Hardly a good analogy either. A blasting cap is specifically designed to trigger an explosion on a decidedly unstable chemical substance.
Here you are talking about trying to use a nuke on what amounts to be solid rock that is chemically inert. OK, if you had prefect knowledge of the geology you might be able to identify fault lines and be able to figure out where a precise explosion might dislodge some rock to get a cascading earthquake to happen that might under the most ideal circumstances get an eruption.
But there are so many if here that even the energy to trigger the earthquake in the first place is several orders of magnitude greater than nuclear bombs. I think you significantly underestimate just how much energy is needed to initiate such geological actions. A nuke is merely something that happens to be a man-made device that can deliver some fairly substantial quantities of energy, but it still isn't going to be enough.
At perhaps the right time when the geological forces are very much balanced, perhaps you might trigger an eruption a few days or weeks early, but that hardly matters anyway. For something like this hot spot in Yellowstone, it is going to blow regardless of any significant actions you are going to try. And nukes are going to simply complicate the ash fall even more due to the introduction of radioactive components.
This is a flawed analogy completely, although it should be noted that ordinary blasting caps are part of the process used to trigger a nuclear explosion. How else do you think the fission products get put together to initiate the chain reaction? Otherwise this is just a (unfortunately typical) Hollywood concept that would only be done in a movie.
Come on and be real. It wouldn't even make a dent.
Even the largest nuke that has ever been developed wouldn't even compare to the raw energy that an ordinary volcano like Mt. St. Helens with what was even a modest eruption in 1980.
An above ground nuclear detonation would do absolutely nothing, other than general environmental damage and knocking down trees. It wouldn't affect the geology at all.
Underground, it would create a minor jolt, but it wouldn't trigger any kind of eruption.
Keep in mind that the eruption from Yellowstone, if it really did blow, would obliterate all of Yellowstone National Park, and send measureable quantities of ash all of the way to New York City. All of the nukes in the world, combined, at the height of the Cold War, can't do this much damage.
Of course the introduction of ethylene glycol into dihydrogen monoxide can help reduce the freezing and boiling issues if ingested toxicity is not a significant problem, such as for automotive applications, but it does introduce other problems.
Chemical corrosion is something that is significant, although that can be mitigated. The largest problem of atomic disassociation, however that is achieved, is that you end up with monoatomic oxygen, perhaps the most reactive oxidizer you can find. The corrosive effects of that by product can indeed damage most metalic structures and can cause potentially explosive environments.
Still, getting back to the original posting, solid hydrogen does offer some interesting benefits, particularly if you could find a chemical compound that would produce an exothermic reaction (dihydrogen monoxide tends to be endothermic in most reactions) that would release the hydrogen. But as mentioned in this general thread any such compound makes a nice rocket propellant (or explosive) if made in large quantities. Many of the NASA rockets already use Hydrogen/LOX fuel systems because hydrogen already has a high ISP. Adding in some extra energy from the hydrogen release would make the fuel and rocket system using such a chemical very attractive and may raise the ISP of the rocket motor.
And it is indeed easily maufactured, non-polluting, non-toxic, cheap, safe to transport, and (usually) leaves no residue behind.
It is also very cheap to manufacture, and can be delivered to your home at a price cheaper than dirt or gravel in volume. And it is also found in quantity at most fuel stations where you buy gasoline, so the need to establish a seperate distribution system is not going to be too much of a problem. Indeed, the major oil companies already offer it for sale at premium prices from independent refineries and distilleries.
The chemical? Dihydrogen monoxide, also known as hydroxylic acid.
Of course, in its solid form I usually use it in a few drinks, but who is counting here. It does need a bit of help to release the hydrogen from the compound, but perpetual energy machines are not a problem for many individuals who are looking for other forms of solid hydrogen.
I wouldn't, but I have seen critical medical monitoring equipmet running on Microsoft Windows. I even mentioned the fact to the doctor who was treating my wife at the time and said "do you really trust this isn't going to freeze up half-way through the procedure?"
The medical doctor just gave me a blank stare wondering what planet I just came from.
Why the FDA (who approves medical equipment like this) gave a thumbs up for that equipment, I have no idea. I certainly wouldn't trust my life to rely upon Windows working 24/7. At least in this csae all the equipment did was to monitor a patient, and the things it was monitoring could also be verified "by hand", such as blood pressure and heart rate.
No, I completely understand the difference between patents and copyrights here.
If you have studied a particular algorithm in detail to the point that you completely "Grok" or come to an understanding of what is a complex process, you are bound to take some of those same ideas into other software that you have written. The GPL in this case has to do with the fact that you can't duplicate an algorithm exactly as it is coded. It then becomes a derivitive work if you are copying the same general structure... and you would pretty much have to if you are using the same algorithm.
Yeah, I suppose that is a patentable idea too, but in many cases what you have written is going to look the same even after you have moved on and supposedly "coded from scratch". This is also why I think software patents are completely stupid. You can use copyright law to enforce protecting algorithms just as much (or better) than what is needed for patent law. And it is easier to establish when something was actually written and to demonstrate if the idea even works at all. Using copyright to enforce algorithms would allow some minor to substantial changes to be considered a completely new idea. With a patent, you don't even need to demonstrate that the idea even works as is described within the patent.
BTW, what I was trying to mention here anyway was a certain school of thought that does exist... not that I necessarily believe this "fact" to be true. Somebody who is paranoid to a fault will be religiously concerned that somehow their software developers have been "contaminated" with GPL'd software, which therefore makes those software developers unfit for writing propriatary software.
From a more pragmatic viewpoint, this isn't nearly so much of a real worry. As long as you have an ethical developer, they will keep the two codebases seperate. Even so, it is very tempting to copy an algorithm you have been a joint developer with that happens to be under the GPL, and then take that same code bit to a propriatary software package that is buried so deep that (you think) nobody will ever notice that it was GPL'd source code initially. In theory at that point, the added code needs to remain under the GPL.
But as I tried to mention (and will again), if you are worried about GPL'd and other free licenses that may contaminate your software base, I would be far more worried about propritary software licenses that would also do the same thing. You might find some way to "undo" the damage of GPL'd software mis-attribution and be able to fix the problem easily and quickly. The developer community may even forgive you. If you tried to do that with propriatary software, you would have to spend the next several years dealing with lawyers and little else.
If there is a word that I am writing and I don't want to bother with trying to look it up in a dictionary or can't think of the proper spelling, I'll punch it into google and ignore the search items themselves, other than to see how many other people suck at spelling as bad as I do and even published content with the misspelling.
What is surprising is how many times even deliberate misspellings still turn up content on the Google search.
As a note here, one of the reasons for the Microsoft "Shared Assurance" program that locks you into their grips is to prevent people from trying to install "free upgrade" and other stuff from the Microsoft.com website. There are not nearly as many "free downloads" from there as there were even a few years ago. And those that there are require you to use your OS registration key (in an innocent name called a "passport") or some other similar feature to verify that you are a genuine MS customer.
This was not done at all ten year ago, when ReactOS could barely boot at all, and that was considered a major accomplishment.
I would say that while Microsoft is not running for the hills with their tail between their legs, they are not ignoring ReactOS either. I would even argue that the move with Vista to a new API was due in part to their attempt to relegate ReactOS to the dustheap of ancient and unsupported operating systems.
Where ReactOS is going to be a "killer app" is when Microsoft finally decides to stop supporting Windows 2000. There will be a huge need for many businesses to keep some legacy applications running on new hardware (due to the old stuff simply having mechanical failures) but they can't upgrade to XP (or Vista) for various reasons. ReactOS would certainly be something for companies considering this as a potential migration path, where continued OS support will occur.
While this goes back some time in American history, the Grangers and Progressives were two political parties (and movements with upper and lowercase letters to go with these parties) who were able to get major national political campaigns going that had some very real impacts.
In both cases, those movements were also taken over by the "mainstream" political parties. I've heard all kinds of political theories why there are only two political parties in America, and while I see it, I'm still not completely convinced that this has to be the case... particularly in the age of electronic communications and especially networked computers. If a 3rd party were to get into Congress and be able to split things up (such as is the current situation) so that neither party has a majority, that 3rd party would wield some incredible political power.
For the life of me, I have no idea why Lieberman and Jeffords don't try to take advantage of their situation and throw more weight arround than they currently do... although I will admit Lieberman really is a loyal party man in his heart... his state party merely threw him out in a bizzare twist of the political scene.
On the presidential level, the situation is harder to see as the current method of allocating electors strongly favors the major parties, at least if the 3rd parties have only diffused minority support across the whole country. Being strong in just a few states, on the other hand, would throw the whole electorial college into a very powerful political body with the 3rd parties holding the keys to the White House... even if they couldn't necessarily get themselves into there on their own.
While to me it seems as though the Libertarians may have the best shot at actually changing the political landscape of America in a real way, it does take some reform of what they are doing and a change in their way of thinking about political campaigns as well form the more typical 3rd party chest beatings that more typically espouse extreme political ideas that won't realistically be implemented into actual law. On this point, I would have to agree with you.
It is Microsoft who is extremely aggressive about enforcing their "rights", attack products for non-compliance (note especially the "shared assurance" problems with XP and Vista), and have been known as "the Borg of the internet" for several other reasons, including going after small companies and either buying them out (when the legal cost isn't worth it) or driving them into submission, particularly by explicitly writing a competing application to drive them out of business.
I hardly call it safe if you deal with Microsoft products, particularly if you are a software development company.
And in terms of free software applications, only a very few are even backed by what could be called any sort of corporate infrastructure. Yes, IBM (and their Nazgul), Red Hat, MySQL AB, Novell, and a few other companies are involved directly with their own apps that are open sourced. And those are ones I would be a little on the more cautious side of trying to screw with as well for the same reason that they have deep pockets if you fail to comply with their terms.
But for the most part GPL'd software is stuff that is either written by a large community (like the MediaWiki software running Wikipedia, or perhaps Firefox for a better example), or is just a very small handful of hobbyists who just love programming and are doing it in their spare time. Most of them are flattered that you have even sent them an e-mail saying you like their software at all!
While there is quite a bit of bluster that is sometimes said about license enforcement, how many people do you know (besides the $1 million+ revenue companies of major apps I mentioned above) that have actually even tried to enforce the GPL? The Free Software Foundation does occasionally send a cease and desist letter, but nobody has even tried to challenge the GPL in any real substantial way, except for SCO... and they took on IBM for that!
I can tell you of many times that Microsoft has gone into corporate offices and conducted "license audits", and of several people who are either in jail for blatant copyright infringement of Microsoft product, or for all practical purposes lost their business. Some that are right here in the town where I live! I can't name even one company or person (with the exception again of SCO... and they are still around even if on life support) that has gone out of business due to including a GPL'd piece of software.
Again, I would be far more afraid of the Microsoft EULA than the GPL any day.
I would add that libertarians (small l) actualy have a hunger and thirst to find anybody willing to stand up and provide some real leadership in this area.
I would love to think that some 3rd party, like the Libertarians (BIG L), might try to offer this sort of genuine leadership. I have even formally registered as a Big-L Libertarian in hopes that numbers alone might draw some interest. Unfortunately, in the last couple of elections they have tied themselves to the same (or similar) platforms as the democrats, particularly in regards to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By doing this, they have also rendered themselves as irrelevant on the national political stage where again significant leadership is needed by both political parties. IMHO both Bush and Pelosi are out to lunch in regards to what should be done in Iraq, and there is plenty of room available for some genuine new policies that might make a real difference.
In the 2004 election, I could hardly tell the difference between Kerry and Badnarik, at least on the substantive issues that were commonly being discussed. In this regard, it is no wonder that many libertarians (at least in the USA) felt they had no choice other than to vote Republican. And then Democrat in 2006.
You also forgot to mention how the California State Board of Regents decided to get into the mess as well and tried to claim that all BSD stuff belonged to them, even if that was a short lived and misguided thought when it was suggested. And other legal wrangling by the state of California.
That and the other problems with the infinitely growing license due to the advertising clause where everybody who added stuff tried to tack their name onto the end. That was a big deal once upon a time as well.
Your memories here about the problems with the BSD license is square on. The legal cloud over the BSD distros certainly was a push to some early developers of Linux to move in that direction instead, as many of them were really license agnostic and just wanted to have a fun hobby to play with.
It should be noted that only among hard core free/open source software advocates does anybody even bother the read the license in the first place to even know what is written in them. Oh a bored lawyer might actually go through many of the other propritary ones, but how many times when you install software on your computer do you simply look at the license and simply click "Accept" without even having read the thing in the first place?
Certainly there are very few propritary software licenses that have had significant discussions about individual clauses, why they ought to be changed, and how they should be changed. For those companies I've worked for, I doubt the software developers themselves had even read the license their software was being sold under in the first place. In one case, the manager who crafted the license for our software merely copied the license from another application with just a few minor modifications for the name of the company and taking out a term he didn't like. Even then, I don't think he even read the complete license that supposedly even he crafted.
The same could be said (unfortunately) even when the license is written by a professional law office.
On the other hand, I can say that I've read the GPL in detail and have tried to understand each seperate clause. And the same for the various BSD licenses, as well as several other FOSS licenses.
So would they feel more comfortable including something like a DirectX installation package with a Microsoft EULA that is included with their own offering? Or that their developers have copied code snippets from the same DirectX SDK and knowledge base, also under that license?
I would say that the GPL'd stuff has far fewer unknowns and legal implications than what the MS software inclusions might have, and that is just one clear example of many propritary software licenses that might be compiler plug-in tools to customized equipment drivers. Has the legal team gone through all of those licenses to see what is exactly legal and what royalties needed to get paid?
This is a true statement due to the fact that if you decide not to "open up" the software, you are simply stuck with software you don't have a license to distribute. And that is something you should have thought of before you put in the GPL'd (or other free license) software into your product.
In most cases you can also (likely) go back and replace the GPL'd stuff with something you've written yourself... if you are a competent developer. It may require a "clean room" type development effort at a critical time of the product development that may get some eyebrows raised or people get fired due to the project getting late, but it isn't necessarily the end of the world either.
If you don't want to have people see your source code that is co-mingled with GPL'd software, just don't release it at all.
How this applies to something that is done internally within a company is another story, but then again you only have to provide source code to those who actually get the software.
There were some FOSS licenses (or at least free/shareware software) that did require giving any changes made to the software back to the original software developer, but those licenses never did grab that much mindshare among software developers. Even then, how would that original developer even know unless you actually released the modified software?
For myself, I didn't have to steal my former employer's code base. They mailed it to me, after I quit!
Or in one case (a university), I was able to buy my development computer at an open public bid auction (I paid $100 for the whole thing) just one month after I was fired. The hard drive wasn't even reformatted, and the full code base was right on there!
I know that source code security is often a bit more secure than this at most companies, but not always... especially if you worked for smaller companies. In some cases, I know I am the only person who even has the source code at all.
What you are saying here is mostly true as well, and unfortunately is one of the reasons why good programmers can have a hard time finding work when the lousy guys are messing it up for those of us with skills.
There is an issue regarding people who have been "contaminated" with having worked on GPL'd code.... even if just at a glance... and to try and make sure some of those algorithms don't make it into the propritary code base owned by the company
Of course this is an issue if you hire any experienced software developer who has done significant development under any other company's code base. They even know trade secrets (NDAs not withstanding here), and even if they weren't working directly for a competitor, they still have insights from that experience including algorithms either they developed at the other company or techniques and ideas developed by former co-workers.
For myself, as a software team manager, I'm more worried about employees infringing on this propritary software than getting GPL'd software doing cross contamination. Most FOSS developers would be flattered that part of their algorithm has been copied and extended in some new directions... particularly if it was used in a completely different application. They might get pissed if you tried to back-end patent the software afterward, but that is another issue entirely and technically illegal as well.
A GPL'd application generally does not have people with deep pockets that are willing to get involved with an extended legal battle. You can't say that about most major corporations with their private software code base contributed by former employees.
It seems as though some of the individuals involved here (typical of government bureaucrats BTW) don't have the first idea of basic economic theory:
If you raise the price of something, the demand goes down. How simple can you get here?
There are some product like gasoline which in the short term doesn't display this tendancy, although even the oil companies have been required to adjust to fuel efficient vehicles, where even state taxation authorities have realized that highly fuel efficient vehicles don't pay nearly the same fuel taxes that gasoline hogs once did... proportional to the number of miles those vehicles actually drove.
In the case of a pure luxury consumer product like music, this sort of economic theory is much more apparent. For music performers who perform live concerts, they have known this for decades and for the most part have astronomical ticket prices because their arenas and other places they perform at are limited in size. They can get away with the high prices because it is expensive to build larger arenas or performing halls. Cutting their audience size to 1% of those who might be willing to attend if the ticket prices were more reasonable wouldn't make a difference if they can still fill a 100,000 seat arena with that 1%.
For internet radio, the number game is something that plays out significantly different. First of all, most people who are hard fans of musical performances have been used to obtaining "free" music over the internet, even if they subseqently purchase the same music on a CD afterward. That is the key point, that much of what is done on the internet is a form of advertising.
While I have no doubt there is some way that music studios can "maximize profit" here in terms of royalties for these internet music rebroadcast sites, the amount of money to be made is going to be even at best far less than this $2 billion that is being claimed. The money simply isn't there. And even if it were, how much of this is going to be coming from other revenue sources that the music industry currently is already taking. If you spend it on a subscription to an internet radio station, are you going to purchase the CD, or go to a concert with the same money? I don't think so. It has already been spent.
When you are dealing with "near time period" Sci-Fi (such as Armegeddon and Final Impact), where both had supposedly NASA spacecraft that were but marginally more advanced than the Space Shuttle, it is surprising that they invented "artificial gravity" as a plot device in there as well.
In the case of the astronauts running around the surface of an asteroid, I don't know how you would even be able to visually notice the difference between genuine weightlessness and a very low gravity field, except that stuff would eventually fall down over time. Like over several minutes or even hours. An astronaut using just his own foot power would be able to achieve genuine escape velocity. Indeed I think that would be the #1 hazard that would be mentioned during any training exercise, to avoid pushing too hard on the ground.
Still, it is something that is often wrong in perhaps the worst of the worst science movies.
Perhaps the all-time worst excuse for scientific principles was the movie "Independence Day", staring Bill Pullman and Will Smith. Outrunning explosions happened in several situations, including (but not limited to) Air Force One out running the main explosion of Washington D.C., the scene where everybody dives in through a door just in time beating the explosion in a tunnel (they would also get most of the blast being in a side entrance too!), and last but not least the movie finale where they take out the the "mother ship" in space (although you could claim they had some significant velocity before that one went off).
Several of the classical Schwartzenager movies also had some problems, most notably "True Lies" which does a very medocre depiction of a nuclear bomb explosion. Indeed, that particular movie violated just about every one of the principles mentioned in the original article.
On the other hand, the series premier of Battlestar Galactica (the new version, not the classic with Loren Green) does what I consider the absolute best demonstration of what a real wide-scale nuclear war would really feel like to those of us who might be stuck in the hinterlands trying to evade the dreaded weapons. They even got the explosion/sound time delay down pretty good too, all things considered. It isn't that it can't be done, but it takes somebody with a good background in science to not override reality to make something that merely "looks good".
I couldn't have said it much better myself, although Jimbo has been curiously absent from discussion lately on Foundation-l and a few of the usual haunts that used to be quite common with him. And I've seen him being much more reluctant over the past six months or so to even try to step in and deal with individual projects and disputes.
Still, the ever present ultimate authority is also Jimbo Wales, and if you are working on a policy decision the "best" way to end discussion is to simply bring up a "Jimbo says..." comment, unless you can back it up with a completely contradictory statement also by the man.
I will say that in addition to his larger involvement with Wikia lately and semi-retirement from day to day Wikimedia Foundation affairs, Wikimedia projects have also grown substantially... particularly in languages other than English. There is literally so much happening that it is impossible for a single person to really get into the minutae of dealing with individual users across all of the projects without simply going nuts and doing that on a full-time basis. And that would get, IMHO, rather boring as well. Perhaps that is why he has given up even trying.
There are some bureaucracies that are now being established that fill some of what Jimbo did in the past, but for the moment these are very weak and lack the prestige that Jimbo had. It is also easier to tell off somebody who can't pull out the "project founder" card and tell them that they have gone too far when they throw their weight around. In short, more sanity exists now to avoid radical policy changes, but at the same time it is harder to get any real changes made when they are necessary, as it turns into decisions made by committees. My largest complaint is that many of these committees have very closed membership, and anserable only to a very limited number of people. For some things like a legal advisory board might make sense (especially if it is a group of lawyers offering pro bono advise, as does exist), many of these groups that do make official policy are seriously lacking the components to really gague what ordinary users are thinking and doing.
What it would take to "break" this logjam is to have some very high quality music group/performer that would simply refuse to get involved with the "big five" RIAA companies, and use royalty-free internet radio stations (and other alternative music outlets, including "legal" Peer-to-Peer networks) to distribute their content. So far the way you get "made" is to sign with one of the big boys, but I don't think that will last forever.
Of course I'm talking somebody on the order of the Beatles, the Who, and other classical groups that would make this sort of impact with network radio. People like that only come around once in a decade and usually they are so good that even otherwise blind and deaf executives at the majors will drip money into these artists like there is no tomorrow that would be very hard for such a group or performer to pass up.
I would have to say that the concept of a trade secret also applies here, where the act of divulging a trade secret is illegal, and the rest is merely trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.
The problem here was that the prosecution couldn't prove that the defendant had knowledge of the trade secret (in this case the CSS algorithm) that came from anybody in the "DVD Consortium" that created the algorithm in the first place. Instead it was a pure reverse engineering effort from the openly (and publicly) available binary executables.
Keep in mind this happened pre-DCMA as well.
One of the ways that the "genie" was "stuffed back into the bottle" was to describe the software as a device, just as you have mentioned. In that manner, certain laws that specified sealed devices could help protect these trade secrets.
Normally a trade secret is a manufacturing process or something that helps give you a distinct competitive advantage over a competitor, and is known only by employees or contractors working for the company. The analogy to a military secret is almost identical here, and indeed the attitude within larger corporations is to classify things as "confidental" or even "eyes-only" or other similar comparable terms that also involve document security and even criminal background checks to see if an employee is leaking documents of this nature.
The reason why the DVD Consortium (now DVD Forum) decided to use the trade secret defense instead of simply patenting the CSS algorithm is because they would have been required to publish the algorithm as a part of the patent application. It turned out that it was an embarrassingly simply algorithm to reverse in terms of actually protecting optical disc content from "unauthorized access". In hindsight they would have been much better off had it been patented, as they would have been able to stop the massive distribution of the algorithm in actual software (and revoked the GPL at the same time). Instead, the software is still widely available, published in newspapers, billboards, radio commercials, and other places as proof that it is hardly a secret. Having people wear T-shirts with the software into the various hearings about it made it very difficult to prove that it really was a secret as well.
As far as I know, only the 2600 magazine was blocked from using the link to the DeCSS software, and I don't know of a single other court that has used this ruling as preceedence, showing the legal holes in this judge's opinion.
It is hardly the pervasive and nearly only graphical file format that existed 15 years ago. And the patent issues did cause a huge downturn in the use and application of GIF files.
And if you look at where those GIF images are being used: Clipart, buttons, and design elements. They are not really being used for new image content. It is a dated file format that is not getting additional support precisely because the developer mindshare simply isn't there to work on it and everybody has moved on.
I didn't say that you couldn't find GIF images on the web still, but it isn't the #1 dominant file format like it used to be. In time you will notice that it will be used less and less often, even though now the patent issues no longer apply. I dare you to show me a graphical manipulation software package that brags about its ability to edit GIF images as a major feature, or uses that file format as the default image format. Oh, sure, you can find GIF formats listed with 30 other image file types in a feature list, but as something singled out it is hardly likely at all.
In the mid-1990's, there were several graphical editing tools that focused exclusively on GIF images and did use that file format as the default format for saving the data. And programming books of the era also had source code for how to manipulate GIF images and add them to your own software. You just don't see that anymore.
The only comparison that I could possibly give here is with the GIF image standard that also had nearly identically widespread use by nearly every website, dial-up BBS, and computer lab. It was The Image Standard that all other image file formats were compared to, and several graphic image manipulators only dealt with the GIF format at all.
And then came Unisys, who instituted insane royalty policies that effectively killed the format for anybody who wanted to create software that used the format or even post GIF images on their websites. I know this first hand, because I tried to obtain a license for a software package that I wrote that would display GIF images on stadium scoreboards. Unisys was insisting on a 5% royalty for the entire system, meaning the entire scoreboard. Needless to say that other than as a demonstration to prove the software could be written (it was anyway, but not sold until the patent expired), we didn't sell the GIF codec with the stadium software. BTW, that was 5% of $20 million, which was considered insane by my supervisors for just a few stupid images that could easily be converted to other formats instead.
If you look around today on the web, the GIF format, even now that the patent has expired, is largely a minor file format and its use is largely fading still. Jpeg files largely took over the slack, although file formats like PNG and others did come up to help take up the slack from GIF as well.
In this situation, it is up to those stakeholders of the MP3 file format to see just how far they will try to milk their patents and attempt to extort those companies who have published MP3 players. If the royalties are modest and they use their head (like not going after FLOSS developers), you may be right that the MP3 file format is so entrenched that there will not be any other file format. But if they get a case of greed and stupidity, it will mean the death of the file format.
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Hardly a good analogy either. A blasting cap is specifically designed to trigger an explosion on a decidedly unstable chemical substance.
Here you are talking about trying to use a nuke on what amounts to be solid rock that is chemically inert. OK, if you had prefect knowledge of the geology you might be able to identify fault lines and be able to figure out where a precise explosion might dislodge some rock to get a cascading earthquake to happen that might under the most ideal circumstances get an eruption.
But there are so many if here that even the energy to trigger the earthquake in the first place is several orders of magnitude greater than nuclear bombs. I think you significantly underestimate just how much energy is needed to initiate such geological actions. A nuke is merely something that happens to be a man-made device that can deliver some fairly substantial quantities of energy, but it still isn't going to be enough.
At perhaps the right time when the geological forces are very much balanced, perhaps you might trigger an eruption a few days or weeks early, but that hardly matters anyway. For something like this hot spot in Yellowstone, it is going to blow regardless of any significant actions you are going to try. And nukes are going to simply complicate the ash fall even more due to the introduction of radioactive components.
This is a flawed analogy completely, although it should be noted that ordinary blasting caps are part of the process used to trigger a nuclear explosion. How else do you think the fission products get put together to initiate the chain reaction? Otherwise this is just a (unfortunately typical) Hollywood concept that would only be done in a movie.
Come on and be real. It wouldn't even make a dent.
Even the largest nuke that has ever been developed wouldn't even compare to the raw energy that an ordinary volcano like Mt. St. Helens with what was even a modest eruption in 1980.
An above ground nuclear detonation would do absolutely nothing, other than general environmental damage and knocking down trees. It wouldn't affect the geology at all.
Underground, it would create a minor jolt, but it wouldn't trigger any kind of eruption.
Keep in mind that the eruption from Yellowstone, if it really did blow, would obliterate all of Yellowstone National Park, and send measureable quantities of ash all of the way to New York City. All of the nukes in the world, combined, at the height of the Cold War, can't do this much damage.
Of course the introduction of ethylene glycol into dihydrogen monoxide can help reduce the freezing and boiling issues if ingested toxicity is not a significant problem, such as for automotive applications, but it does introduce other problems.
Chemical corrosion is something that is significant, although that can be mitigated. The largest problem of atomic disassociation, however that is achieved, is that you end up with monoatomic oxygen, perhaps the most reactive oxidizer you can find. The corrosive effects of that by product can indeed damage most metalic structures and can cause potentially explosive environments.
Still, getting back to the original posting, solid hydrogen does offer some interesting benefits, particularly if you could find a chemical compound that would produce an exothermic reaction (dihydrogen monoxide tends to be endothermic in most reactions) that would release the hydrogen. But as mentioned in this general thread any such compound makes a nice rocket propellant (or explosive) if made in large quantities. Many of the NASA rockets already use Hydrogen/LOX fuel systems because hydrogen already has a high ISP. Adding in some extra energy from the hydrogen release would make the fuel and rocket system using such a chemical very attractive and may raise the ISP of the rocket motor.
And it is indeed easily maufactured, non-polluting, non-toxic, cheap, safe to transport, and (usually) leaves no residue behind.
It is also very cheap to manufacture, and can be delivered to your home at a price cheaper than dirt or gravel in volume. And it is also found in quantity at most fuel stations where you buy gasoline, so the need to establish a seperate distribution system is not going to be too much of a problem. Indeed, the major oil companies already offer it for sale at premium prices from independent refineries and distilleries.
The chemical? Dihydrogen monoxide, also known as hydroxylic acid.
Of course, in its solid form I usually use it in a few drinks, but who is counting here. It does need a bit of help to release the hydrogen from the compound, but perpetual energy machines are not a problem for many individuals who are looking for other forms of solid hydrogen.
I wouldn't, but I have seen critical medical monitoring equipmet running on Microsoft Windows. I even mentioned the fact to the doctor who was treating my wife at the time and said "do you really trust this isn't going to freeze up half-way through the procedure?"
The medical doctor just gave me a blank stare wondering what planet I just came from.
Why the FDA (who approves medical equipment like this) gave a thumbs up for that equipment, I have no idea. I certainly wouldn't trust my life to rely upon Windows working 24/7. At least in this csae all the equipment did was to monitor a patient, and the things it was monitoring could also be verified "by hand", such as blood pressure and heart rate.
No, I completely understand the difference between patents and copyrights here.
If you have studied a particular algorithm in detail to the point that you completely "Grok" or come to an understanding of what is a complex process, you are bound to take some of those same ideas into other software that you have written. The GPL in this case has to do with the fact that you can't duplicate an algorithm exactly as it is coded. It then becomes a derivitive work if you are copying the same general structure... and you would pretty much have to if you are using the same algorithm.
Yeah, I suppose that is a patentable idea too, but in many cases what you have written is going to look the same even after you have moved on and supposedly "coded from scratch". This is also why I think software patents are completely stupid. You can use copyright law to enforce protecting algorithms just as much (or better) than what is needed for patent law. And it is easier to establish when something was actually written and to demonstrate if the idea even works at all. Using copyright to enforce algorithms would allow some minor to substantial changes to be considered a completely new idea. With a patent, you don't even need to demonstrate that the idea even works as is described within the patent.
BTW, what I was trying to mention here anyway was a certain school of thought that does exist... not that I necessarily believe this "fact" to be true. Somebody who is paranoid to a fault will be religiously concerned that somehow their software developers have been "contaminated" with GPL'd software, which therefore makes those software developers unfit for writing propriatary software.
From a more pragmatic viewpoint, this isn't nearly so much of a real worry. As long as you have an ethical developer, they will keep the two codebases seperate. Even so, it is very tempting to copy an algorithm you have been a joint developer with that happens to be under the GPL, and then take that same code bit to a propriatary software package that is buried so deep that (you think) nobody will ever notice that it was GPL'd source code initially. In theory at that point, the added code needs to remain under the GPL.
But as I tried to mention (and will again), if you are worried about GPL'd and other free licenses that may contaminate your software base, I would be far more worried about propritary software licenses that would also do the same thing. You might find some way to "undo" the damage of GPL'd software mis-attribution and be able to fix the problem easily and quickly. The developer community may even forgive you. If you tried to do that with propriatary software, you would have to spend the next several years dealing with lawyers and little else.
You actually hit upon one of my uses for Google:
Being a quick spell checker.
If there is a word that I am writing and I don't want to bother with trying to look it up in a dictionary or can't think of the proper spelling, I'll punch it into google and ignore the search items themselves, other than to see how many other people suck at spelling as bad as I do and even published content with the misspelling.
What is surprising is how many times even deliberate misspellings still turn up content on the Google search.
As a note here, one of the reasons for the Microsoft "Shared Assurance" program that locks you into their grips is to prevent people from trying to install "free upgrade" and other stuff from the Microsoft.com website. There are not nearly as many "free downloads" from there as there were even a few years ago. And those that there are require you to use your OS registration key (in an innocent name called a "passport") or some other similar feature to verify that you are a genuine MS customer.
This was not done at all ten year ago, when ReactOS could barely boot at all, and that was considered a major accomplishment.
I would say that while Microsoft is not running for the hills with their tail between their legs, they are not ignoring ReactOS either. I would even argue that the move with Vista to a new API was due in part to their attempt to relegate ReactOS to the dustheap of ancient and unsupported operating systems.
Where ReactOS is going to be a "killer app" is when Microsoft finally decides to stop supporting Windows 2000. There will be a huge need for many businesses to keep some legacy applications running on new hardware (due to the old stuff simply having mechanical failures) but they can't upgrade to XP (or Vista) for various reasons. ReactOS would certainly be something for companies considering this as a potential migration path, where continued OS support will occur.
While this goes back some time in American history, the Grangers and Progressives were two political parties (and movements with upper and lowercase letters to go with these parties) who were able to get major national political campaigns going that had some very real impacts.
In both cases, those movements were also taken over by the "mainstream" political parties. I've heard all kinds of political theories why there are only two political parties in America, and while I see it, I'm still not completely convinced that this has to be the case... particularly in the age of electronic communications and especially networked computers. If a 3rd party were to get into Congress and be able to split things up (such as is the current situation) so that neither party has a majority, that 3rd party would wield some incredible political power.
For the life of me, I have no idea why Lieberman and Jeffords don't try to take advantage of their situation and throw more weight arround than they currently do... although I will admit Lieberman really is a loyal party man in his heart... his state party merely threw him out in a bizzare twist of the political scene.
On the presidential level, the situation is harder to see as the current method of allocating electors strongly favors the major parties, at least if the 3rd parties have only diffused minority support across the whole country. Being strong in just a few states, on the other hand, would throw the whole electorial college into a very powerful political body with the 3rd parties holding the keys to the White House... even if they couldn't necessarily get themselves into there on their own.
While to me it seems as though the Libertarians may have the best shot at actually changing the political landscape of America in a real way, it does take some reform of what they are doing and a change in their way of thinking about political campaigns as well form the more typical 3rd party chest beatings that more typically espouse extreme political ideas that won't realistically be implemented into actual law. On this point, I would have to agree with you.
I think you have that exactly reversed.
It is Microsoft who is extremely aggressive about enforcing their "rights", attack products for non-compliance (note especially the "shared assurance" problems with XP and Vista), and have been known as "the Borg of the internet" for several other reasons, including going after small companies and either buying them out (when the legal cost isn't worth it) or driving them into submission, particularly by explicitly writing a competing application to drive them out of business.
I hardly call it safe if you deal with Microsoft products, particularly if you are a software development company.
And in terms of free software applications, only a very few are even backed by what could be called any sort of corporate infrastructure. Yes, IBM (and their Nazgul), Red Hat, MySQL AB, Novell, and a few other companies are involved directly with their own apps that are open sourced. And those are ones I would be a little on the more cautious side of trying to screw with as well for the same reason that they have deep pockets if you fail to comply with their terms.
But for the most part GPL'd software is stuff that is either written by a large community (like the MediaWiki software running Wikipedia, or perhaps Firefox for a better example), or is just a very small handful of hobbyists who just love programming and are doing it in their spare time. Most of them are flattered that you have even sent them an e-mail saying you like their software at all!
While there is quite a bit of bluster that is sometimes said about license enforcement, how many people do you know (besides the $1 million+ revenue companies of major apps I mentioned above) that have actually even tried to enforce the GPL? The Free Software Foundation does occasionally send a cease and desist letter, but nobody has even tried to challenge the GPL in any real substantial way, except for SCO... and they took on IBM for that!
I can tell you of many times that Microsoft has gone into corporate offices and conducted "license audits", and of several people who are either in jail for blatant copyright infringement of Microsoft product, or for all practical purposes lost their business. Some that are right here in the town where I live! I can't name even one company or person (with the exception again of SCO... and they are still around even if on life support) that has gone out of business due to including a GPL'd piece of software.
Again, I would be far more afraid of the Microsoft EULA than the GPL any day.
I would add that libertarians (small l) actualy have a hunger and thirst to find anybody willing to stand up and provide some real leadership in this area.
I would love to think that some 3rd party, like the Libertarians (BIG L), might try to offer this sort of genuine leadership. I have even formally registered as a Big-L Libertarian in hopes that numbers alone might draw some interest. Unfortunately, in the last couple of elections they have tied themselves to the same (or similar) platforms as the democrats, particularly in regards to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By doing this, they have also rendered themselves as irrelevant on the national political stage where again significant leadership is needed by both political parties. IMHO both Bush and Pelosi are out to lunch in regards to what should be done in Iraq, and there is plenty of room available for some genuine new policies that might make a real difference.
In the 2004 election, I could hardly tell the difference between Kerry and Badnarik, at least on the substantive issues that were commonly being discussed. In this regard, it is no wonder that many libertarians (at least in the USA) felt they had no choice other than to vote Republican. And then Democrat in 2006.
You also forgot to mention how the California State Board of Regents decided to get into the mess as well and tried to claim that all BSD stuff belonged to them, even if that was a short lived and misguided thought when it was suggested. And other legal wrangling by the state of California.
That and the other problems with the infinitely growing license due to the advertising clause where everybody who added stuff tried to tack their name onto the end. That was a big deal once upon a time as well.
Your memories here about the problems with the BSD license is square on. The legal cloud over the BSD distros certainly was a push to some early developers of Linux to move in that direction instead, as many of them were really license agnostic and just wanted to have a fun hobby to play with.
It should be noted that only among hard core free/open source software advocates does anybody even bother the read the license in the first place to even know what is written in them. Oh a bored lawyer might actually go through many of the other propritary ones, but how many times when you install software on your computer do you simply look at the license and simply click "Accept" without even having read the thing in the first place?
Certainly there are very few propritary software licenses that have had significant discussions about individual clauses, why they ought to be changed, and how they should be changed. For those companies I've worked for, I doubt the software developers themselves had even read the license their software was being sold under in the first place. In one case, the manager who crafted the license for our software merely copied the license from another application with just a few minor modifications for the name of the company and taking out a term he didn't like. Even then, I don't think he even read the complete license that supposedly even he crafted.
The same could be said (unfortunately) even when the license is written by a professional law office.
On the other hand, I can say that I've read the GPL in detail and have tried to understand each seperate clause. And the same for the various BSD licenses, as well as several other FOSS licenses.
So would they feel more comfortable including something like a DirectX installation package with a Microsoft EULA that is included with their own offering? Or that their developers have copied code snippets from the same DirectX SDK and knowledge base, also under that license?
I would say that the GPL'd stuff has far fewer unknowns and legal implications than what the MS software inclusions might have, and that is just one clear example of many propritary software licenses that might be compiler plug-in tools to customized equipment drivers. Has the legal team gone through all of those licenses to see what is exactly legal and what royalties needed to get paid?
This is a true statement due to the fact that if you decide not to "open up" the software, you are simply stuck with software you don't have a license to distribute. And that is something you should have thought of before you put in the GPL'd (or other free license) software into your product.
In most cases you can also (likely) go back and replace the GPL'd stuff with something you've written yourself... if you are a competent developer. It may require a "clean room" type development effort at a critical time of the product development that may get some eyebrows raised or people get fired due to the project getting late, but it isn't necessarily the end of the world either.
If you don't want to have people see your source code that is co-mingled with GPL'd software, just don't release it at all.
How this applies to something that is done internally within a company is another story, but then again you only have to provide source code to those who actually get the software.
There were some FOSS licenses (or at least free/shareware software) that did require giving any changes made to the software back to the original software developer, but those licenses never did grab that much mindshare among software developers. Even then, how would that original developer even know unless you actually released the modified software?
For myself, I didn't have to steal my former employer's code base. They mailed it to me, after I quit!
Or in one case (a university), I was able to buy my development computer at an open public bid auction (I paid $100 for the whole thing) just one month after I was fired. The hard drive wasn't even reformatted, and the full code base was right on there!
I know that source code security is often a bit more secure than this at most companies, but not always... especially if you worked for smaller companies. In some cases, I know I am the only person who even has the source code at all.
What you are saying here is mostly true as well, and unfortunately is one of the reasons why good programmers can have a hard time finding work when the lousy guys are messing it up for those of us with skills.
There is an issue regarding people who have been "contaminated" with having worked on GPL'd code.... even if just at a glance... and to try and make sure some of those algorithms don't make it into the propritary code base owned by the company
Of course this is an issue if you hire any experienced software developer who has done significant development under any other company's code base. They even know trade secrets (NDAs not withstanding here), and even if they weren't working directly for a competitor, they still have insights from that experience including algorithms either they developed at the other company or techniques and ideas developed by former co-workers.
For myself, as a software team manager, I'm more worried about employees infringing on this propritary software than getting GPL'd software doing cross contamination. Most FOSS developers would be flattered that part of their algorithm has been copied and extended in some new directions... particularly if it was used in a completely different application. They might get pissed if you tried to back-end patent the software afterward, but that is another issue entirely and technically illegal as well.
A GPL'd application generally does not have people with deep pockets that are willing to get involved with an extended legal battle. You can't say that about most major corporations with their private software code base contributed by former employees.
You nailed this sentiment.
It seems as though some of the individuals involved here (typical of government bureaucrats BTW) don't have the first idea of basic economic theory:
If you raise the price of something, the demand goes down. How simple can you get here?
There are some product like gasoline which in the short term doesn't display this tendancy, although even the oil companies have been required to adjust to fuel efficient vehicles, where even state taxation authorities have realized that highly fuel efficient vehicles don't pay nearly the same fuel taxes that gasoline hogs once did... proportional to the number of miles those vehicles actually drove.
In the case of a pure luxury consumer product like music, this sort of economic theory is much more apparent. For music performers who perform live concerts, they have known this for decades and for the most part have astronomical ticket prices because their arenas and other places they perform at are limited in size. They can get away with the high prices because it is expensive to build larger arenas or performing halls. Cutting their audience size to 1% of those who might be willing to attend if the ticket prices were more reasonable wouldn't make a difference if they can still fill a 100,000 seat arena with that 1%.
For internet radio, the number game is something that plays out significantly different. First of all, most people who are hard fans of musical performances have been used to obtaining "free" music over the internet, even if they subseqently purchase the same music on a CD afterward. That is the key point, that much of what is done on the internet is a form of advertising.
While I have no doubt there is some way that music studios can "maximize profit" here in terms of royalties for these internet music rebroadcast sites, the amount of money to be made is going to be even at best far less than this $2 billion that is being claimed. The money simply isn't there. And even if it were, how much of this is going to be coming from other revenue sources that the music industry currently is already taking. If you spend it on a subscription to an internet radio station, are you going to purchase the CD, or go to a concert with the same money? I don't think so. It has already been spent.
When you are dealing with "near time period" Sci-Fi (such as Armegeddon and Final Impact), where both had supposedly NASA spacecraft that were but marginally more advanced than the Space Shuttle, it is surprising that they invented "artificial gravity" as a plot device in there as well.
In the case of the astronauts running around the surface of an asteroid, I don't know how you would even be able to visually notice the difference between genuine weightlessness and a very low gravity field, except that stuff would eventually fall down over time. Like over several minutes or even hours. An astronaut using just his own foot power would be able to achieve genuine escape velocity. Indeed I think that would be the #1 hazard that would be mentioned during any training exercise, to avoid pushing too hard on the ground.
Still, it is something that is often wrong in perhaps the worst of the worst science movies.
Perhaps the all-time worst excuse for scientific principles was the movie "Independence Day", staring Bill Pullman and Will Smith. Outrunning explosions happened in several situations, including (but not limited to) Air Force One out running the main explosion of Washington D.C., the scene where everybody dives in through a door just in time beating the explosion in a tunnel (they would also get most of the blast being in a side entrance too!), and last but not least the movie finale where they take out the the "mother ship" in space (although you could claim they had some significant velocity before that one went off).
Several of the classical Schwartzenager movies also had some problems, most notably "True Lies" which does a very medocre depiction of a nuclear bomb explosion. Indeed, that particular movie violated just about every one of the principles mentioned in the original article.
On the other hand, the series premier of Battlestar Galactica (the new version, not the classic with Loren Green) does what I consider the absolute best demonstration of what a real wide-scale nuclear war would really feel like to those of us who might be stuck in the hinterlands trying to evade the dreaded weapons. They even got the explosion/sound time delay down pretty good too, all things considered. It isn't that it can't be done, but it takes somebody with a good background in science to not override reality to make something that merely "looks good".
I couldn't have said it much better myself, although Jimbo has been curiously absent from discussion lately on Foundation-l and a few of the usual haunts that used to be quite common with him. And I've seen him being much more reluctant over the past six months or so to even try to step in and deal with individual projects and disputes.
Still, the ever present ultimate authority is also Jimbo Wales, and if you are working on a policy decision the "best" way to end discussion is to simply bring up a "Jimbo says..." comment, unless you can back it up with a completely contradictory statement also by the man.
I will say that in addition to his larger involvement with Wikia lately and semi-retirement from day to day Wikimedia Foundation affairs, Wikimedia projects have also grown substantially... particularly in languages other than English. There is literally so much happening that it is impossible for a single person to really get into the minutae of dealing with individual users across all of the projects without simply going nuts and doing that on a full-time basis. And that would get, IMHO, rather boring as well. Perhaps that is why he has given up even trying.
There are some bureaucracies that are now being established that fill some of what Jimbo did in the past, but for the moment these are very weak and lack the prestige that Jimbo had. It is also easier to tell off somebody who can't pull out the "project founder" card and tell them that they have gone too far when they throw their weight around. In short, more sanity exists now to avoid radical policy changes, but at the same time it is harder to get any real changes made when they are necessary, as it turns into decisions made by committees. My largest complaint is that many of these committees have very closed membership, and anserable only to a very limited number of people. For some things like a legal advisory board might make sense (especially if it is a group of lawyers offering pro bono advise, as does exist), many of these groups that do make official policy are seriously lacking the components to really gague what ordinary users are thinking and doing.
What it would take to "break" this logjam is to have some very high quality music group/performer that would simply refuse to get involved with the "big five" RIAA companies, and use royalty-free internet radio stations (and other alternative music outlets, including "legal" Peer-to-Peer networks) to distribute their content. So far the way you get "made" is to sign with one of the big boys, but I don't think that will last forever.
Of course I'm talking somebody on the order of the Beatles, the Who, and other classical groups that would make this sort of impact with network radio. People like that only come around once in a decade and usually they are so good that even otherwise blind and deaf executives at the majors will drip money into these artists like there is no tomorrow that would be very hard for such a group or performer to pass up.
I would have to say that the concept of a trade secret also applies here, where the act of divulging a trade secret is illegal, and the rest is merely trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.
The problem here was that the prosecution couldn't prove that the defendant had knowledge of the trade secret (in this case the CSS algorithm) that came from anybody in the "DVD Consortium" that created the algorithm in the first place. Instead it was a pure reverse engineering effort from the openly (and publicly) available binary executables.
Keep in mind this happened pre-DCMA as well.
One of the ways that the "genie" was "stuffed back into the bottle" was to describe the software as a device, just as you have mentioned. In that manner, certain laws that specified sealed devices could help protect these trade secrets.
Normally a trade secret is a manufacturing process or something that helps give you a distinct competitive advantage over a competitor, and is known only by employees or contractors working for the company. The analogy to a military secret is almost identical here, and indeed the attitude within larger corporations is to classify things as "confidental" or even "eyes-only" or other similar comparable terms that also involve document security and even criminal background checks to see if an employee is leaking documents of this nature.
The reason why the DVD Consortium (now DVD Forum) decided to use the trade secret defense instead of simply patenting the CSS algorithm is because they would have been required to publish the algorithm as a part of the patent application. It turned out that it was an embarrassingly simply algorithm to reverse in terms of actually protecting optical disc content from "unauthorized access". In hindsight they would have been much better off had it been patented, as they would have been able to stop the massive distribution of the algorithm in actual software (and revoked the GPL at the same time). Instead, the software is still widely available, published in newspapers, billboards, radio commercials, and other places as proof that it is hardly a secret. Having people wear T-shirts with the software into the various hearings about it made it very difficult to prove that it really was a secret as well.
As far as I know, only the 2600 magazine was blocked from using the link to the DeCSS software, and I don't know of a single other court that has used this ruling as preceedence, showing the legal holes in this judge's opinion.
It is hardly the pervasive and nearly only graphical file format that existed 15 years ago. And the patent issues did cause a huge downturn in the use and application of GIF files.
And if you look at where those GIF images are being used: Clipart, buttons, and design elements. They are not really being used for new image content. It is a dated file format that is not getting additional support precisely because the developer mindshare simply isn't there to work on it and everybody has moved on.
I didn't say that you couldn't find GIF images on the web still, but it isn't the #1 dominant file format like it used to be. In time you will notice that it will be used less and less often, even though now the patent issues no longer apply. I dare you to show me a graphical manipulation software package that brags about its ability to edit GIF images as a major feature, or uses that file format as the default image format. Oh, sure, you can find GIF formats listed with 30 other image file types in a feature list, but as something singled out it is hardly likely at all.
In the mid-1990's, there were several graphical editing tools that focused exclusively on GIF images and did use that file format as the default format for saving the data. And programming books of the era also had source code for how to manipulate GIF images and add them to your own software. You just don't see that anymore.
The only comparison that I could possibly give here is with the GIF image standard that also had nearly identically widespread use by nearly every website, dial-up BBS, and computer lab. It was The Image Standard that all other image file formats were compared to, and several graphic image manipulators only dealt with the GIF format at all.
And then came Unisys, who instituted insane royalty policies that effectively killed the format for anybody who wanted to create software that used the format or even post GIF images on their websites. I know this first hand, because I tried to obtain a license for a software package that I wrote that would display GIF images on stadium scoreboards. Unisys was insisting on a 5% royalty for the entire system, meaning the entire scoreboard. Needless to say that other than as a demonstration to prove the software could be written (it was anyway, but not sold until the patent expired), we didn't sell the GIF codec with the stadium software. BTW, that was 5% of $20 million, which was considered insane by my supervisors for just a few stupid images that could easily be converted to other formats instead.
If you look around today on the web, the GIF format, even now that the patent has expired, is largely a minor file format and its use is largely fading still. Jpeg files largely took over the slack, although file formats like PNG and others did come up to help take up the slack from GIF as well.
In this situation, it is up to those stakeholders of the MP3 file format to see just how far they will try to milk their patents and attempt to extort those companies who have published MP3 players. If the royalties are modest and they use their head (like not going after FLOSS developers), you may be right that the MP3 file format is so entrenched that there will not be any other file format. But if they get a case of greed and stupidity, it will mean the death of the file format.