Every time this issue comes up, I have pleaded with nearly everybody to make a clear cut example where patents were actually useful to anybody outside of the legal community.
There is one and only one semi-useful function that patents actually serve: they document the historical development of technology in a systematic fashion. In other words, the USPTO is really a bunch of poorly disguised historians and nothing more.
I have known many individuals who have spent fortunes on developing patents, and I've been on the brunt of supposed patent infringement and having to change my designs explicitly because of either potential or real violations of patents. When the prevailing opinion is that engineers should never actually read the text of anybody else's patents, ever, you wonder what actual value they give in the first place.
I used to think that mechanical patents might have some value (as opposed to software patents that are completely meritless). Certainly classic "inventors" like Thomas Edison did use the power of a patent portfolio to their advantage, but I would argue that he was a very, very, very (I could repeat this a dozen times) very rare exception and is not typical at all. Far more people are like Philo T. Farnsworth who had an incredible idea, but spent not only a fortune trying to get the patent in the first place and to do the original research necessary, but also fought a very long and protracted legal battle with none other than RCA and David Sarnoff. Mr. Farnsworth barely recovered legal fees and other related expenses, and never really got proper royalties for his invention of television. And when he decided to develop his Fusor technology, he once again went down the path of patenting the technology only to find out that it really didn't matter.
Far more people are like my grandfather, who was awarded 11 patents, but the only person who ever made any money off of those inventions was his patent attorney. One of his inventions was a predecessor to optical disc technology and is explicitly mentioned in the CD (redbook) and DVD patent claims. I could name other inventions of his, but frankly nobody would really buy his ideas, because in reality that is not how most companies use patents.
The typical use of a patent is a defense against somebody else trying to claim they have a patent on one of your manufacturing processes or products. You then pull out your patent inventory (assuming you are a large company) that is stocked full of all kinds of juicy stuff, and you then go back after the original party in the suit. Rather than melting down everything and filing hundreds of lawsuits, the two companies who are then holding a knife against each other goes for a "portfolio exchnage" and usually swaps patents between each other in some sort of agreements. Think of what happened last year between Microsoft and Novell, and you get the picture rather clear about what this type of patent exchange is often like.
There is no way that "Guido's 'net startup garage" with two employees and a couple of patents are possibly going to prevail against a large and powerful company... even if you can absolutely prove that you have a very valid patent. It just won't happen, and what is supposed to "promote the useful arts and sciences" does neither. It doesn't even protect small start-up companies with a very good idea from being overwhelmed by major corporations, much less an independent inventor. In short, what good do patents of any kind actually do for anybody other than keep a bunch of lawyers employed?
There is a world of difference between content producers/distributors and content creators. And the content distributors are IMHO much more of a leech on society than people who pirate content without paying for it. At least the pirates are being honest about what they are doing (well... sort of).
Classic example: Billy Joel. Note especially the "Piano Man" album of his. He was locked into an exclusive contract that prohibited him from being able to perform commercially, and had huge legal issues that essentially took all of the money from him. From his perspective on this, copyright laws offered him absolutely no financial advantage at all. I'm sure on that particular album, Billy Joel wouldn't mind if it got pirated completely.
Mr. Joel has achieved a certain level of commercial success anyway in spite of his contractural problem, but only somebody this good could possibly overcome the obsticles involved. For more marginal performers, or somebody who doesn't want to make a life-long committment to the music industry, this sort of mismanagement of musical recording contracts would sink their career.
If there ought to be a change to copyright laws, these sort of exclusive contracts ought to be declared void by statue and put any sort of creative control of content in the hands of the original creators of that content. How that applies to projects that by necessity require multiple individuals to be involved with content creation (like movies and computer software) can be debated, but even then there is a difference between content creation and content distribution.
I've been involved with far too many "public prototypes" that actually were shipped to paying customers, when we as an engineering team knew that the product wasn't "ready for prime time". This practice is far more common than you would believe.
And one of my projects I was involved with had a price tag of over $20 million dollars.... more than a Falcon I. I won't say what it was, but I'm sure you've seen it as I have seen photos of that project on the front page of the New York Times. I should add that the project was not in New York City either, but somewhere on the U.S. west coast.
Let's just say that I spent nearly two months on site with that project, and I was a software engineer. The mechanical and electrical engineers should have rented out a house for the amount of money they spent on hotel costs alone... or the company should have even bought a house in the location and later resold it for a (modest) profit.
If you compare this attitude to the Apollo program, where the attitude was "damn the costs, we need to get to the Moon now!", you had a project that consumed nearly 10% of the U.S. Federal budget. It didn't even start to get cutbacks until it started to significantly affect the ability of the generals to carry on the Vietnam War.
It is precisely this sort of legacy that gives us the $200 million per seat cost to get to LEO that NASA is currently doing with its astronauts. Is there anybody who really thinks this is working? I know you were arguing here that SpaceX is trying to do it cheaply (in response to an AC comment), but consider that the total cost of setting up SpaceX has been about $200 million, with cash reserves left over as well. And they have been doing manned spacecraft development on top of that. I don't see SpaceX burning through another $200 million before they actually get to the ISS in their Dragon capsule, even if they need to have more than several launches to get there. And those are launches that are on their flight manifest right now.
A positive feedback loop? In other words, the software was over compensating for the bump and couldn't get stabilized.
I've seen this with the Armadillo Aerospace flights (including a couple of spectacular crashes), and it isn't a trivial thing to fix like Mr. Musk has suggested. Of course, as you mentioned, I'm not a SpaceX employee who has been working with this stuff nor actively employed in the aerospace industry.
I hope that the "fix" for this problem will be as trivial as is suggested. Unfortunately, even for proven designs like the Soyuz and Delta rockets still have spectacular failures even after hundreds of launches.
NASA hardly has a good track record here themselves. When the test rockets were being developed for the original Mercury Project flights, there was some serious concern that a rocket would even get launched at all. Dozens of flights occured where the rockets literally blew up just seconds into the flight or in a few cases even before the rocket could leave the tower. That is why "the rocket has cleared the tower" is such a huge deal for most rocket launches: They have already beat some of NASA's earlier attempts.
As far as launching STS-1 on the first attempt... that was indeed a huge gamble. John Young and Robert Crippen have been distinguished as one of only 10 people who have not posthumously received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor explicitly because they did place their lives in grave danger by flying that mission. It was a big deal, and information since it was launched indicated it was a larger problem than either of them could have anticipated.
The upcoming shuttle launch that is likely to be in April is such a different spacecraft that you can hardly call it the same thing that these two men flew back in 1981. On the pleasant side of that, however, is that the things that have changed were done incrementally and tested in a controlled environment.
Of course, by the time NASA flew this first shuttle mission, they had already been quite experienced at flying spacecraft, including all of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab missions.
On the contrary. Trying to do lawsuits against open source projects tend to drag on for years and years, and are a moving target, as once one person drops the project somebody else is more than willing to take it up.... especially if the software has any value at all. In addition, most open source software developers are about as poor as you can get (college students and other part-time volunteers), so even if the lawsuit succeeds, the plaintiff can't get any money. And the software development keeps going with the only consolation that one particular developer or a small team has been barred from participation on that particular project.
An established company with fixed tangible assets is more likely to be the target of a lawsuit. I admit that small companies can be huge targets for some lawsuits, but in the case of an open source project that is hosted on some guy's DSL line on a 5-year-old computer running Linux, there isn't much in terms of assets to take. The value of that property is likely to be less than what is legally permissible with seizure and forfeiture laws, as that same Linux server could be considered personal property.
Shut what down and who to shut down? This was precisely the problem with the deCSS (DVD-Video decryption) software, as once one of the websites was shut down, a dozen more came up to take its place. It was literally impossible to shut it down entirely, even during the middle of a trial.
Court injunctions have to be very specific, and in the case of ReactOS, you can get copyright permission (in the form of the GPL) to host it nearly everywhere. Those hosting the content are not violating copyright law, unless there is something that is alleged to have been source-code copied from Microsoft.
Even in SCO vs. IBM, SCO hasn't been so stupid as to try and shut down Red Hat or any of the other distros during the trial. While they claim that Linux has violated their "IP" (whatever that means), they certainly have not sought a blanket ban to prohibit redistribution of Linux from any vendor. Indeed, they haven't even tried to stop IBM from selling Linux... or at least they havn't succeeded.
I can't imagine that this would be any different, not to mention that most of the software developers for ReactOS (not all of them) are from Europe. Having a U.S. judge try to impose a temporary distribution injunction in Germany seems as stupid as it comes. It wouldn't even be in their juristiction. Or the other way around (assuming that Microsoft sues in Germany). A judge does not have super powers to prohibit distribution, and the free content license nature of ReactOS would make nearly any effort to block distribution pointless. A judge might be able to prohibit distribution of the content within the confines of his courtroom (as did happen with the deCSS software!), but that would really be the limit of his authority.
This is more than simply moving the servers to another country. At best all that could be claimed is a patent violation. Even then, I can't imagine it would be something so critical that a judge would completely block distribution of the rest of the operating system not in dispute.
In short, this is pure FUD you are mentioning here, and has no basis in reality.
If an event like this (the roll control issue) happened on a manned spaceflight (it did BTW, with Gemini 8), there would be abort procedures to get people out of this. In other words, this is a "survivable" accident. The earlier launch, where the 1st stage blew up 35 seconds into the flight, would have been quite a bit tougher to get out from on a manned spaceflight. Not impossible, but it would have required an automated abort system and something like a launch escape tower.
Let's just say I would rather be riding on one of these rockets with some good safty precautions than riding the Shuttle, where engine failure means destructive loss of the vehicle. And skydiving from 300 km is not my idea of fun, even though somebody is bound to try it out some time in the not too distant future.
You got the quote wrong, and I would say that this is a general engineering principle as well:
You can have your product done:
reliably
quickly
cheaply
Please choose only two of the above options!
In the case of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, they choose options 1 and 2. In the case of SpaceX, they have instead choosen options 1 and 3. This is where they are indeed doing something different than the more traditional companies. That Mr. Musk has deep pockets helps some, but he is trying to do it on the cheap and is willing to have some delays before he can have his dream. For government operations, they have to get results in four years or their budget will be cut (in the USA).
If SpaceX were run like a government agency, they would have had their funding cut already, or some congressional oversight committee that would have mucked up the process by demanding more "oversight" in the form of increased paperwork and bureaucratic Bu**s***. Lucky for them, they only have to answer to one person who nearly everybody in the company knows on a first name basis... and he knows them too.
This is as clear of an answer as I can think of myself. I have no idea why I was modded down here, but I guess not too many other people can understand why Clear Channel has joined the "light side" either. My comment wasn't really trolling, or at least I don't think so. Somebody must not think Clear Chanel can ever get "good" press.
SpaceX just announced that the abort happened because of a glitch when handing off monitoring and control systems to the internal guidance computers, as a communcations delay resulted in a delay from the rocket. (see http://spacex.com/updates.php)
The launch is back on for 4 PM PDT (-7 hours GMT).
Let's hope that SpaceX has all of their ducks in a row on this one. This is just one of those things that happens when you have to get out of the lab and where simulations break down. Sometimes you have to actually have to fire the thing to see what happens.
You did read that Clear Channel is one of those who are being vocal in opposition to these royalty rates? And they are also one of the companies who has a fairly substantial stake in seeing internet radio succeed with their own group of internet radio stations and simulcast rebroadcasting of their FM fare.
Retroactive enforcement is considered "ex post facto" and explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution as something that can't be done by Congress or any rule making body. And courts have (usually) held a consistent view that such rules and laws simply can't happen. That is why most laws have a "grandfathering" clause built into them, or is implicitly assumed and enforced by courts.
It is for this reason that roads going through wilderness areas can't be shut down... as long as they have historical existance prior to the environmental laws. A law granting authority to build these roads was repealed in the 1870's, (yes, 1870, not 1970), but that original law from elsewhen is still the authority for why many of the rural roads in the western USA are still allowed to exist even when environmental activists would like to see these roads closed down.
As a practical matter, I don't see how you can effectively enforce such royalties in a retroactive fashion either, other than arguing that this is a pure copyright infringement situation and the RIAA is just trying to collect a legal "fine" for what was improper usage of their content. Unfortunately the RIAA had an earlier royalty system that would presume that those at least paying those royalty payments would have permission to broadcast the content.
In short, show me where this is truly retroactive and not just a scare tactic to bring more FUD to this debate.
So again, who at the RIAA screwed up so royally that Clear Channel didn't sign on to this agreement? If your customers are those who sign the checks, this is one huge check that is regularly signed that the RIAA (and member companies... I can't forget them) absolutely depend upon.
To piss off such a major customer should, in my opinion, result in a massive firing of all top management involved with the decision to push for this sort of royalty arrangement. If I were a shareholder of one of the major record companies, I would be doing just that upon hearing this sort of news.
I don't care what business you are in, if you piss off too many of your customers you will quickly be out of business. This is one customer that the RIAA should not have pissed off, and should have been "in the pocket" in regards to this royalty decision.
Maybe you live in a country were nobody moves around with anything else than a car except within the confines of one's home. But here in Europe the streets are shared with pedestrian, biker, cyclists, etc. SUVs noses are much more deadly for them than regular cars.
Yeah, you just about described most of the western USA here nearly completely. You simply can't go much of anywhere without an automobile, even to get basics like groceries and visit the doctor. Even the housing districts are so "car friendly" that sidewalks are often optional. Too bad I can't post pictures here to demonstrate.
While there are not laws specific to prohibiting pedestrian and bicycle travel, it isn't necessarily something I would recommend on many of the roads and especially highways in western suburbia, or frankly most of the USA west of the Hudson river. I even had the police do an investigation as to if I were a fit parent because I let my children ride bicycles in front of my house (on a purely residental street with no through traffic). Those law enforcement officers even had the balls to tell me that I was foolish to even let my children play in my front yard.
While mass transit systems to exist outside of NYC or other big cities in America, you can't get around the fact that most people you meet when traveling are going to be in an automobile, and the other means of transit are the exception, not the primary means of travel. At least within the USA.
The one thing about electric automobiles that you also have to include when you are trying to do a price comparison against gasoline or other energy sources is that you have to take into account the cost of battery replacement as well.
For example, when you factor in the cost of battery replacement into the cost of driving the Tesla Roadster, the nominal 1 per mile goes up to 11 per mile. This is much more comparable to the cost of operating a gasoline engine, if you consider a vehicle that gets 40 mpg (not unheard of but high) with gasoline costs of about $3/gal. That gives you roughly 7.5 per mile. If you add in vehicle maintainence costs (and ignore depreciation for now) such as oil changes and other routine fluid replacements, it is very similar to that 11 per mile. In other words, a dead even comparison. Obviously an SUV is going to be much more expensive to operate, although I don't know an all-electric SUV to make a valid comparison. Tesla claims they will make one in the future, but it isn't something they have in production at the moment. Nobody else is even planning on an electric SUV at all.
I don't know enough about these compressed air engines to make a comment about their efficiency and costs of operations, but I would say that there ought to be some hidden costs that aren't being explained here, or that this "$3 per tank fill-up" is not an accurate figure.
I just can't see standing on the side of a roadway when you run out of compressed air and using a bicycle pump to "fill up" your car. There must be something more to this concept.
Of all of the people to come out specifically against this proposal, I would have thought that Clear Channel would have been one of the most vocal supporters of the original ruling.... as they clearly benefit from their existing terrestrial broadcast stations and would be the ones most likely to benefit from eliminated competition in the form of no internet radio stations.
For those who aren't familiar with Clear Channel, they have become infamous for their seemingly insatiable appetite for buying broadcast radio stations and currently television stations as well. They have nearly enough television stations to begin their own competitive television broadcast network. Their control of commercial FM broadcasting is near legendary at the moment.
So why the RIAA would not try to negotiate directly with their largest marketing partner and get them to come on board with an agreement that directly affects this particular business is something that to me is showing a decided lack of business sense and inept leadership on the part of the RIAA and the major music companies.
I can not underestimate how significant Clear Channel coming into this against this royalty rule really is. It would be nearly like Mircosoft filing a friend of the court brief in a lawsuit supporting the GPL and open source community, where that was a major issue.
Either that or this is a massive conspiracy (get out your tin foil hats people!) and Clear Channel is playing good cop/bad cop. Somehow I think the RIAA is just being stupid, and not brilliantly strategic with a much larger plan.
Too bad this was posted anonymously. There is some real meat here that could be explored into further detail.
I know that the civilian contractors do form a major part of the current structure of the U.S. military, and there are many reasons why these individuals (many of them ex-military as well) choose not to be a part of the traditional military chain of command/heirarchy. And my comment about WWII force organization was a broad generalization, where certainly many of the points you bring up here applied to the nearly 15 million American in uniform when General MacArthur signed the peace treaty ending the war against Japan.
The current civilian contractor/military personnel relationship, for example a contractor being a cook of a Burger King franchise on a post in Baghdad is very different from the Army cooks that existed in WWII and Korea (even though a cook is still a MOS). This is also due to, IMHO, the fact that most military activity centers around a fixed military installation, as was especially true during most of the Cold War. And the war in Iraq really didn't spend all that much time as an invading army and fluid campaign fronts against an organized enemy. Even in Iraq, it is rare for organized groups of tens or even hundreds of insurgents in what could loosely be called either a paramilitary or even full military organization. If such groups do exist, they are quickly and judiciously "expidited" and the threat eliminated.
As far as hammers are concerned... yeah, I know that there are different hammers to do different tasks. And sending a private into a Home Depot is likely to get a disposable $5 hammer, as once you have done the task that needs that hammer in the first place (whatever that is) it would be much more of a hassle to inventory and store that hammer for a later use. And for some (certainly not all!) applications you could use "any old hammer", just as you can use the Quick-E-Mart keyboards in environments where you know the keyboard is likely to be thrashed in just a few days anyway. Not all situations require the expensive solution. I'm just pointing out that there are often easier solutions to problems than throwing money at them.
I think you missed one minor point, but otherwise you were hitting dead on.
Where the government can save money is to buy commodity equipment/goods that are sold on a larger basis than just to government contracts. Even this has some problems (for example, the Army buying diesel fuel for trucks... still needs specialized logistics). But as has been said, if an Army private can purchase a hammer for $5 at the local Home Depot, he should be permitted to do that instead of going through the normal supply chain where the same hammer will cost $100 due to logistical overhead and layers of approval.
And some efforts to allow this sort of "petty cash" spending has been introduced into some military units and smaller government agencies, precisely because of this sort of savings.
I certainly think the military was much more efficient with the use of money during WWII, when nearly every position was an actual sworn officer or enlisted member of the military. Of course there was graft and corruption, but you also stood to have a military tribunal if you were caught, or even receive battlefield justice. Such stuff doesn't happen with Haliburton and its sub-contractors.
It should have read patents and deep pockets are not unlimited.
Although who am I kidding here. When he is successful Boeing will pull out a stealth patent they developed for the Delta IV and demand "fair and reasonable" royalties to put Elon's prices on par with other Loc-Mart rockets.
It isn't that thin. It is on the order of manuvering in the stratosphere, and due to the much lower gravity on Mars the atmosphere doesn't thin out as you gain altitude to the degree that it does on the Earth. At some of the lower altitudes on Mars (like at the bottom of Hellas Basin or Valles Marineris), all you would need to survive there as a human is good winter clothing (like being in Antarctica) and an oxygen mask. The atmospheric pressure there is similar to being at the top of Mt. Everest... and people have climbed that mountain without even using an oxygen mask (the atmosphere of Mars has different composition of atmospheric gasses... so the need for an oxygen mask is clearly more critical).
Commercial passenger airliners on the Earth can and do maneuver in those atmospheric conditions, although you would be correct that it would be much more difficult and require much, much longer "runways" to accomplish the task. A Helium baloon, however, certainly could do some manuvering (or even use Hydrogen since it would be harder to burn on Mars).
For an excellent comparison of the size different between Mars and the Earth, I love this picture. Unfortunately, it doesn't show comparisons to other airless objects like the Moon.
All I'm pointing out here is that there are terrestrial analogs that you can use to show how flight on Mars wouldn't necessarily have to involve a power decent engine like you need on the Moon.
Ahhh... the Red Mars/Green Mars debate by Kim Robinson.
And part of the same philosophy that has suggested that all of Mars ought to be preserved as some ecological nature park like Antarctica is at the moment... only scientist need to apply for a visit and nobody can settle there permanently.
While I can understand this point of view, it is hardly the only opinion here and there are very legitimate reason to want to use lava tubes like this. Still, that there are ethical issues to raise about this is something that is valid to raise, even if you think there are greater rewards that may come from those who choose to fill tubes like this with oxygen for human habitation.
I happen to know both scientists, engineers, and even astronauts who work for (or have worked for) NASA on a very personal and social level. I can tell you that these are some of the smartest and most dedicated individuals who you could possibly imagine and genuinely want to do some very legitimate science. It is precisely because of these engineers and scientists that NASA gets anything done at all.
On the agency level, however, NASA is not really about organizing scientific effort, but it is a massive jobs program for employing scientists in nearly every state of the country. There is some sort of NASA presence in nearly every one of the 335 different congressional districts, and that isn't accidental. Some of the previous NASA administrators realized that in order to survive politically in the current system of government within America, they needed to make sure that the pork was spread as far and wide as possible. This is obviously a very inefficient way of trying to perform scientific research, but it does make sure that no congressman is going to cut the funding to any specific NASA project once it has been established in the first place. To cut that funding, you risk pissing off some congressman who is going to come back swinging and try to cut the funding in another district of the person who suggested the budget cut in the first place.
Or if you look at the current shuttle program, there is a standing army of nearly 100,000 very highly skilled technicians (we are not talking immigrant minimum wage labor here) in order to service even a single shuttle flight. And with the work flow and manufacturing processes that involve the shuttle, they can't really perform any more than one flight at a time.
Could all this improve? Absolutely. But to disparage the individual employees in what is mainly a mess on the national management level is not placing the blame for where the actual problems lie. Some incredible science does get done, but it is more often than not filed away and stored in some warehouse in Virginia (close to D.C.) never to be seen again, or only referenced on subsequent NASA research that is also not seen except by a very handful of researchers. This is especially true for those who do research on or about Mars, and especially those who do research about manned expeditions to Mars. Research about this topic has been going on for decades, but hardly anybody really knows what has been done except for those researchers who have been directly involved.
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Every time this issue comes up, I have pleaded with nearly everybody to make a clear cut example where patents were actually useful to anybody outside of the legal community.
There is one and only one semi-useful function that patents actually serve: they document the historical development of technology in a systematic fashion. In other words, the USPTO is really a bunch of poorly disguised historians and nothing more.
I have known many individuals who have spent fortunes on developing patents, and I've been on the brunt of supposed patent infringement and having to change my designs explicitly because of either potential or real violations of patents. When the prevailing opinion is that engineers should never actually read the text of anybody else's patents, ever, you wonder what actual value they give in the first place.
I used to think that mechanical patents might have some value (as opposed to software patents that are completely meritless). Certainly classic "inventors" like Thomas Edison did use the power of a patent portfolio to their advantage, but I would argue that he was a very, very, very (I could repeat this a dozen times) very rare exception and is not typical at all. Far more people are like Philo T. Farnsworth who had an incredible idea, but spent not only a fortune trying to get the patent in the first place and to do the original research necessary, but also fought a very long and protracted legal battle with none other than RCA and David Sarnoff. Mr. Farnsworth barely recovered legal fees and other related expenses, and never really got proper royalties for his invention of television. And when he decided to develop his Fusor technology, he once again went down the path of patenting the technology only to find out that it really didn't matter.
Far more people are like my grandfather, who was awarded 11 patents, but the only person who ever made any money off of those inventions was his patent attorney. One of his inventions was a predecessor to optical disc technology and is explicitly mentioned in the CD (redbook) and DVD patent claims. I could name other inventions of his, but frankly nobody would really buy his ideas, because in reality that is not how most companies use patents.
The typical use of a patent is a defense against somebody else trying to claim they have a patent on one of your manufacturing processes or products. You then pull out your patent inventory (assuming you are a large company) that is stocked full of all kinds of juicy stuff, and you then go back after the original party in the suit. Rather than melting down everything and filing hundreds of lawsuits, the two companies who are then holding a knife against each other goes for a "portfolio exchnage" and usually swaps patents between each other in some sort of agreements. Think of what happened last year between Microsoft and Novell, and you get the picture rather clear about what this type of patent exchange is often like.
There is no way that "Guido's 'net startup garage" with two employees and a couple of patents are possibly going to prevail against a large and powerful company... even if you can absolutely prove that you have a very valid patent. It just won't happen, and what is supposed to "promote the useful arts and sciences" does neither. It doesn't even protect small start-up companies with a very good idea from being overwhelmed by major corporations, much less an independent inventor. In short, what good do patents of any kind actually do for anybody other than keep a bunch of lawyers employed?
I agree completely with this AC posting.
There is a world of difference between content producers/distributors and content creators. And the content distributors are IMHO much more of a leech on society than people who pirate content without paying for it. At least the pirates are being honest about what they are doing (well... sort of).
Classic example: Billy Joel. Note especially the "Piano Man" album of his. He was locked into an exclusive contract that prohibited him from being able to perform commercially, and had huge legal issues that essentially took all of the money from him. From his perspective on this, copyright laws offered him absolutely no financial advantage at all. I'm sure on that particular album, Billy Joel wouldn't mind if it got pirated completely.
Mr. Joel has achieved a certain level of commercial success anyway in spite of his contractural problem, but only somebody this good could possibly overcome the obsticles involved. For more marginal performers, or somebody who doesn't want to make a life-long committment to the music industry, this sort of mismanagement of musical recording contracts would sink their career.
If there ought to be a change to copyright laws, these sort of exclusive contracts ought to be declared void by statue and put any sort of creative control of content in the hands of the original creators of that content. How that applies to projects that by necessity require multiple individuals to be involved with content creation (like movies and computer software) can be debated, but even then there is a difference between content creation and content distribution.
You obviously havn't been an engineer.
I've been involved with far too many "public prototypes" that actually were shipped to paying customers, when we as an engineering team knew that the product wasn't "ready for prime time". This practice is far more common than you would believe.
And one of my projects I was involved with had a price tag of over $20 million dollars.... more than a Falcon I. I won't say what it was, but I'm sure you've seen it as I have seen photos of that project on the front page of the New York Times. I should add that the project was not in New York City either, but somewhere on the U.S. west coast.
Let's just say that I spent nearly two months on site with that project, and I was a software engineer. The mechanical and electrical engineers should have rented out a house for the amount of money they spent on hotel costs alone... or the company should have even bought a house in the location and later resold it for a (modest) profit.
If you compare this attitude to the Apollo program, where the attitude was "damn the costs, we need to get to the Moon now!", you had a project that consumed nearly 10% of the U.S. Federal budget. It didn't even start to get cutbacks until it started to significantly affect the ability of the generals to carry on the Vietnam War.
It is precisely this sort of legacy that gives us the $200 million per seat cost to get to LEO that NASA is currently doing with its astronauts. Is there anybody who really thinks this is working? I know you were arguing here that SpaceX is trying to do it cheaply (in response to an AC comment), but consider that the total cost of setting up SpaceX has been about $200 million, with cash reserves left over as well. And they have been doing manned spacecraft development on top of that. I don't see SpaceX burning through another $200 million before they actually get to the ISS in their Dragon capsule, even if they need to have more than several launches to get there. And those are launches that are on their flight manifest right now.
A positive feedback loop? In other words, the software was over compensating for the bump and couldn't get stabilized.
I've seen this with the Armadillo Aerospace flights (including a couple of spectacular crashes), and it isn't a trivial thing to fix like Mr. Musk has suggested. Of course, as you mentioned, I'm not a SpaceX employee who has been working with this stuff nor actively employed in the aerospace industry.
I hope that the "fix" for this problem will be as trivial as is suggested. Unfortunately, even for proven designs like the Soyuz and Delta rockets still have spectacular failures even after hundreds of launches.
NASA hardly has a good track record here themselves. When the test rockets were being developed for the original Mercury Project flights, there was some serious concern that a rocket would even get launched at all. Dozens of flights occured where the rockets literally blew up just seconds into the flight or in a few cases even before the rocket could leave the tower. That is why "the rocket has cleared the tower" is such a huge deal for most rocket launches: They have already beat some of NASA's earlier attempts.
As far as launching STS-1 on the first attempt... that was indeed a huge gamble. John Young and Robert Crippen have been distinguished as one of only 10 people who have not posthumously received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor explicitly because they did place their lives in grave danger by flying that mission. It was a big deal, and information since it was launched indicated it was a larger problem than either of them could have anticipated.
The upcoming shuttle launch that is likely to be in April is such a different spacecraft that you can hardly call it the same thing that these two men flew back in 1981. On the pleasant side of that, however, is that the things that have changed were done incrementally and tested in a controlled environment.
Of course, by the time NASA flew this first shuttle mission, they had already been quite experienced at flying spacecraft, including all of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab missions.
On the contrary. Trying to do lawsuits against open source projects tend to drag on for years and years, and are a moving target, as once one person drops the project somebody else is more than willing to take it up.... especially if the software has any value at all. In addition, most open source software developers are about as poor as you can get (college students and other part-time volunteers), so even if the lawsuit succeeds, the plaintiff can't get any money. And the software development keeps going with the only consolation that one particular developer or a small team has been barred from participation on that particular project.
An established company with fixed tangible assets is more likely to be the target of a lawsuit. I admit that small companies can be huge targets for some lawsuits, but in the case of an open source project that is hosted on some guy's DSL line on a 5-year-old computer running Linux, there isn't much in terms of assets to take. The value of that property is likely to be less than what is legally permissible with seizure and forfeiture laws, as that same Linux server could be considered personal property.
Shut what down and who to shut down? This was precisely the problem with the deCSS (DVD-Video decryption) software, as once one of the websites was shut down, a dozen more came up to take its place. It was literally impossible to shut it down entirely, even during the middle of a trial.
Court injunctions have to be very specific, and in the case of ReactOS, you can get copyright permission (in the form of the GPL) to host it nearly everywhere. Those hosting the content are not violating copyright law, unless there is something that is alleged to have been source-code copied from Microsoft.
Even in SCO vs. IBM, SCO hasn't been so stupid as to try and shut down Red Hat or any of the other distros during the trial. While they claim that Linux has violated their "IP" (whatever that means), they certainly have not sought a blanket ban to prohibit redistribution of Linux from any vendor. Indeed, they haven't even tried to stop IBM from selling Linux... or at least they havn't succeeded.
I can't imagine that this would be any different, not to mention that most of the software developers for ReactOS (not all of them) are from Europe. Having a U.S. judge try to impose a temporary distribution injunction in Germany seems as stupid as it comes. It wouldn't even be in their juristiction. Or the other way around (assuming that Microsoft sues in Germany). A judge does not have super powers to prohibit distribution, and the free content license nature of ReactOS would make nearly any effort to block distribution pointless. A judge might be able to prohibit distribution of the content within the confines of his courtroom (as did happen with the deCSS software!), but that would really be the limit of his authority.
This is more than simply moving the servers to another country. At best all that could be claimed is a patent violation. Even then, I can't imagine it would be something so critical that a judge would completely block distribution of the rest of the operating system not in dispute.
In short, this is pure FUD you are mentioning here, and has no basis in reality.
If an event like this (the roll control issue) happened on a manned spaceflight (it did BTW, with Gemini 8), there would be abort procedures to get people out of this. In other words, this is a "survivable" accident. The earlier launch, where the 1st stage blew up 35 seconds into the flight, would have been quite a bit tougher to get out from on a manned spaceflight. Not impossible, but it would have required an automated abort system and something like a launch escape tower.
Let's just say I would rather be riding on one of these rockets with some good safty precautions than riding the Shuttle, where engine failure means destructive loss of the vehicle. And skydiving from 300 km is not my idea of fun, even though somebody is bound to try it out some time in the not too distant future.
You can have your product done:
Please choose only two of the above options!
In the case of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, they choose options 1 and 2. In the case of SpaceX, they have instead choosen options 1 and 3. This is where they are indeed doing something different than the more traditional companies. That Mr. Musk has deep pockets helps some, but he is trying to do it on the cheap and is willing to have some delays before he can have his dream. For government operations, they have to get results in four years or their budget will be cut (in the USA).
If SpaceX were run like a government agency, they would have had their funding cut already, or some congressional oversight committee that would have mucked up the process by demanding more "oversight" in the form of increased paperwork and bureaucratic Bu**s***. Lucky for them, they only have to answer to one person who nearly everybody in the company knows on a first name basis... and he knows them too.
This is as clear of an answer as I can think of myself. I have no idea why I was modded down here, but I guess not too many other people can understand why Clear Channel has joined the "light side" either. My comment wasn't really trolling, or at least I don't think so. Somebody must not think Clear Chanel can ever get "good" press.
SpaceX just announced that the abort happened because of a glitch when handing off monitoring and control systems to the internal guidance computers, as a communcations delay resulted in a delay from the rocket. (see http://spacex.com/updates.php)
The launch is back on for 4 PM PDT (-7 hours GMT).
Let's hope that SpaceX has all of their ducks in a row on this one. This is just one of those things that happens when you have to get out of the lab and where simulations break down. Sometimes you have to actually have to fire the thing to see what happens.
This is also why it is called "rocket science".
You did read that Clear Channel is one of those who are being vocal in opposition to these royalty rates? And they are also one of the companies who has a fairly substantial stake in seeing internet radio succeed with their own group of internet radio stations and simulcast rebroadcasting of their FM fare.
Retroactive enforcement is considered "ex post facto" and explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution as something that can't be done by Congress or any rule making body. And courts have (usually) held a consistent view that such rules and laws simply can't happen. That is why most laws have a "grandfathering" clause built into them, or is implicitly assumed and enforced by courts.
It is for this reason that roads going through wilderness areas can't be shut down... as long as they have historical existance prior to the environmental laws. A law granting authority to build these roads was repealed in the 1870's, (yes, 1870, not 1970), but that original law from elsewhen is still the authority for why many of the rural roads in the western USA are still allowed to exist even when environmental activists would like to see these roads closed down.
As a practical matter, I don't see how you can effectively enforce such royalties in a retroactive fashion either, other than arguing that this is a pure copyright infringement situation and the RIAA is just trying to collect a legal "fine" for what was improper usage of their content. Unfortunately the RIAA had an earlier royalty system that would presume that those at least paying those royalty payments would have permission to broadcast the content.
In short, show me where this is truly retroactive and not just a scare tactic to bring more FUD to this debate.
So again, who at the RIAA screwed up so royally that Clear Channel didn't sign on to this agreement? If your customers are those who sign the checks, this is one huge check that is regularly signed that the RIAA (and member companies... I can't forget them) absolutely depend upon.
To piss off such a major customer should, in my opinion, result in a massive firing of all top management involved with the decision to push for this sort of royalty arrangement. If I were a shareholder of one of the major record companies, I would be doing just that upon hearing this sort of news.
I don't care what business you are in, if you piss off too many of your customers you will quickly be out of business. This is one customer that the RIAA should not have pissed off, and should have been "in the pocket" in regards to this royalty decision.
Yeah, you just about described most of the western USA here nearly completely. You simply can't go much of anywhere without an automobile, even to get basics like groceries and visit the doctor. Even the housing districts are so "car friendly" that sidewalks are often optional. Too bad I can't post pictures here to demonstrate.
While there are not laws specific to prohibiting pedestrian and bicycle travel, it isn't necessarily something I would recommend on many of the roads and especially highways in western suburbia, or frankly most of the USA west of the Hudson river. I even had the police do an investigation as to if I were a fit parent because I let my children ride bicycles in front of my house (on a purely residental street with no through traffic). Those law enforcement officers even had the balls to tell me that I was foolish to even let my children play in my front yard.
While mass transit systems to exist outside of NYC or other big cities in America, you can't get around the fact that most people you meet when traveling are going to be in an automobile, and the other means of transit are the exception, not the primary means of travel. At least within the USA.
The one thing about electric automobiles that you also have to include when you are trying to do a price comparison against gasoline or other energy sources is that you have to take into account the cost of battery replacement as well.
For example, when you factor in the cost of battery replacement into the cost of driving the Tesla Roadster, the nominal 1 per mile goes up to 11 per mile. This is much more comparable to the cost of operating a gasoline engine, if you consider a vehicle that gets 40 mpg (not unheard of but high) with gasoline costs of about $3/gal. That gives you roughly 7.5 per mile. If you add in vehicle maintainence costs (and ignore depreciation for now) such as oil changes and other routine fluid replacements, it is very similar to that 11 per mile. In other words, a dead even comparison. Obviously an SUV is going to be much more expensive to operate, although I don't know an all-electric SUV to make a valid comparison. Tesla claims they will make one in the future, but it isn't something they have in production at the moment. Nobody else is even planning on an electric SUV at all.
I don't know enough about these compressed air engines to make a comment about their efficiency and costs of operations, but I would say that there ought to be some hidden costs that aren't being explained here, or that this "$3 per tank fill-up" is not an accurate figure.
I just can't see standing on the side of a roadway when you run out of compressed air and using a bicycle pump to "fill up" your car. There must be something more to this concept.
Of all of the people to come out specifically against this proposal, I would have thought that Clear Channel would have been one of the most vocal supporters of the original ruling.... as they clearly benefit from their existing terrestrial broadcast stations and would be the ones most likely to benefit from eliminated competition in the form of no internet radio stations.
For those who aren't familiar with Clear Channel, they have become infamous for their seemingly insatiable appetite for buying broadcast radio stations and currently television stations as well. They have nearly enough television stations to begin their own competitive television broadcast network. Their control of commercial FM broadcasting is near legendary at the moment.
So why the RIAA would not try to negotiate directly with their largest marketing partner and get them to come on board with an agreement that directly affects this particular business is something that to me is showing a decided lack of business sense and inept leadership on the part of the RIAA and the major music companies.
I can not underestimate how significant Clear Channel coming into this against this royalty rule really is. It would be nearly like Mircosoft filing a friend of the court brief in a lawsuit supporting the GPL and open source community, where that was a major issue.
Either that or this is a massive conspiracy (get out your tin foil hats people!) and Clear Channel is playing good cop/bad cop. Somehow I think the RIAA is just being stupid, and not brilliantly strategic with a much larger plan.
Too bad this was posted anonymously. There is some real meat here that could be explored into further detail.
I know that the civilian contractors do form a major part of the current structure of the U.S. military, and there are many reasons why these individuals (many of them ex-military as well) choose not to be a part of the traditional military chain of command/heirarchy. And my comment about WWII force organization was a broad generalization, where certainly many of the points you bring up here applied to the nearly 15 million American in uniform when General MacArthur signed the peace treaty ending the war against Japan.
The current civilian contractor/military personnel relationship, for example a contractor being a cook of a Burger King franchise on a post in Baghdad is very different from the Army cooks that existed in WWII and Korea (even though a cook is still a MOS). This is also due to, IMHO, the fact that most military activity centers around a fixed military installation, as was especially true during most of the Cold War. And the war in Iraq really didn't spend all that much time as an invading army and fluid campaign fronts against an organized enemy. Even in Iraq, it is rare for organized groups of tens or even hundreds of insurgents in what could loosely be called either a paramilitary or even full military organization. If such groups do exist, they are quickly and judiciously "expidited" and the threat eliminated.
As far as hammers are concerned... yeah, I know that there are different hammers to do different tasks. And sending a private into a Home Depot is likely to get a disposable $5 hammer, as once you have done the task that needs that hammer in the first place (whatever that is) it would be much more of a hassle to inventory and store that hammer for a later use. And for some (certainly not all!) applications you could use "any old hammer", just as you can use the Quick-E-Mart keyboards in environments where you know the keyboard is likely to be thrashed in just a few days anyway. Not all situations require the expensive solution. I'm just pointing out that there are often easier solutions to problems than throwing money at them.
I think you missed one minor point, but otherwise you were hitting dead on.
Where the government can save money is to buy commodity equipment/goods that are sold on a larger basis than just to government contracts. Even this has some problems (for example, the Army buying diesel fuel for trucks... still needs specialized logistics). But as has been said, if an Army private can purchase a hammer for $5 at the local Home Depot, he should be permitted to do that instead of going through the normal supply chain where the same hammer will cost $100 due to logistical overhead and layers of approval.
And some efforts to allow this sort of "petty cash" spending has been introduced into some military units and smaller government agencies, precisely because of this sort of savings.
I certainly think the military was much more efficient with the use of money during WWII, when nearly every position was an actual sworn officer or enlisted member of the military. Of course there was graft and corruption, but you also stood to have a military tribunal if you were caught, or even receive battlefield justice. Such stuff doesn't happen with Haliburton and its sub-contractors.
It should have read patents and deep pockets are not unlimited.
Although who am I kidding here. When he is successful Boeing will pull out a stealth patent they developed for the Delta IV and demand "fair and reasonable" royalties to put Elon's prices on par with other Loc-Mart rockets.
It isn't that thin. It is on the order of manuvering in the stratosphere, and due to the much lower gravity on Mars the atmosphere doesn't thin out as you gain altitude to the degree that it does on the Earth. At some of the lower altitudes on Mars (like at the bottom of Hellas Basin or Valles Marineris), all you would need to survive there as a human is good winter clothing (like being in Antarctica) and an oxygen mask. The atmospheric pressure there is similar to being at the top of Mt. Everest... and people have climbed that mountain without even using an oxygen mask (the atmosphere of Mars has different composition of atmospheric gasses... so the need for an oxygen mask is clearly more critical).
Commercial passenger airliners on the Earth can and do maneuver in those atmospheric conditions, although you would be correct that it would be much more difficult and require much, much longer "runways" to accomplish the task. A Helium baloon, however, certainly could do some manuvering (or even use Hydrogen since it would be harder to burn on Mars).
For an excellent comparison of the size different between Mars and the Earth, I love this picture. Unfortunately, it doesn't show comparisons to other airless objects like the Moon.
All I'm pointing out here is that there are terrestrial analogs that you can use to show how flight on Mars wouldn't necessarily have to involve a power decent engine like you need on the Moon.
Ahhh... the Red Mars/Green Mars debate by Kim Robinson.
And part of the same philosophy that has suggested that all of Mars ought to be preserved as some ecological nature park like Antarctica is at the moment... only scientist need to apply for a visit and nobody can settle there permanently.
While I can understand this point of view, it is hardly the only opinion here and there are very legitimate reason to want to use lava tubes like this. Still, that there are ethical issues to raise about this is something that is valid to raise, even if you think there are greater rewards that may come from those who choose to fill tubes like this with oxygen for human habitation.
I happen to know both scientists, engineers, and even astronauts who work for (or have worked for) NASA on a very personal and social level. I can tell you that these are some of the smartest and most dedicated individuals who you could possibly imagine and genuinely want to do some very legitimate science. It is precisely because of these engineers and scientists that NASA gets anything done at all.
On the agency level, however, NASA is not really about organizing scientific effort, but it is a massive jobs program for employing scientists in nearly every state of the country. There is some sort of NASA presence in nearly every one of the 335 different congressional districts, and that isn't accidental. Some of the previous NASA administrators realized that in order to survive politically in the current system of government within America, they needed to make sure that the pork was spread as far and wide as possible. This is obviously a very inefficient way of trying to perform scientific research, but it does make sure that no congressman is going to cut the funding to any specific NASA project once it has been established in the first place. To cut that funding, you risk pissing off some congressman who is going to come back swinging and try to cut the funding in another district of the person who suggested the budget cut in the first place.
Or if you look at the current shuttle program, there is a standing army of nearly 100,000 very highly skilled technicians (we are not talking immigrant minimum wage labor here) in order to service even a single shuttle flight. And with the work flow and manufacturing processes that involve the shuttle, they can't really perform any more than one flight at a time.
Could all this improve? Absolutely. But to disparage the individual employees in what is mainly a mess on the national management level is not placing the blame for where the actual problems lie. Some incredible science does get done, but it is more often than not filed away and stored in some warehouse in Virginia (close to D.C.) never to be seen again, or only referenced on subsequent NASA research that is also not seen except by a very handful of researchers. This is especially true for those who do research on or about Mars, and especially those who do research about manned expeditions to Mars. Research about this topic has been going on for decades, but hardly anybody really knows what has been done except for those researchers who have been directly involved.
You forgot the impending collision between our galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy. Give or take a billion years.
I was going to mention the supernova explosion of Vega, but you got that covered in the "gamma radiation from stars" section.