some basis of truth to the story, but you can't use the Bible to mean things like the flooding of what is now Denver with seawater happened at the same time Noah got into his ark. The K-T event just wasn't that recent.
Consider the analogue of USA fighter jets in the Middle East: they aren't flying from America, are they?
Actually, many do. With mid-air refueling you can fly aircraft for as long as the pilot can endure staying in the aircraft.
There have been several (primarily bombing) air missions that have flown from Nebraska and Oklahoma to deliver their payload in Iraq and make the return trip back to the middle of America.
Fighter aircraft may be staged (aka flown to be located at a base closer to the action) to Iraq, but you are correct that they will be doing most of their action at a base in the theater of operations. The point here is that fighters don't need to be carried on an aircraft carrier in order to make it to the Middle East from California or Oklahoma. And havn't needed to be carried that way for decades.
Carriers are primarily a way to have an "instant" air base already available with fuel, maintainence crews, sleeping quarters, and the ability to push forward and project military force. And the whole "unit" can be moved to new locations as necessary. Air wings don't even come to port with the ship, but instead leave and land at a naval air station at the end of a "deployment".
The reason deathbed confessions generally gain credibility is that usually the individual making the confession has nothing to gain by lying right before they die. Unfortunately, testimony given this way can't be cross-examined either, which is one of the problems with it.
It is also quite common for people to try and "make peace with the world" if they know they are going to die soon, where they try to clean up whatever messes they left during their life. As the P.R. officer for the military base near Roswell, he certainly was in a position to be in the know about what was going on, and was responsible for the original press releases and helping to formulate what the official government response to the "incident", whatever it was. Clearly something happened, either alien accident or experimental government program gone bad. Either possibility would be amazing to read about, and get the "full scoop" about what happened.
The problem with a rare Earth hypothesis in terms of alien conquest is that it presumes that marginal planets for life (aka Mars or even Luna--the Moon) won't be colonized by advanced technological societies in this context. While I would agree that the "perfect" habitable planet is rare, any technological society could make a "home" out of virtually any sort of collection of raw materials you can find. With the abundance of extra-solar planets that have been discovered lately, finding solar systems with the equivalent features like having an asteroid belt with ice chunks seems like it will be fairly common for other stars besides Sol.
This isn't to say that planets like the Earth which have nearly ideal environments for promoting a large and diverse biosphere are going to be common, but why would a world like that even be necessary for advanced tech societies who are capable of interstellar flight just doesn't seem like a necessary requirement for me.
This makes as much sense as those bad scifi movies which have aliens "harvesting" humans as food. I know of several companies who would be willing to provide all of the beef, pork, or whatever you would want in terms of protien sources without having to resort to disease and chemical infested bodies of 1st world humans that would likely kill whoever or whatever ate them.
The only reason I can see the need for an alien invasion is not to take over a planet, but to wipe out a potential political rival in the universe.
What drives me nuts about people claiming modern semi-conductor based electronic computers (semi-conductors, solar panels, and microminaturization) are based on technologies from aliens is completely discounting the efforts of hundreds of thousands of very bright and skilled engineers who incrementally have developed this technology that can play World of Warcraft (truly an alien artifact if there ever was one).
Modern technological devices can trace their "ancestry" back to the original transistors, which was really a refinement of even earlier technology that was from nearly a century earlier.... by Volta, Tesla, and all of the others who have famous electrical measurement units named after them. The original transistor was an incredibly crude device that filled a lab workstation. That you can fit millions of them now on the head of a pin is besides the point. Integrated circuits (supposedly from Roswell as well) are really just common sense in terms of taking the idea of a transistor a step further and "printing" the transistors on a sheet of silicon and having multiple transistors connected to each other.
You just responded to the same question with contradictory answers here.
How would you design a lifeform that meets the following criteria:
Is made of primarily parts or pieces of the principle elements (by frequency) as found in the universe... aka carbon-based chemical life?
uses a common fluidic transport mechanism for permitting mixing and organizing molecules of increasing complexity. (Water or perhaps methane on Titan... but the Methane at 30 K is hardly going to mix chemicals quickly.)
Is capable of sustained existance outside of that transport mechanism. Achieving spaceflight by launching from underwater is something that seems absurd in most cases (the sub-launched missiles not withstanding).
Is capable of rapid manipulation of its external environment. In other words, not just consuming and excreting substances to/from its environment but also capable of digging, clearing out other life forms, directly locating requisite materials and more.
Is capable of not only finding and using tools, but of manipulating the environment and creating whole new classes of tools that have never previously existed. This is a critical for the next part.
Is capable of concentrating raw energy resources to achieve orbital and hyper orbital velocities.
Can concentrate energy resources to achieve not only orbital velocities, but also interstellar spaceflight. We as humans have not been able to prove this is even possible.
Is capable of sustained existance not only away from the original transport medium that sustained life during the original evolutionary stages, but can also carry on a prolong sustained existance in an interstellar vaccum.
While I can dream up some intelligent creatures that do not necessarily fit this criteria (dolphin and perhaps even parrots come to mind for species that demonstrate intelligence even similar to human intelligence that don't fit our form), the ability to manufacture tools capable of spaceflight seems to be something missing from both kinds of species. I'll discount other primate species for the moment. Imagine what an intelligent tool-using alligator would look like. Bipedal with a vestigal tail? And that is different from us how...even without hair? The human tailbone only serves one purpose right now... to provide room in a woman for vaginal birth by moving away from the birth canal. But it is still there.
We are talking a race that has achieved spaceflight. While dolphins may make it to Mars and beyond, it will have to happen with the support and encouragement of humans, not through something they ahve explicitly developed on their own.
I sure hope they are better educated than this. An ISP is liable for missing data in this situation if upon appeal through the court system the individual who had his/her website taken down in this manner has the decision reversed because it is not considered a valid take town. And there are other additional legal consequences if the directory is simply deleted. To disable the contents of the website is fine, but that just starts a whole other set of legal framework to put the content back up.
If ordered to do so, the ISP has to put the information back up.... at least until the end of the service contract. Free content ISPs have other rules, but take down/bringing back content still applies.
If it is a business affair, or somehow tied to donations, you can prove actual damages on top of any statutory damages that may come up as well... and have to be paid by the ISP or the individual/business who asked for the take down. Removing the content places the financial responsibility squarely on the ISP, not the company who asked for the take down notice. A CYA for an ISP would be to at least back up the data before deleting it from the main servers if that is done at all.
Hans Reiser has to be at least paranoid, which he apparently inherited from his father:
Ramon, Hans' father, certainly has reason to be paranoid from time to time. He served four tours of duty in Vietnam and one in Kuwait during Gulf War I. And did some additional duty he won't talk about after 9/11. Ramon is a genuine American military hero by many standards, and left the U.S. Army at the rank of 1st Sergent (perhaps Sergent-Major, but I havn't pushed him on that point). Ramon also trained as a military intelligence expert, including learning Chinese from the Defense Language Institute. He helped translate some interesting documents that have helped our country out in times of need against possible enemies... and spent time crawling through the weeds fighting the enemies of our country.
How much of the Army rubbed off onto Hans can be debated, but with that background, there is much more to the story.
There are also disclosure laws that prevent a prosecution from presenting "surprise evidence" in a courtroom unless they can show that it really is fresh evidence they just obtained. While the defense hasn't presented all of the possible counter claims for this trial, it is the responsibility of the prosecution that they simply *must* present the evidence at or around the time the charges are filed, and give any additional evidence found to the defense as well.
I hope he does leave the courtroom a free man, but he has lost his primary business, his reputation nearly ruined (I don't know how the open source community will react when this is done, but public image is a big part of that), and he has lost nearly a full year of his life already in jail for a crime he may or may not have actually done. If he didn't do this, the prosecution certainly screwed up in dealing with what is still just a missing persons case.
First of all, do you believe everything that is written by a sensationalist magazine like Wired? While they have been fairly neutral about the whole affair, they do tend to write their pieces with a bit of a flair, just as you have pointed out. And being a bit sensationalist. By going on and on about how she may be a mail order bride or not is besides the point.
I know Hans in a very deep and personal way, so this isn't based on the story but rather from personal experience and first hand knowledge of both working with Hans and spending huge amounts of time with his father (who I actually know much better, to be honest). Hans' father, Ramon, was throughally against the marriage from the get go and even said so before the nuptials. He warned that there was nothing good that would come from the marriage and suggested that Hans leave before it ever got started. It is too bad that Hans didn't listen to this bit of parental advise.
Your quote here did trigger some thought I had, however, about how Nina really had one huge goal in mind when she met Hans: To get American citizenship. And she decided to do that on her back . Seriously, with her medical training and a strong desire to get the big prize, it seems very reasonable that she deliberately timed the nuptials and her first night with Hans at her peak fertility so she could become pregnant.
The photos of Hans that have been sent around the internet since his arrest don't do him justice. He is the ultimate geek's geek, as much as you would expect if you would be involved with designing core elements of the Linux kernel. And he knows how to put on a show but also avoids conformity, particularly when it comes to dressing the part of being a hardcore geek.
As far as if he really did the murder or not, I don't really know. It certainly isn't as easy of a case to prove as OJ Simpson's case, and it appears as though Hans did some real stupid things right after the disappearance of Nina. That he did piss off some Russian businessmen while running his team in Moscow is certain as well, and Nina didn't help out in smoothing things over... in fact tended to add to the problems. His "friend" also was involved in some financial manipulations that actually got far worse than is publicized.
The truly unfortunate part right now is that Hans will never get to see his kids again... or his parents be able to see their grandchildren. That last part is particularly galling because although they are recognized as native-born Americans by the U.S. Government, Russia is claiming Russian citizenship for the two kids and refusing to return them to America. Regardless of who did what, these two kids are the ultimate victims of being denied the ability to see either parent, extended family, or even being able to grow up in the land of their birth. And the State of California is directly to blame on this point, where allowing the kids to leave the USA was even against state law and established child custody guidelines... not to mention that the oldest child is a material witness on behalf of the defense. His leaving the USA could perhaps even be considered tampering with the evidence, and certainly by itself is grounds for an appeal of any guilty verdict.
As for the question about the car.... it seems weird and will to a jury, but what did he do "wrong"? There is nothing he did there that was illegal, and nothing found in or on the car can reasonably be used to demonstrate guilt other than through a very loose "circumstantial evidence". Not even the blood found supposedly in the carpet of the car in trace amounts that seems to match Nina's DNA. That just means she was in the car sometime in the past, and that point is not in dispute. There are photos of her next to the car.
Nina was not a "mail order bride", but somebody Hans met while he was working in Russia. Hans found that he could hire some very competent software engineers (with PhDs even) at very good wage rates, and it was this team from Russia that was some of the core of ReiserFS.
Earning money at Silicon Valley wage rates to pay for the Russian team until he was able to independently make money off of the file system was one of his long term business goals. And nearly succeeded until his wife screwed up the mess.
Hans is able to speak Russian fluently, so it wasn't a problem for him to go back and forth between Oakland and Moscow on a regular basis. This is just a bad marriage that events have gone even worse over time. BTW, Nina's specialty is pediatrics.
As pointed out in other posts with this story, there are indeed many individuals already getting paid to write Wikipedia content....just not paid by the Wikimedia Foundation. They may be paid as P.R. reps to update the articles about their own companies or the products of their company, or perhaps looking over the biographies of their corporate officers. It may be government workers who look over how their country/city/state is written about (while they are "on the clock" in their office). It could be any number of different ways that people could be involved with developing the content. And astro-turfing on Wikipedia is a problem that has been fought before in terms of writing or removing content that casts companies or products in a negative light.
The Essjay incident was unfortunate, as his "credentials" were something added at a time when Wikipedia was much more informal, and when nobody cared about such blather. It is too bad that his "reputation" was enhanced by falsely claiming such credentials and using them in a few arguments when writing articles, but whenever I've seen such credentials pulled out it is usually to bias articles to a particular POV anyway... even if they may be legitimate claims. This incident has nothing at all to do with getting paid to write Wikipedia entries but over how a resume with false entries can affect your employment career down the line even after you have "proven" yourself to a future employer for other reasons.
In this case a 3rd party, the German government, is going to have people write content in Wikipedia that would normally be written anyway in published sources. It is tax dollars that is already being spent on behalf of German citizens, and building the cultural heritage of something that they show with national pride: The German language edition of Wikipedia. They are also asking for some help in learning about Wikipedia and Wiki editing styles from what amounts to be the local chapter of Wikimedia users who have been very active in spreading word about the project through various means. Compared to English speakers, the amount of content written in the German language for Wikimedia projects is far larger than the number of speakers of that language would indicate, and has penetrated far deeper into the German society than it has in England or the USA... in spite of the fact that Wikipedia was in English first and is by far the largest edition. I'm frankly impressed with Wikimedia Deutschland and nearly everything they have done, and it is too bad that we don't see more cooperation like this from the UK government or the US government.
The point that should be made here, however, is that there are plenty of people (both detractors as well as supporters) who are working on this problem. And there are contracts that have been signed by SpaceX and Kistler to supply the ISS at supposedly cheap rates to demonstrate such capabilities.
The problem that NASA is facing is that there has only been two vehicles that have ever been designed by realistic aeronautical design teams to be able to deal with the environment on the Moon. And both were designed in the 1960's by engineers who are retired, dead, or nearing retirement. One was Russian.
By holding this competition, NASA now has a group of at least nine independent development teams who have seriously considered this problem and have come up with realistic solutions on how to deal with the environment on the Moon and how to fly above its surface. And most of the engineers involved with this effort are quite young and will be retaining these skills for another 20-30 years into the future. Even if contracts go off to Lock-Mart for construction, this is a core of developers that can be used to help build these vehicles in the future if congress ever decides that going back to the Moon is something worth consideration on a national scale. Just from a talent development standpoint, I think this is an outstanding concept and one of the best spent tax dollars by NASA in nearly 30 years.
From the standpoint of one of the developers, it is a huge resume builder that would stand out on any future job application. Particularly if any sort of significant commercial activity does happen in LEO and people try to move out of that comfort zone. Even if all you do is try to help design the successor to the 747 for Boeing, it would still be something that could get your foot in the door. Or be able to land a job with SpaceX.
For the rest of us who are spectators.... it also gives us a chance to see some real working spacecraft up close and do something more than rush off to the sky until you can no longer see them. I wish I had the money to be able to go see the competition this year just for the coolness factor alone.
One of Werner Von Braun's original concept of going to the Moon was to establish a space station with a "drydock" facility that would be able to assemble lunar craft in orbit. In many ways I regret that he didn't go this route as it would have put a usable infrastructure into orbit for a sustained presence on the Moon and would have ensured that manned spaceflight would have continued throughout the 1970's in a substantial fashion. BTW, Skylab was a part of that planning, but it turned into something more along the lines of an afterthought to use up the rest of the Apollo hardware when NASA knew they couldn't get another Moon mission approved.
The problem with the ISS is that it simply isn't equipped to deal with this sort of activity.... which would have to be designed into the physical structure of that facility. Assembling parts in orbit is hard enough, and to do that while wearing gloves makes it all that much tougher. Plus it is expensive to put an astronaut into orbit, so their time is so valuable that it is usually much cheaper to hire a dozen technicians at $200,000/yr each than having 1 good person in orbit doing the same job.
On the other hand, using something like a Bigelow space station as a transfer point for fuel and supplies to an already existing Lunar shuttle system that made regular trips from LEO to lunar orbit might be something a bit more reasonable. You can design a spacecraft that would not have to deal with re-entry and launch issues and instead concentrate on things like the Van Allen belt radiation protection and efficiently using fuel in space. The Apollo Lunar Lander is an example of how different the spacecraft would look compared to the sleek aerodynamic spacecraft used for sub-orbital and LEO launches. Fuel could be sent to such a space station on unmanned rockets.
The case for doing this with a Mars mission makes even more sense to me, I would have to agree. The idea that you could build one huge mega rocket (aka Apollo style) that would hold the necessary 7-14 astronauts, all of their food supplies for 2 years, clothing, toiletries, communications gear, and more in one vehicle and try to launch that from sea level in Florida at once boggles the mind that you would even want to try such a monster project. And one of the reasons why it hasn't been done yet. I wouldn't even want to be an astronaut traveling in such a vehicle.
If instead you built a spacecraft that used more of a naval testing regimen to go to Mars that was built in orbit and designed for orbital refueling, and has been "tested" by flying it to the Moon and back a couple of times first before going to Mars, that makes much more sense to me. And sending supplies or even a "return vehicle" to Mars ahead of time would make even more sense.
And on the Mars end of the situation, I would strongly suggest the use of Phobos as a depot for the same reason. The escape velocity from Phobos is trivial, and stuff dropped on the surface of Phobos is unlikely to get into a decaying orbit around Mars. Because landing and taking off from Mars is going to require dealing with atmospheric drag, you need spacecraft designed for such activities even with the thinner Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft needed for traveling to and from Mars can be quite a bit different than what is needed to get to the ground and back up again, not to mention what is needed once on the surface of Mars. "Parking" the interplanetary spacecraft on Phobos would be a good way to protect it in terms of shutting down the systems and conserving resources for the return trip.
Just a thought here, but going to Mars does require some sort of in orbit infrastrcutre, and would allow for a sustained presence on Mars instead of just a simple "world wonder" show piece that demonstrates national pride but nothing else.
Selling any copyrighted product without authorization from the copyright holder is still a copyright violation and can land you with a $750,000 fine and/or up to 5 years in prison.... especially if you have multiple infringements and are openly trying to sell the product. A retailer would have very little to defend themselves against this unless they can show a clear chain of custody back to the original copyright holder or some other license agreement to sell the product.
So no, you don't have to buy products direct from Microsoft in order to be legally required to have a license (or be sub-licensed through a distributor and the agreement with that distributor) to be able to sell copyrighted products like Microsoft Office.
A retailer can have as a defense the "first sale" doctrine, that allows you to re-sell a copyrighted product that you have legally purchased through normal distribution channels. However, both the RIAA, MPAA, and increasingly software companies don't recognize this "right" in their license agreements.... even if you might be able to convince a judge about the idea. It is also this doctrine that allows public libraries to distribute copyrighted material, including computer software, without having to pay additional licensing fees.
But a retailer should know who their supplier is and how reputable their products are. If they buy illegal products, the retailer may be liable as well. And as you pointed out, there may be additional laws about counterfeit products (like counterfeit Levi's) that may apply as well, increasing the liability to a business. I don't know how many small retail shops can afford a $750,000 fine and stay in business, but I don't think too many can. Larger retail chains might be able to absorb the cost, but they would certainly fire any manager who was involved in such stupid behaivior and not give any sort of positive reference afterward.
I understand where you are coming from here, but the fact is that many of these websites are run by Americans, and they felt that it was an expression of free speech to be able to keep doing what it was that they were doing. Not to mention that a low-wattage radio broadcast station doing essentially the same thing does not have to pay the same royalty rates for music that you "broadcast". Some of the anger and resentment here is that there appears to be some price discrimination here, and that the royalty model is set up so only the largest 'net radio users can afford the payments.
What is worse here is that this is a governmental action, and not just something that a single music company came up with. If there were true diversity in the American music industry with multiple sources of music, this wouldn't be that big of a deal. It would be like an airline charging a higher fare for going between Los Angeles and New York. Instead of a direct flight, you can get on a flight going through Atlanta, Georgia for half the price, or go on a different carrier. Or for music, if you have to pay higher royalty rates on Beatles music, you move on to the Rolling Stones or Celene Dion.
Unfortunately, there is no alternative, and even picking up higher quality European music groups is still covered by the royalty fees.... as they are still a part of the same group of music conglomerates. The commercial music business is dying a slow death and is not being managed in a way that the talented individuals are being allowed to advance within the business due to raw talent alone. That "contests" like Pop Idol or American Idol have to be made at all (and the musicians successful after being "discovered") shows that there is no room for musicians to work hard and make it in the business unless you happen to win a lottery of some sort. Those musicians who are of the same quality but don't fit with the demographics of what the producers of those television shows are looking for have no shot at becoming a professional musician any more.
Actually, Staples would be held responsible for content they distributed, just as anybody else would be bound by the terms. Staples and other retail vendors have their own separate distribution licenses from companies like Microsoft to distrubt the software in boxes. It is for this reason that the GPL v. 2 has the explicit requirement that if you distribute GPL'd software on physical media, you must provide the source code for that software in machine readable form in the same "package". A network address doesn't work.
The MS-EULA is an "End User License Agreement", with the emphasis on End User. The restrictions are placed upon those who "break the seal" and actually are the final user of the software, and not somebody who merely passes it down the line in a distribution chain.
If Staples had been distributing Microsoft software from Cho Ming in Shanghai, even if the box looked like it came from Microsoft they would be guilty of distributing computer software without a license and be guilty of copyright infringement. The same would be true if they were distributing GPL'd software that doesn't meet all of the terms of the GPL. Being a vendor or somebody who actually put the stuff together in the first place is irrelevant.
Imagine if instead of this Linux distro, it had been a copy of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Would Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have a claim of copyright infringement against Microsoft for allowing people to download that movie without permission or in violation of the terms of use (assuming somebody just ripped a few DVDs to get the movie)? With permission is another story, but "with permission" for terms other than the GPL on a Linux kernel and suppliment software means you have separate permission from each and every contributor. I don't think Microsoft did this. And yes, the comparison of downloading a movie vs. downloading software is nearly identical in terms of copyright violations or non-violation. Only as long as they don't press the patent issue turning the thing into a copyright infrigement issue would it really be something for Microsoft to worry about.
The only reason why the MS patents are even an issue is that the GPL has a clause that explicitly voids the license if the software being used has patents preventing the free downline redistrubution of the software. So by offering the software for redistrubtion, Microsoft is in effect suggesting that this particular distro of Linux doesn't have any patent concerns, at least from their own portfolio or patents they have cross licensed. Either that or they have violated copyright laws by allowing people to download the sftware.
Regarding point #1.... read the GPL again. The source code is required if you make a modification or not. If you get it from a website, you are usually covered by providing a link to the source code, but it still must be there. If this is distributed on physical media, the source code must be included on the media. You don't have to give modifications "back to the author" (a common thought for some open source discussions) or even make it easy for the original author to find you, but if you do make modifications you must provide the modified code as well to those who receive a copy of the software from you. Think "pay it forward" and you got the idea down more or less.
As far as Point #2 is concerned, it does weaken the patent claim if you are a software developer who uses this particular version of Linux and makes modifications with this particular code base. Provided you personally downloaded the content from the Microsoft website or can show a clean chain of custody from somebody who did. A judge might throw out the counter claim if you want to plea on this point to presume that Microsoft made a mistake to even having this content on their website, but here is the main counter argument:
If Microsoft wants to sue for patent infringement, they are openly admitting that they blatantly violated the copyright of that software against the terms of the GPL. So Microsoft can't have it both ways... either they have violated copyright and face statutory damages on behalf of all of the software developers involved in any piece of the distro, or they have to drop the patent infringement claim. But only if you were a lucky S.O.B. and downloaded the software in the first place. Not after it was/.ed and you got the software elsewhere. If this instead was a 3rd party website, Microsoft could have been held blameless but it *was* a Microsoft website, complete with the Microsoft logo and copyright tag.
Mind you, this would only realy amount to a defense in this limited situation, but if you are you got yourself a "get out of jail free" card from Microsoft patents. Especially if you were a kernel contributors and got your own software from Microsoft. Somehow I have doubts that any Linux kernel developer ever got a copy this way...particularly if they did something that may be technically covered by a Microsoft patent. And besides, I have not seen Microsoft try to milk these patents and file lawsuits over them forcing Linux kernel developers to cease and desist distribution of the "violating" software.
But my representative absolutely does represent my interests in the U.S. House of Representatives. But he represents my district instead of my political party.
And you had better believe that those representatives know who they represent too! You go to a congressional office (especially one more than 300 miles from Washington D.C.) and you will get "red carpet" treatment by your representative. A school trip to D.C. with a hundred high school students is assured to get a visit from the congressman who represents that school's congressional district... even if they are a ranking member, and especially if they are speaker of the House. You are likely to get support from districts closer to the national capital, but they are more likely to get regular visitors. For most citizen request, like trying to get some congressional help on visas or appointments to military academies, they really don't even care about political party at all... as long as you are from their district.
And to compare the stability of the Scottish Parliament to the U.S. Congress is totally comparing completely different situations. The Scottish Parliament isn't even a national legislature, and the independence moves are to succeed from the UK only to rejoin the EU as a separate state. That is almost like western Texas becoming a separate state in the USA (and something the enabling act of Texas permits).
You still havn't addressed the governmental stability issues that I brought up, which is where the district-based governments tend to seek broad concensus across the whole country, forcing political parties to think broadly in a geographical sense and not try to concentrate their political power in just one area like rural districts, urban areas, or even one or two major states. It minimizes the impact of cities like New York City and has allowed cities like Los Angeles to go from a small rural town to a major metropolis in less than 100 years (among other factors). The American form of government allows this sort of flexability and encourages broad means of geographical thinking.
Major political parties that ignore significant interest groups do so at their own peril, and find themselves quickly out of office in a dwindling position.
This is presuming that American voters are mindless robots that always vote straight ticket and toe the party line.... and can't see through these games when they are being played. I have seen strategies like this backfire precisely when it is obvious that blatant political manipulation of the basic government is occuring.
And as the previous post was trying to mention but didn't quite get it out, blatant gerrymandering doesn't work when you are in a position where one political party is growing and the one in power is shrinking. In that case you do have to give thinner and thinner margins to everybody until you finally "break", handing the whole apparatus to the "other" party. Very few people maintain the same political philosophy throughout their entire life and always vote "straight ticket", so historical voting patterns don't necesarily hold true in the following election.
I'm not saying that there isn't something broken with the current system, but the game, especially in the reform scenerio, misses much of the reasons for why things are done the way they are currently done, and doesn't address "real life" in terms of fickle voters, demographic changes, and changes in attitude toward a political philosophy.
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I think you miss what the electoral college is and why many in the USA continue to support the electoral college in the first place.
Most importantly, the only function they have is to elect a President, not to enact legislation or perform any other duty, unlike electing somebody to Congress (or a parlimentary seat, for instance). Only on very rare occasions have there been faithless electors (aka voted for somebody other than who they pledged), and there has never been a presidential election overturned by a wayward electoral college that didn't decide the President who represented what the vote tallies recommended they cast their ballots toward. Based on state representation and other election factors and not just raw popular vote.
You can complain about the Bush vs. Gore situation in 2000, but that was a close election by nearly any system you can come up with and did involve some tie breaker issues as well. Certainly the polling was within the margin of error of even the vote gathering techniques, where even innocent (and not so innocent) counting errors could and did influence the final result. Creativly "discovering" new votes that were uncounted and changing the voting rules after the election is over only added to that mess. Frankly, I think the electoral college saved the USA from something even uglier had it not been in place for this election in 2000. Imagine a full nation-wide recount or even a second run-off Presidential election! Neither seem like something comforting to me as an American citizen.
The article does mention that this staff tried to mark a compromise between scanning so finely that they would record noise (a problem when doing analog to digital conversion in any format, but especially image data) and not well enough that you also lose data.
You can debate the choice here in terms of where to draw this line, and to suggest that they use some archival quality file format that does lossless image compression, but this is something that did go into their consideration.
I'm so glad that they have chosen to make this effort now instead of 10 years ago, where the decisions of image quality would have been a bit different (perhaps quite a bit) and the data storage requirements for this project would have been pushing or even beyond the capabilities of technology at the time. Petabyte storage facilities are now starting to be developed (it is still state-of-the-art even now) but it isn't completely unusual. And image processing techniques and storage concepts have matured to the point that you can reasonably determine as an archivist what technological route to take. Ten or twenty years ago that wasn't the case at all.
My largest worry here is that it appears as though only the "normalized" data is going to be preserved. I would strongly urge this staff to keep and preserve the original scanning data along with the normalized data, and store that as two totally different databases. I do understand the research needs for standardizing the brightness data and compensating for different emulsions, viewing conditions, plate making techniques, and even exposure times. But raw data is raw data, and often you can mine that original data for more details later one that sometimes the sanitized data doesn't make out.
I've seen this as a problem with other scientific fields, especially with climatological data. The sanitized version is preserved digitally and only the raw analog data (read here paper records from weather stations) is left in analog form.... only to be left in a warehouse to rot and be eaten by critters. Or even simply destroyed now that the information has been digitized and is stored in a "compressed" form.
I also hope that after an effort like this digitizing project that the original plates are still preserved, so they can be referenced twenty years from now and compared to the digitized data but with the plates scanned with future processing techniques.
What species is this which was the other intelligent species? The Neanderthals? I've seen studies that have suggested they weren't even really a seperate species from homo sapiens. I'm really curious about what other tool making species you are talking about here that was capable of achieving spaceflight without the use of an asteroid slamming into the Earth to dislodge them first.
As far as geting "out there", it has been entirely within my lifetime that mankind has even been able to get up and into space. That may date me somewhat, but I don't consider myself to be that old either. Certainly not to pass judgment about what planets may be habitable with a little technology and what ones aren't. It is another story if you are talking about planets that are able to spontaneously generate complex life from nothing more than a single microbe (assuming panspermia as a philosophy for how life started here on the Earth).
I don't believe that the Earth is necessarily unique even for complex carbon-based life, but it could be argued that intelligent tool-making life is much more rare. I have no idea if the Drake equation is accurate, what is parameters might be, or if there may be missing or extra parameters either. But water-based worlds, at least in our solar system, seem to be fairly common and there is no reason not to believe that there may not be many other worlds like this elsewhere.
I was going to suggest the original Cruther's ADVENT, but Space War does beat ADVENT by almost (not quite) a decade.
/.) on a mainframe would be in a similar league of hard core classic games. I also remember another fun one what was global thermonuclear war, where you played the part of the USA going after Russia in a full out nuclear war lanuching MIRVs, ICBMs, and Bombers against Russian cities. You "won" if you could wipe out the Russians before you lost everybody in your own cities, and it introduced to me the ideas of overkill and megatonnage.
The classic Oregon Trail (mentioned just a bit ago here on
This list also missed the whole 8-bit microcomputer era, so I'm not surprised they missed even earlier classics.
BTW, I did say hyper-orbital velocity and not hyper-luminal velocity. There is a huge difference between the two. One can be supported by physics (although it is a huge amount of energy), and the other contradicts basic scientific tenants that have been proven sufficiently that you had better prove a theory of mechanics that will supplant Einstein and Relativity as the primary working theory at the moment for that branch of physics.
Mankind has been able to achieve hyper-orbital velocity (true escape velocity) in even manned spacecraft. There are the footprints of a dozen men on the Moon to prove that point. But we have currently only two human artifacts that have achieved solar escape velocity, plus a couple of other items that some speculation suggests they may also have been touched by homo sapiens at some point and then also left the realm of our Sun. Nothing manned at all, even accidentally.
Still, the energies needed for interplanetary travel are nothing compared to what is needed for interstellar flight, and that is the major problem with the argument that aliens are visiting us. Or if they made it here that they would even care to stick around with primitive folks who are still arguing about merely traveling to our natural satellite again and complaining about how expensive that might be.
The only thing that does ring true to the story is that sometimes shit happens, and happens in a bad way. And to have it happen while flying over what was arguably the most technologically advanced country at the time was additional bad luck. I've heard people complain about the P-51's as lousy fighters, but they were one of the most advanced aircraft of the time and had incredible maneuverability compared to even modern jet fighters. But they were propeller driven, so they didn't have the flat out speed that modern fighters have. Certainly far more sophisticated than what a alien race would have found had they done a survey only 30 years earlier and had seen the joke of a fighter plane used during WWI. Called a kite for a very good reason.
Imagine such an alien race that listed a race of beings (us) in their equivalent of Wikipedia as having just discovered flight through hot air balloons, only to discover a squadron of battle hardened combat fighter pilots flying P-51's and other aircraft found at the end of WWII. That certainly would have been an interesting surprise, particularly if they had detected evidence of surface nuclear weapon detonations in the general area (Roswell isn't that far from Alamogordo where the Trinty tests took place). The change in the level of technology from 1900 to 1950 is far more astonishing than what has happened from 1950 to 2000. 1941 to 1947 was a time of incredible developements of many technologies, particular military hardware. Particularly for a country that in 1940 was actually serious about a proposal to completely eliminate the Army altogether and had some pretty widespread support for the idea.
What Christian insistance? You mean a few vocal literalists who insist that the KJV Bible is a 100% authentic translation from completely accurate records that were preserved unmodified from the hands of the original prophets who uttered the original words, including Jesus Christ himself?
I find that to be as weird as believing anything else like Global Warming or Peak Oil. It is just a variation of religious themes here.
There are many believing Christians (myself included) who don't necessarily take the Bible to be the literal word of God, but do accept it as ancient literature that has some important moral stories that can be applied to ordinary life in a beneficial manner. It is obvious that there have been transcription errors and other problems with propagation of biblical literature, and the translation process from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to German to English has also lost some information along the way. Try to send something through Babelfish that many times and see what you get if you think you can preserve context completely, and keep in mind that some of the stuff in the Old Testament was translated into Hebrew in a few cases (like Daniel, who did most of his writing and speaking in Assyrian). The Bible even has a story about how one of the Israelite kings discovered what was the Old Testament of the time buried in a vault of the Temple (in Jerusalem) and ordered copies of it made for others to read because it was all new stuff to him. And that was about 700 B.C. when it was considered ancient literature to that king.
Stories about Noah, Adam, the "Great Flood", and other very ancient stories were considered ancient history to Moses when supposedly he wrote them down in the first place. The millenia since then, with the only means to propagate the stories was through manual transcription processes until Gutenberg, only scream that some details have been fudged over time. Even if you maintain a belief in God. That doesn't mean there may be some basis of truth to the story, but you can't use the Bible to mean things like the flooding of what is now Denver with seawater happened at the same time Noah got into his ark. The K-T event just wasn't that recent.
Actually, many do. With mid-air refueling you can fly aircraft for as long as the pilot can endure staying in the aircraft.
There have been several (primarily bombing) air missions that have flown from Nebraska and Oklahoma to deliver their payload in Iraq and make the return trip back to the middle of America.
Fighter aircraft may be staged (aka flown to be located at a base closer to the action) to Iraq, but you are correct that they will be doing most of their action at a base in the theater of operations. The point here is that fighters don't need to be carried on an aircraft carrier in order to make it to the Middle East from California or Oklahoma. And havn't needed to be carried that way for decades.
Carriers are primarily a way to have an "instant" air base already available with fuel, maintainence crews, sleeping quarters, and the ability to push forward and project military force. And the whole "unit" can be moved to new locations as necessary. Air wings don't even come to port with the ship, but instead leave and land at a naval air station at the end of a "deployment".
The reason deathbed confessions generally gain credibility is that usually the individual making the confession has nothing to gain by lying right before they die. Unfortunately, testimony given this way can't be cross-examined either, which is one of the problems with it.
It is also quite common for people to try and "make peace with the world" if they know they are going to die soon, where they try to clean up whatever messes they left during their life. As the P.R. officer for the military base near Roswell, he certainly was in a position to be in the know about what was going on, and was responsible for the original press releases and helping to formulate what the official government response to the "incident", whatever it was. Clearly something happened, either alien accident or experimental government program gone bad. Either possibility would be amazing to read about, and get the "full scoop" about what happened.
The problem with a rare Earth hypothesis in terms of alien conquest is that it presumes that marginal planets for life (aka Mars or even Luna--the Moon) won't be colonized by advanced technological societies in this context. While I would agree that the "perfect" habitable planet is rare, any technological society could make a "home" out of virtually any sort of collection of raw materials you can find. With the abundance of extra-solar planets that have been discovered lately, finding solar systems with the equivalent features like having an asteroid belt with ice chunks seems like it will be fairly common for other stars besides Sol.
This isn't to say that planets like the Earth which have nearly ideal environments for promoting a large and diverse biosphere are going to be common, but why would a world like that even be necessary for advanced tech societies who are capable of interstellar flight just doesn't seem like a necessary requirement for me.
This makes as much sense as those bad scifi movies which have aliens "harvesting" humans as food. I know of several companies who would be willing to provide all of the beef, pork, or whatever you would want in terms of protien sources without having to resort to disease and chemical infested bodies of 1st world humans that would likely kill whoever or whatever ate them.
The only reason I can see the need for an alien invasion is not to take over a planet, but to wipe out a potential political rival in the universe.
What drives me nuts about people claiming modern semi-conductor based electronic computers (semi-conductors, solar panels, and microminaturization) are based on technologies from aliens is completely discounting the efforts of hundreds of thousands of very bright and skilled engineers who incrementally have developed this technology that can play World of Warcraft (truly an alien artifact if there ever was one).
Modern technological devices can trace their "ancestry" back to the original transistors, which was really a refinement of even earlier technology that was from nearly a century earlier.... by Volta, Tesla, and all of the others who have famous electrical measurement units named after them. The original transistor was an incredibly crude device that filled a lab workstation. That you can fit millions of them now on the head of a pin is besides the point. Integrated circuits (supposedly from Roswell as well) are really just common sense in terms of taking the idea of a transistor a step further and "printing" the transistors on a sheet of silicon and having multiple transistors connected to each other.
How would you design a lifeform that meets the following criteria:
While I can dream up some intelligent creatures that do not necessarily fit this criteria (dolphin and perhaps even parrots come to mind for species that demonstrate intelligence even similar to human intelligence that don't fit our form), the ability to manufacture tools capable of spaceflight seems to be something missing from both kinds of species. I'll discount other primate species for the moment. Imagine what an intelligent tool-using alligator would look like. Bipedal with a vestigal tail? And that is different from us how...even without hair? The human tailbone only serves one purpose right now... to provide room in a woman for vaginal birth by moving away from the birth canal. But it is still there.
We are talking a race that has achieved spaceflight. While dolphins may make it to Mars and beyond, it will have to happen with the support and encouragement of humans, not through something they ahve explicitly developed on their own.
I sure hope they are better educated than this. An ISP is liable for missing data in this situation if upon appeal through the court system the individual who had his/her website taken down in this manner has the decision reversed because it is not considered a valid take town. And there are other additional legal consequences if the directory is simply deleted. To disable the contents of the website is fine, but that just starts a whole other set of legal framework to put the content back up.
If ordered to do so, the ISP has to put the information back up.... at least until the end of the service contract. Free content ISPs have other rules, but take down/bringing back content still applies.
If it is a business affair, or somehow tied to donations, you can prove actual damages on top of any statutory damages that may come up as well... and have to be paid by the ISP or the individual/business who asked for the take down. Removing the content places the financial responsibility squarely on the ISP, not the company who asked for the take down notice. A CYA for an ISP would be to at least back up the data before deleting it from the main servers if that is done at all.
Ramon, Hans' father, certainly has reason to be paranoid from time to time. He served four tours of duty in Vietnam and one in Kuwait during Gulf War I. And did some additional duty he won't talk about after 9/11. Ramon is a genuine American military hero by many standards, and left the U.S. Army at the rank of 1st Sergent (perhaps Sergent-Major, but I havn't pushed him on that point). Ramon also trained as a military intelligence expert, including learning Chinese from the Defense Language Institute. He helped translate some interesting documents that have helped our country out in times of need against possible enemies... and spent time crawling through the weeds fighting the enemies of our country.
How much of the Army rubbed off onto Hans can be debated, but with that background, there is much more to the story.
There are also disclosure laws that prevent a prosecution from presenting "surprise evidence" in a courtroom unless they can show that it really is fresh evidence they just obtained. While the defense hasn't presented all of the possible counter claims for this trial, it is the responsibility of the prosecution that they simply *must* present the evidence at or around the time the charges are filed, and give any additional evidence found to the defense as well.
I hope he does leave the courtroom a free man, but he has lost his primary business, his reputation nearly ruined (I don't know how the open source community will react when this is done, but public image is a big part of that), and he has lost nearly a full year of his life already in jail for a crime he may or may not have actually done. If he didn't do this, the prosecution certainly screwed up in dealing with what is still just a missing persons case.
First of all, do you believe everything that is written by a sensationalist magazine like Wired? While they have been fairly neutral about the whole affair, they do tend to write their pieces with a bit of a flair, just as you have pointed out. And being a bit sensationalist. By going on and on about how she may be a mail order bride or not is besides the point.
I know Hans in a very deep and personal way, so this isn't based on the story but rather from personal experience and first hand knowledge of both working with Hans and spending huge amounts of time with his father (who I actually know much better, to be honest). Hans' father, Ramon, was throughally against the marriage from the get go and even said so before the nuptials. He warned that there was nothing good that would come from the marriage and suggested that Hans leave before it ever got started. It is too bad that Hans didn't listen to this bit of parental advise.
Your quote here did trigger some thought I had, however, about how Nina really had one huge goal in mind when she met Hans: To get American citizenship. And she decided to do that on her back . Seriously, with her medical training and a strong desire to get the big prize, it seems very reasonable that she deliberately timed the nuptials and her first night with Hans at her peak fertility so she could become pregnant.
The photos of Hans that have been sent around the internet since his arrest don't do him justice. He is the ultimate geek's geek, as much as you would expect if you would be involved with designing core elements of the Linux kernel. And he knows how to put on a show but also avoids conformity, particularly when it comes to dressing the part of being a hardcore geek.
As far as if he really did the murder or not, I don't really know. It certainly isn't as easy of a case to prove as OJ Simpson's case, and it appears as though Hans did some real stupid things right after the disappearance of Nina. That he did piss off some Russian businessmen while running his team in Moscow is certain as well, and Nina didn't help out in smoothing things over... in fact tended to add to the problems. His "friend" also was involved in some financial manipulations that actually got far worse than is publicized.
The truly unfortunate part right now is that Hans will never get to see his kids again... or his parents be able to see their grandchildren. That last part is particularly galling because although they are recognized as native-born Americans by the U.S. Government, Russia is claiming Russian citizenship for the two kids and refusing to return them to America. Regardless of who did what, these two kids are the ultimate victims of being denied the ability to see either parent, extended family, or even being able to grow up in the land of their birth. And the State of California is directly to blame on this point, where allowing the kids to leave the USA was even against state law and established child custody guidelines... not to mention that the oldest child is a material witness on behalf of the defense. His leaving the USA could perhaps even be considered tampering with the evidence, and certainly by itself is grounds for an appeal of any guilty verdict.
As for the question about the car.... it seems weird and will to a jury, but what did he do "wrong"? There is nothing he did there that was illegal, and nothing found in or on the car can reasonably be used to demonstrate guilt other than through a very loose "circumstantial evidence". Not even the blood found supposedly in the carpet of the car in trace amounts that seems to match Nina's DNA. That just means she was in the car sometime in the past, and that point is not in dispute. There are photos of her next to the car.
Nina was not a "mail order bride", but somebody Hans met while he was working in Russia. Hans found that he could hire some very competent software engineers (with PhDs even) at very good wage rates, and it was this team from Russia that was some of the core of ReiserFS.
Earning money at Silicon Valley wage rates to pay for the Russian team until he was able to independently make money off of the file system was one of his long term business goals. And nearly succeeded until his wife screwed up the mess.
Hans is able to speak Russian fluently, so it wasn't a problem for him to go back and forth between Oakland and Moscow on a regular basis. This is just a bad marriage that events have gone even worse over time. BTW, Nina's specialty is pediatrics.
As pointed out in other posts with this story, there are indeed many individuals already getting paid to write Wikipedia content....just not paid by the Wikimedia Foundation. They may be paid as P.R. reps to update the articles about their own companies or the products of their company, or perhaps looking over the biographies of their corporate officers. It may be government workers who look over how their country/city/state is written about (while they are "on the clock" in their office). It could be any number of different ways that people could be involved with developing the content. And astro-turfing on Wikipedia is a problem that has been fought before in terms of writing or removing content that casts companies or products in a negative light.
The Essjay incident was unfortunate, as his "credentials" were something added at a time when Wikipedia was much more informal, and when nobody cared about such blather. It is too bad that his "reputation" was enhanced by falsely claiming such credentials and using them in a few arguments when writing articles, but whenever I've seen such credentials pulled out it is usually to bias articles to a particular POV anyway... even if they may be legitimate claims. This incident has nothing at all to do with getting paid to write Wikipedia entries but over how a resume with false entries can affect your employment career down the line even after you have "proven" yourself to a future employer for other reasons.
In this case a 3rd party, the German government, is going to have people write content in Wikipedia that would normally be written anyway in published sources. It is tax dollars that is already being spent on behalf of German citizens, and building the cultural heritage of something that they show with national pride: The German language edition of Wikipedia. They are also asking for some help in learning about Wikipedia and Wiki editing styles from what amounts to be the local chapter of Wikimedia users who have been very active in spreading word about the project through various means. Compared to English speakers, the amount of content written in the German language for Wikimedia projects is far larger than the number of speakers of that language would indicate, and has penetrated far deeper into the German society than it has in England or the USA... in spite of the fact that Wikipedia was in English first and is by far the largest edition. I'm frankly impressed with Wikimedia Deutschland and nearly everything they have done, and it is too bad that we don't see more cooperation like this from the UK government or the US government.
The point that should be made here, however, is that there are plenty of people (both detractors as well as supporters) who are working on this problem. And there are contracts that have been signed by SpaceX and Kistler to supply the ISS at supposedly cheap rates to demonstrate such capabilities.
The problem that NASA is facing is that there has only been two vehicles that have ever been designed by realistic aeronautical design teams to be able to deal with the environment on the Moon. And both were designed in the 1960's by engineers who are retired, dead, or nearing retirement. One was Russian.
By holding this competition, NASA now has a group of at least nine independent development teams who have seriously considered this problem and have come up with realistic solutions on how to deal with the environment on the Moon and how to fly above its surface. And most of the engineers involved with this effort are quite young and will be retaining these skills for another 20-30 years into the future. Even if contracts go off to Lock-Mart for construction, this is a core of developers that can be used to help build these vehicles in the future if congress ever decides that going back to the Moon is something worth consideration on a national scale. Just from a talent development standpoint, I think this is an outstanding concept and one of the best spent tax dollars by NASA in nearly 30 years.
From the standpoint of one of the developers, it is a huge resume builder that would stand out on any future job application. Particularly if any sort of significant commercial activity does happen in LEO and people try to move out of that comfort zone. Even if all you do is try to help design the successor to the 747 for Boeing, it would still be something that could get your foot in the door. Or be able to land a job with SpaceX.
For the rest of us who are spectators.... it also gives us a chance to see some real working spacecraft up close and do something more than rush off to the sky until you can no longer see them. I wish I had the money to be able to go see the competition this year just for the coolness factor alone.
One of Werner Von Braun's original concept of going to the Moon was to establish a space station with a "drydock" facility that would be able to assemble lunar craft in orbit. In many ways I regret that he didn't go this route as it would have put a usable infrastructure into orbit for a sustained presence on the Moon and would have ensured that manned spaceflight would have continued throughout the 1970's in a substantial fashion. BTW, Skylab was a part of that planning, but it turned into something more along the lines of an afterthought to use up the rest of the Apollo hardware when NASA knew they couldn't get another Moon mission approved.
The problem with the ISS is that it simply isn't equipped to deal with this sort of activity.... which would have to be designed into the physical structure of that facility. Assembling parts in orbit is hard enough, and to do that while wearing gloves makes it all that much tougher. Plus it is expensive to put an astronaut into orbit, so their time is so valuable that it is usually much cheaper to hire a dozen technicians at $200,000/yr each than having 1 good person in orbit doing the same job.
On the other hand, using something like a Bigelow space station as a transfer point for fuel and supplies to an already existing Lunar shuttle system that made regular trips from LEO to lunar orbit might be something a bit more reasonable. You can design a spacecraft that would not have to deal with re-entry and launch issues and instead concentrate on things like the Van Allen belt radiation protection and efficiently using fuel in space. The Apollo Lunar Lander is an example of how different the spacecraft would look compared to the sleek aerodynamic spacecraft used for sub-orbital and LEO launches. Fuel could be sent to such a space station on unmanned rockets.
The case for doing this with a Mars mission makes even more sense to me, I would have to agree. The idea that you could build one huge mega rocket (aka Apollo style) that would hold the necessary 7-14 astronauts, all of their food supplies for 2 years, clothing, toiletries, communications gear, and more in one vehicle and try to launch that from sea level in Florida at once boggles the mind that you would even want to try such a monster project. And one of the reasons why it hasn't been done yet. I wouldn't even want to be an astronaut traveling in such a vehicle.
If instead you built a spacecraft that used more of a naval testing regimen to go to Mars that was built in orbit and designed for orbital refueling, and has been "tested" by flying it to the Moon and back a couple of times first before going to Mars, that makes much more sense to me. And sending supplies or even a "return vehicle" to Mars ahead of time would make even more sense.
And on the Mars end of the situation, I would strongly suggest the use of Phobos as a depot for the same reason. The escape velocity from Phobos is trivial, and stuff dropped on the surface of Phobos is unlikely to get into a decaying orbit around Mars. Because landing and taking off from Mars is going to require dealing with atmospheric drag, you need spacecraft designed for such activities even with the thinner Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft needed for traveling to and from Mars can be quite a bit different than what is needed to get to the ground and back up again, not to mention what is needed once on the surface of Mars. "Parking" the interplanetary spacecraft on Phobos would be a good way to protect it in terms of shutting down the systems and conserving resources for the return trip.
Just a thought here, but going to Mars does require some sort of in orbit infrastrcutre, and would allow for a sustained presence on Mars instead of just a simple "world wonder" show piece that demonstrates national pride but nothing else.
Selling any copyrighted product without authorization from the copyright holder is still a copyright violation and can land you with a $750,000 fine and/or up to 5 years in prison.... especially if you have multiple infringements and are openly trying to sell the product. A retailer would have very little to defend themselves against this unless they can show a clear chain of custody back to the original copyright holder or some other license agreement to sell the product.
So no, you don't have to buy products direct from Microsoft in order to be legally required to have a license (or be sub-licensed through a distributor and the agreement with that distributor) to be able to sell copyrighted products like Microsoft Office.
A retailer can have as a defense the "first sale" doctrine, that allows you to re-sell a copyrighted product that you have legally purchased through normal distribution channels. However, both the RIAA, MPAA, and increasingly software companies don't recognize this "right" in their license agreements.... even if you might be able to convince a judge about the idea. It is also this doctrine that allows public libraries to distribute copyrighted material, including computer software, without having to pay additional licensing fees.
But a retailer should know who their supplier is and how reputable their products are. If they buy illegal products, the retailer may be liable as well. And as you pointed out, there may be additional laws about counterfeit products (like counterfeit Levi's) that may apply as well, increasing the liability to a business. I don't know how many small retail shops can afford a $750,000 fine and stay in business, but I don't think too many can. Larger retail chains might be able to absorb the cost, but they would certainly fire any manager who was involved in such stupid behaivior and not give any sort of positive reference afterward.
I understand where you are coming from here, but the fact is that many of these websites are run by Americans, and they felt that it was an expression of free speech to be able to keep doing what it was that they were doing. Not to mention that a low-wattage radio broadcast station doing essentially the same thing does not have to pay the same royalty rates for music that you "broadcast". Some of the anger and resentment here is that there appears to be some price discrimination here, and that the royalty model is set up so only the largest 'net radio users can afford the payments.
What is worse here is that this is a governmental action, and not just something that a single music company came up with. If there were true diversity in the American music industry with multiple sources of music, this wouldn't be that big of a deal. It would be like an airline charging a higher fare for going between Los Angeles and New York. Instead of a direct flight, you can get on a flight going through Atlanta, Georgia for half the price, or go on a different carrier. Or for music, if you have to pay higher royalty rates on Beatles music, you move on to the Rolling Stones or Celene Dion.
Unfortunately, there is no alternative, and even picking up higher quality European music groups is still covered by the royalty fees.... as they are still a part of the same group of music conglomerates. The commercial music business is dying a slow death and is not being managed in a way that the talented individuals are being allowed to advance within the business due to raw talent alone. That "contests" like Pop Idol or American Idol have to be made at all (and the musicians successful after being "discovered") shows that there is no room for musicians to work hard and make it in the business unless you happen to win a lottery of some sort. Those musicians who are of the same quality but don't fit with the demographics of what the producers of those television shows are looking for have no shot at becoming a professional musician any more.
Actually, Staples would be held responsible for content they distributed, just as anybody else would be bound by the terms. Staples and other retail vendors have their own separate distribution licenses from companies like Microsoft to distrubt the software in boxes. It is for this reason that the GPL v. 2 has the explicit requirement that if you distribute GPL'd software on physical media, you must provide the source code for that software in machine readable form in the same "package". A network address doesn't work.
The MS-EULA is an "End User License Agreement", with the emphasis on End User. The restrictions are placed upon those who "break the seal" and actually are the final user of the software, and not somebody who merely passes it down the line in a distribution chain.
If Staples had been distributing Microsoft software from Cho Ming in Shanghai, even if the box looked like it came from Microsoft they would be guilty of distributing computer software without a license and be guilty of copyright infringement. The same would be true if they were distributing GPL'd software that doesn't meet all of the terms of the GPL. Being a vendor or somebody who actually put the stuff together in the first place is irrelevant.
Imagine if instead of this Linux distro, it had been a copy of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Would Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have a claim of copyright infringement against Microsoft for allowing people to download that movie without permission or in violation of the terms of use (assuming somebody just ripped a few DVDs to get the movie)? With permission is another story, but "with permission" for terms other than the GPL on a Linux kernel and suppliment software means you have separate permission from each and every contributor. I don't think Microsoft did this. And yes, the comparison of downloading a movie vs. downloading software is nearly identical in terms of copyright violations or non-violation. Only as long as they don't press the patent issue turning the thing into a copyright infrigement issue would it really be something for Microsoft to worry about.
The only reason why the MS patents are even an issue is that the GPL has a clause that explicitly voids the license if the software being used has patents preventing the free downline redistrubution of the software. So by offering the software for redistrubtion, Microsoft is in effect suggesting that this particular distro of Linux doesn't have any patent concerns, at least from their own portfolio or patents they have cross licensed. Either that or they have violated copyright laws by allowing people to download the sftware.
Regarding point #1 .... read the GPL again. The source code is required if you make a modification or not. If you get it from a website, you are usually covered by providing a link to the source code, but it still must be there. If this is distributed on physical media, the source code must be included on the media. You don't have to give modifications "back to the author" (a common thought for some open source discussions) or even make it easy for the original author to find you, but if you do make modifications you must provide the modified code as well to those who receive a copy of the software from you. Think "pay it forward" and you got the idea down more or less.
/.ed and you got the software elsewhere. If this instead was a 3rd party website, Microsoft could have been held blameless but it *was* a Microsoft website, complete with the Microsoft logo and copyright tag.
As far as Point #2 is concerned, it does weaken the patent claim if you are a software developer who uses this particular version of Linux and makes modifications with this particular code base. Provided you personally downloaded the content from the Microsoft website or can show a clean chain of custody from somebody who did. A judge might throw out the counter claim if you want to plea on this point to presume that Microsoft made a mistake to even having this content on their website, but here is the main counter argument:
If Microsoft wants to sue for patent infringement, they are openly admitting that they blatantly violated the copyright of that software against the terms of the GPL. So Microsoft can't have it both ways... either they have violated copyright and face statutory damages on behalf of all of the software developers involved in any piece of the distro, or they have to drop the patent infringement claim. But only if you were a lucky S.O.B. and downloaded the software in the first place. Not after it was
Mind you, this would only realy amount to a defense in this limited situation, but if you are you got yourself a "get out of jail free" card from Microsoft patents. Especially if you were a kernel contributors and got your own software from Microsoft. Somehow I have doubts that any Linux kernel developer ever got a copy this way...particularly if they did something that may be technically covered by a Microsoft patent. And besides, I have not seen Microsoft try to milk these patents and file lawsuits over them forcing Linux kernel developers to cease and desist distribution of the "violating" software.
But my representative absolutely does represent my interests in the U.S. House of Representatives. But he represents my district instead of my political party.
And you had better believe that those representatives know who they represent too! You go to a congressional office (especially one more than 300 miles from Washington D.C.) and you will get "red carpet" treatment by your representative. A school trip to D.C. with a hundred high school students is assured to get a visit from the congressman who represents that school's congressional district... even if they are a ranking member, and especially if they are speaker of the House. You are likely to get support from districts closer to the national capital, but they are more likely to get regular visitors. For most citizen request, like trying to get some congressional help on visas or appointments to military academies, they really don't even care about political party at all... as long as you are from their district.
And to compare the stability of the Scottish Parliament to the U.S. Congress is totally comparing completely different situations. The Scottish Parliament isn't even a national legislature, and the independence moves are to succeed from the UK only to rejoin the EU as a separate state. That is almost like western Texas becoming a separate state in the USA (and something the enabling act of Texas permits).
You still havn't addressed the governmental stability issues that I brought up, which is where the district-based governments tend to seek broad concensus across the whole country, forcing political parties to think broadly in a geographical sense and not try to concentrate their political power in just one area like rural districts, urban areas, or even one or two major states. It minimizes the impact of cities like New York City and has allowed cities like Los Angeles to go from a small rural town to a major metropolis in less than 100 years (among other factors). The American form of government allows this sort of flexability and encourages broad means of geographical thinking.
Major political parties that ignore significant interest groups do so at their own peril, and find themselves quickly out of office in a dwindling position.
This is presuming that American voters are mindless robots that always vote straight ticket and toe the party line.... and can't see through these games when they are being played. I have seen strategies like this backfire precisely when it is obvious that blatant political manipulation of the basic government is occuring.
And as the previous post was trying to mention but didn't quite get it out, blatant gerrymandering doesn't work when you are in a position where one political party is growing and the one in power is shrinking. In that case you do have to give thinner and thinner margins to everybody until you finally "break", handing the whole apparatus to the "other" party. Very few people maintain the same political philosophy throughout their entire life and always vote "straight ticket", so historical voting patterns don't necesarily hold true in the following election.
I'm not saying that there isn't something broken with the current system, but the game, especially in the reform scenerio, misses much of the reasons for why things are done the way they are currently done, and doesn't address "real life" in terms of fickle voters, demographic changes, and changes in attitude toward a political philosophy.