Hardly. DeCSS was GPL'd computer software, with the minor provision that the content of the software was a publicly known trade secret, whatever that really means. It wasn't a device, it was an algorithm that would describe how to decrypt the CSS encryption found on the data stream produced by content conforming to the DVD-Video specification.
This wouldn't even be like a GPL'd MP3 player, where at least there is a patent issue that would potentially prevent you from redistributing the software, although it is certainly in the same realm of IP issue. And the MP3 player comparison is about as close to what happened with DeCSS as you can get otherwise.
Perhaps another analogy would be is it legal to have a link to top secret military documents that have been previously published in the New York Times that shows England was behind the 9/11 attacks? The NYT would be in hot legal trouble, perhaps, but I don't think the other 2000 media websites that would copy the information and link to the NYT would be guilty of "spilling the beans" about the documents. Yet this is precisely what happened to those who spread knowledge about DeCSS and had the links.
One thing that should be a glaring point to be made to almost all Hollywood and RIAAA studios is this simple thought:
If preventing duplication of electonic content were so successful and could legitimately be enforced through technical means, it would be software development companies that would have the most successful and the most experience in trying to prevent the duplication.
I see the motion picture and recording industry going through the same cycles of trying to protect their content that software companies tried nearly 30 years ago: Scrambing the content, requring special "hardware" keys, messing around with the distribution media format and more.
If you look at a piece of software (distributed by somebody other than Microsoft), you will find that most software publishers gave up on the idea of trying to prevent software duplication decades ago. All it seems to accomplish except perhaps on the most exclusive and most expensive software packages is to piss off customers and push them onto their competitors.
I would say the jury is still out on Windows Vista and how successful it will be with the incredible DRM restrictions. I've heard recurring problems with Windows XP where people with legitimate "licenses" are suddenly discovering that Microsoft has crippled their operating system, forcing them to buy yet another license even though they were assured that they had a completely legal version of XP from the store where they bought the computer. And it even worked for many months until the warnings poped up.
In the long run, these attempts to control electronic duplication simply don't work. Instead, you have to put the duplcation of the software into your business model, and add services that would justify paying for the extra "seats" if you want to have people pay for each copy of the software/music/movies seperately.
For movies and music, ease of distribution and quality of content are something that can be offered to be superior to something you would pull off of a P2P network, and would therefore be something of value that people would be willing to pay for. Blatant copyright violations can and should be dealt with as well... if copyright is even a policy that is even valued at all for society.
In terms of open and truly free multimedia specification standards, I don't think you can get anywhere better than the PNG specification.
The actual standard is free (as in beer and FLOSS), has some significant extentions that provide unique features found for nearly any other graphical format, and has a very open process to try and extend the specification... if you want to really take the effort to try and do so.
The developers of the PNG standard were also paranoid almost to a fault about avoiding patent encumberance. As a result, it is one of the few graphical standards that can reliabily be used on GPL'd software without any fear of future retaliation by patent and copyright holders (the reference software was even released into the public domain).
I would agree that the MPEG specification falls signifcantly short when compared to this kind of very open process that went into the PNG standard. While technically outstanding on a number of levels, the MPEG standard is something that is fraught with legal landmines almost everywhere that you step. Only MPEG-1 is something I would even recommend to people as something to legitimately try and implement... and that only because most of the major patents that cover the algorithms have simply expired due to how old the specification has become.
If you are a for-profit company, you can get by with the MPEG-2 specs as the licensing terms aren't too bad for a commercial product, but you are absolutely correct that a GPL'd project that needs these specs to implement a Linux-based DVD player has to stick their necks out legally if they really care to develop anything using those standards. This is one reason why DVD-Video development on Linux, while not dead, is certainly severely lacking and lacks some of the best and brightest minds working on it.
I got that you didn't like MediaWiki. Yeah, it is slow, but it is slow because of what it does.
As far as the actual studies involved, I would have to at the moment refer you to the Wikimedia development team directly, although I've seen some published values that do go into some details.
For general statistics of Wikimedia projects, I would have to refer you to http://stats.wikimedia.org/ that goes into some depth about individual projects and what the general demands on them are, including statistical summaries of leading contributors, growth of content, and edit counts that would certainly be of general interest in terms of trying to compare to other Wiki environments.
I also would like to mention that Erik Zachte, the person who has written this statistical summary mentioned above, has also gone into depth regarding general usage data where he has been given direct access to the Apache server logs and has noted areas that were critical for Wikimedia projects. Brion Vibber is also actively involved with these reviews, and several of these statistical summaries were noted among the internal developers lists, with hints of these studies being mentioned from time to time on other foundation mailing lists.
There have also been formal requests for performing this sort of statistical analysis by several university research teams that have been eager to get such a statistical set, which also prompted the WMF to establish specific guidelines for obtaining this sort of raw data.
Is this specific enough? I don't know right off hand besides these direct studies, but I do know there are others that do exist as well. Wikipedia is a heavily studied topic in part because much of the data is open and available, which gives some interesting sociological interpretations as well if studied through the lens of a statistical review. And there is enough raw data to come to conclusions that may not fit the traditional orthodoxy, so you can also tweak some noses at the same time.
The reason I mention MediaWiki's feature set is that you are (I'm presuming here) claiming that one of the reasons why the Wikimedia Foundation is running out of money is due in part because they are foolishly spending money on server resources that could be better run had they only selected the proper Wiki software. I am offering a rebuttal that this is hardly the case, and that almost (because I can't claim absolute knowledge here) any other Wiki editing software package would die a horrible and nearly instant death if they had to deal with the same feature set and bandwidth issues that currently confront Wikipedia. Or that the other software packages are so lacking in the essential requirements needed to run Wikipedia that there is hardly room to even justify a valid comparison based off of only one single comparison.... content distribution bandwidth on the CPU.
Who is going to write this radically different software?
If it is even written, how would it integrate into the current Wikipedia software during the transition?
Does it require downloading new software beyond a typical web-browser? If so, who would be turned away from editing because of this new requirement.
Assuming that if this "distributed" version of Wikipedia could be done through a Java applet or something similar (eliminating the "need" for using a web server), would there really be a significant bandwidth reduction anyway? Is setting up a distributed network even something that could be done with just Java apps and how slow would that make accessing data?
While distribution of the content could be distributed, how would you collect the "edits" and roll them back together for everybody to have synchronized copies?
The suggestion to move Wikipedia to Freenet is simply something so over the top that I don't know where to begin. Freenet simply does not scale to the level that Wikipedia has in terms of the raw number of pages in Wikipedia alone, not to mention all of the images that would have to be included. And Freenet is slow... as in the very definition of Freenet is a snails pace of activity even on a dedicated private T1 line.
Distributed algorithms certainly could be improved somewhat over Freenet if you didn't want to worry about all of the security paranoia in Freenet. Freenet is explicitly designed so somebody looking at your cache can't see what you've requested, or for somebody monitoring your node to know for certain if you were the one requesting the kiddy porn or if it was a node connected to yours, or something even further downstream yet.
And freenet doesn't have the content editing capabilities for Wikipedia.... which would still require a massive server farm if you decided to simply send the "edit" data back to the central server.
If you can answer these questions effectively and still come up with a good distributed version of Wikipedia... patent it immediately. You will have found a very significant killer app for the internet and you are bound to become the next dot-com billionaire.
While I might have some strong criticisms about Wikipedia, I think the software is very near the bottom of something you have cause to criticize about here. MediaWiki has been written in such a manner to deal with so many possible situations that to compare a mirror that doesn't even offer editing of the content.
Some very competent computer scientists (and I don't use that term lightly here either) have done some serious algorithmic studies and have evaluated the bandwidth, and have gone over the current network demands on a statistical basis to see where areas of improvement are needed. While things could certainly improve, suggesting such a massive software switch without looking at all of the system requirements is a foolhardy suggestion at best.
If you can come up with a much more effective piece of software that can scale to the degree of MediaWiki, and be able to cope with all of the community demands (including vandalism protection, user rights management, social networking, content markups, and the host of plug-in tools that are asked for in most MediaWiki situations including template transclusion issues), I would suggest that you make a formal presentation to the Wikimedia Foundation. I seriously doubt you can find such a piece of software, particularly one that also competes as being available for change using the GPL.
For a small Wiki community, yeah, I would agree MediaWiki is lousy software. But for Wikipedia.... it is exactly what it needed and is constantly being tweaked to fit the changing needs of that community. Only when you have more than about 1000 active users does MediaWiki really become something that is really necessary.
The Alaska point still stands (or Antartica, if you prefer): Why aren't modern "frontiersmen" mining the mountains of the south pole? It's orders of magnitude easier to reach than the moon.
And where was the last home built that was chartered and registered under the Homestead Act?
The final official "homestead" was granted by the U.S. Department of the Interior (and signed by Ronald Reagan) in 1986. This law was repealed in 1976.
People have done it and still want to go to Alaska to establish a hunk of real estate that they can call their own, although I would like to point out that a significant portion of Alaska was declared wilderness and has been put under legal protection so you simply can't go there anymore... at least to build a house, a farm, or a business (beyond perhaps some very incidental tourist business under strict annual licensing). You certainly can't take an unclaimed mountain in Alaska and start digging for minerals and build a steel mill and smelter.
You would actually have an easier time trying to start a business of that nature in New York City, at least to get the legal permits to even get the business going. So why is it so easy to get to Alaska and do something there?
As for Antartica, you have the Antartic Treaty that specifically prohibits commercial development of that continent. You are also prohibited from owning real estate at all as a private citizen. The reason people are not mining Antartica has to do with legal issues, not people willing to take a chance and try to make a living there.
While I admit that you wouldn't (perhaps) see millions of people running to Antartica for a "gold rush" the way that happened in 1849 for California if suddenly it did become legal to go there and stake a claim and build a mining company there, I do believe it would not necessarily be zero people involved. Oil companies are willing to drill on the North Slope of Alaska, and the environment in that part of Alaska is hardly much different than Antartica. I'm not sure if a proper oil reserve exploration has ever really been done in Antartica, although some general geological studies have suggested that there may be some significant oil fields alone.
The point here is that the only real reason why more people aren't in Alaska, and why Antartica isn't inhabited with permanent groups of people has to do with international legal requirments and people's concerns about the global environment. While that may be some exceedingly good reasons, you shouldn't be using the excuse that people won't be willing to live in harsh environments like Antartica as rationale for suggesting that people don't want to live on Mars, or anywhere else in the Solar System besides the Earth.
All that is stopping people from getting into space at the moment are legal issues from people worried about "safty" and "the environment on Mars". There is even a group of hard core environmentalists that want to stop lunar development, claiming that it will change the appearance of the face of the moon and somehow affect wildlife here on the Earth. As if even detonating nuclear bombs on the Moon at a large scale could significantly change the current environment there. Lunar environmentalism will be a major issue of the latter half of the 21st Century, trust me!
So should an article about a movie published by a major studio have no images in it because any still from the movie is copyright someone else and categorically unavailable for free licensing?
Short answer:
No! It is a copyright violation to use those images.
More developed answer:
I am very unconfortable with the very widespread usage of fair use on Wikipedia, as most justifications for fair use are merely rationalizations of copyright violations. I don't see where the fair-use aspect of critical commentary comes in, such as would be used by a movie critic doing a review of the movie. Such an article is also something akin to an editorial, which is not permitted on any Wikimedia project much less on Wikipedia.
Still, if you want to say that an NPOV community-written article regardng the asthetics of a movie can be written, you might be able to use a very limited number of images from publicity photos or frames grabbed from the movie, when the text of the article goes into details about that particular image.
Fair-use is not rationale for simply making something look asthetically pleasing, and the photos used in such a manner should almost never be used in any other article. I say almost never, because there may be a few very rare exceptions, but most often multiple uses of a fair-use image are usually violations of fair use misappropriated into an article just to have something for asthetics.
I also believe that if Wikipedia had a stronger "no fair use" or even "very limited fair use", that in situations like this you would find Wikipedia contributors trying to push for free content images that could be used instead to do the same thing. The GPL and GFDL don't stop copyright... they just limit how copyright can be enforced or what the terms of use for content might be. You might just see some movie companies be willing to release a few limited frames under FLOSS licenses if they knew that was the only way to splash up their Wikipedia page.
Instead, particularly for movies (since you broached the subject), I've seen some "Wikipedia use only" licenses be aserted for some frame selections and publicity photos by movie companies just because they are being allowed. These smaller indy film producers who have done this would likely have released these same images under the GFDL or Creative Commons license had that been the only option available to them.
Flickr also allows you to "tag" the images so you can know what license they have been released under. Google images simply is a scan of pratically everything on the internet and there is not a standard format for tagging images under a given license on a web page.
OK, you might be able to put CC-by-SA as a search term to help, but from a technical side, I don't know how you could set up a web crawler and have it identify what legal license each image is going to be available under... particularly as free content (FLOSS-style licenses) would be the vast minority of images available.
I just don't know how from a technical viewpoint you could catalog images, or what the incentive would be for a website owner/developer would be to tag all of the images with some sort of copyright license tag. For Wikipedia to tag the images, there is incentive as it provides rationale to keep or delete the images and cites where the content came from. Others perhaps ought to be just as paranoid about copyright, but unfortunately in most cases they usually aren't.
That way, if somebody else does take a photo of your house, you can go after them not only for "actual damages" but "statutory damages" as well. I believe this is currently $250,000 for statutory damages... so this isn't necessarily something trivial, especially as the formal registration is only $45.
I'm sure you could easily recover the $45+legal fees alone if this Canadian company were to take a photo of your house without your permission, if you just wanted to go after them on the basis of principle alone. And let your lawyer buy a new BMW with the $1/4 million if he wants to go after the rest.
So what is wrong with including a link to a blog on your own user page? I fail to see what the problem is there, as external links are quite common on user pages from what I've seen, as long as it is about you personally in some manner. Even then, user pages are usually quite open and very rarely do admins even enforce the few rules that do exist on them. BTW, I do include a link to my blog on my user page.
About the only hard rule about user pages is that you shouldn't go messing around with another user page unless you have been given permission somehow. There is a controvercy over userboxes and other silly stuff like that, but it is a controvercy in part because it is some users trying to tell others what they can and can't do with their user pages.
It sounds like you are uploading images that you don't own the copyright over. If you own the copyright (as in you took the image yourself or personally know the person who did and has given you permission to upload the image), uploading an image to Wikipedia is not a problem at all. Or if you can clearly demonstrate that the image is in the public domain. Or as good can demonstrate that the person who does own the image has given copyright permission (usually in the form of the GFDL or something compatable) for the image.
Frankly I think that far too many fair-use images are being used on Wikipedia and what is there needs to be reduced even more. Grabbing random content from Google Images is not appropriate and is simply a copyright violation.
If only that had been true. Unfortunately it took the creation of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation to even create the basic infrastructure necessary to even license commercial spacecraft.
In other words, the "FAA" of outer space is..... the Federal Aviation Administration... the FAA!
I would have to agree that had NASA administrators been using their head, that they would have created an office of commercial space transportation when the Gemini spacecraft were being launched... or perhaps when the NASA administrators started to use the terminology of "Space Transportation System" for the Shuttle program.
I do know of private investors who had raised the necessary capital to "buy" a private space shuttle, and only wanted the production line to continue for another couple of iterations with the opportunity that the privately owned shuttle would be used primarily for commercial payloads. And NASA did "sell" some space on some of the early shuttle flights to private companies, including some astronauts that were employees of private for-profit companies that only used the shuttle to help work on various projects for these private companies. This is something that since the Challenger disaster has all but stopped, when the shuttle was considered too much of a risk and the flights became government projects only.
The demand for commercial spaceflight never really stopped after Challenger, and many of the companies that wanted to get into space instead opted for unmanned rockets instead. There is a small but active fleet of private spacecraft that do get into space from time to time in part because of this demand, but the price to get there is driven, unfortunately, by government contracts and nobody willing to try and drive the cost of the rockets down as the economics for the few extra spacecraft that would be flown at cheaper rates is comparatively fewer than would make up for the loss in revenue due to keeping the price at the rates government agencies are willing to pay.
The economics that open up due to spacecraft like Spaceship One and tourism models like Virgin Galactic are of the level that whole new kinds of customers are able to pay for real spaceflight. Something like a medium sized university can also afford to launch something on these cheaper rockets and spacecraft where they are simply unable to get the money together for an unmanned rocket like the Delta-4 made by Boeing.
Keep in mind that the NASA budget in the 1960's was a full 10% of the U.S. Federal budget, second only to spending on the Department of Defense.
Today, even the DoD doesn't rank in the top 5 appropriation categories, and NASA falls into the budget at a measly 0.6% of the budget. That is still rather significant in terms of absolute dollars on a $2.6 trillion budget, but it certainly can't be compared to what happened in the 60's.
I'm also not certain I would want to ride in an Apollo spacecraft, and that was rather well-built compared to the Mercury capsules. There have been some considerable improvements over the years in spacecraft design, where the Soyuz spacecraft are much more reliable and better built today than the Apollo spacecraft were of yesteryear.
As far as education, healthcare, and the other things you are griping about, they are just a giant economic black hole that will never get filled. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some reasonable efforts in these areas, but completely cutting out NASA or even all military spending isn't going to make that much of a difference in those program. Can you guess what items #1 and #2 are today?
#1 - Interest on the federal debt #2 - Social Security benefits
So instead of the usual refrain of "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we....", it should be instead "If grandfathers can golf in Palm Springs, why can't we...."
Just to add a little bit of extra here, that the "inverted pyramid" style was originally created due to the deficiencies of the medium that was used to transmit messages throughout most of the 19th Century: The electric telegraph.
If you thought communications systems have a horrid "uptime" now, it is downright miserable when the telegraph first was up and going. Having a good connection for a few minutes or hours was considered good service, and it would often go down even for "natural events", much less from ranchers or Indians who would push down the telegraph poles deliberately because they thought it adversly affected the "buffalo" or the cattle. Or simply seemed ugly.
It didn't help during the U.S. Civil War that reporters trying to send messages back to their editors that telegraph lines where also a deliberate target of sabotage either.
The point here being that the telegraph reinforced the inverted pyramid, because for larger stories it was common for the final few paragraphs simply to be cut off when the telegraph line when down. That perhaps the story would be re-transmitted later on, but that would often result in missing deadlines and more.
There are two other "news delivery" mediums that you also missed out here: radio and (movie) news reels. Of these the news reels are perhaps the most interesting because they set many of the preceedents for television news coverage, even though they did overlap TV news broadcasts for a brief period of time. Both of them had some very interesting methodologies for their delivery that were also tied directly to their media, and are unique to all other kinds of news media delivery.
While Scaled Composites was certainly the only "fully funded entry", there were other contestants that may have likely succeeded had Burt Ruton not sent in his entry.
Notably Armadillo Aerospace certainly has been showing some surprising results, as has the Romanian ARCA group. Both have gone off to other areas now that the X-Prize has been "won".
I will admit though that many of the other 30 teams were there in name only, and it seems as though the entry fee they paid was only to help boost the overall success of the X-Prize Foundation. Only a small handful of groups ever got to the point of actually having some sort of flyable hardware at all. And that would put Homer Hickam from the "Big Creek Missile Agency" as one of the major contenders (had they decided to enter the contest).
As for prizes that lead to supposed "dead end" technologies, I would argue that the "Spirt of St. Louis" did help spur on additional aeronautical development, as once Lindburg did cross the atlantic, it then became more of a contest to say how to do it more comfortably, reliably, and with more cargo (the Spirt of St. Louis had esentially no payload except perhaps the pilot himself). Once you could show to some investor that the idea was technically feasable because it had already been done once by somebody else, it opens up many other ideas to try the same task again and again.
I would argue that Spaceship One does the same thing: It is possible to build a spacecraft that would get you to the edge of space, and to build one cheaply. It certainly has opened the doors up for other groups who are also building spacecraft, and has "legitimized" the idea of personal spaceflight that does not involve working with NASA. While this may have happened without the X-Prize, the contest certainly did focus the contestants on a concrete goal and also provided a forum to share their ideas and experiences.
Orbital spaceflight costing substantially less than $20 million (per passenger) will be possible in the next couple of decades, and possibly sooner. How much less and by whom is going to be part of the fun to see what exactly will happen.
To really mess things up here, I remember back in my (analog pre-computer days) typewriter class where the instructor suggested that to determine a classical "words per minute" for typing that written English had on average five characters per word.
That is at least a reasonable approximation that does have some standard to compare to that is outside of the realm of computer science, even though the number "five" doesn't really fit in too well with binary numbers as a divisor.
2000 words (English) = 10K bytes (roughly) is a good translation.
BTW, the Gutenberg version of the Declaration of Independence is a bit larger than this (with headers), but not by much.
Without trying to belabor this more than it needs, one of the problems with trying to read/interpret legislation like this that is in the process of being drafted and ammended is that it is very much a moving target. While at one point it may be exactly as you suggest that only highly paid lobbyists need concern themselves with this, that, or the other thing, other incarnations are much more inflamatory and concern private citizens and indeed require formal registration.
BTW, the analogy with lawyers and the various bar associations, while true, is flawed so far as I would hope and pray that nothing of the sort ever gets created for journalists and those who want to engage in political speech. Even putting together an organized group should not be regulated in any way, as the constitution clearly notes that no law should ever be created regarding this activity. That perhaps some minor regulations may by necessary in terms of the content delivery systems (aka broadcast television, mailing periodicals, etc.) but those regulations should be completely agnostic in terms of what sorts of content and speech is delivered. All they should regulate is the medium itself, and wheither you are talking about the upcoming 2008 Presidential election or the latest MMORPG should be irrelevant.
Collecting and spending money from like-mined individuals to further the goals of that group is by definition political activity. I fail to see the constitutional basis and justification for doing any sort of regulation of this kind of activity.
Thanks for the link. What I find interesting is that the actual boundary of the heliopause is something that still is an area of significant investigation at the moment. I have heard all kinds of ranges in estimates regarding when Voyager would actually cross that threshold, with the date getting pushed back more and more as Voyager actually gets to the point they thought would be the heliopause. It also seems to be affected by things like the sunspot cycle and other solar activity (with an appropriate time lag due to the distances involved).
2009, I believe, was one of the earlier estimates given back when Voyager was still close to Neptune. What is cool is that real science is still happening with the Voyager spacecraft as it heads for the very frontier of the solar system, as the only way to do this sort of science is to get something "out there" in the first place.
Since this portion of the bill has been stripped out of the final "ethics" bill, it is at this point irrelevant. But the provision to even require "registration" is one of the first steps toward any sort of regulation, and the suggestion that at the moment there are no fees or anything else to worry about is unfortunately repeated many times throughout modern American history. Once established, fees and formal licensing requirements often follow, later if not right away.
Once you put somebody on a list, that list can be used, and the point here is that it would be illegal for you to engage in political commentary without getting onto that list in the first place. Particularly if you were advocating a particular poliitcal party, candidate, or political issue.
This is really an attack on the "Swift Boat Vets", and trying to write legislation to keep groups like that from attacking an incumbant congressman. As if logevity in Congress is necessarily a problem at the moment.
The point I was trying to make about having senators actually read the U.S. Constitution is that they need to read the part of the 1st Ammendment that says "Congress shall make no law". I think that applies directly here in this case, nor can I possibly see how it fits the sort of regulated speech that the SCOTUS has laid down in terms of abusive speech that can cause public harm, such as the classic yelling "Fire!" in a crowded room.
Saying that Nancy Polosi needs to be kicked out of office in the '08 elections and advocating that position on a blog, or even paying for a two minute Super Bowl ad advocating that position should not be regulated in any way, shape, or form. There should never be any "registration" for this sort of political speech, and you shouldn't have to fill out a political equivalent of a 1040 form either if you engage in that sort of political activity. Nor should advocacy of the impeachment of George W. Bush for that matter. That is political speech and the whole purpose of the 1st Ammendment provisions of the freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
The legal requirement to register means that you have to have a license to perform that activity. And once you segregate those who have a license from those who don't, it means that you can then add subsequent restrictions just to keep that license, such as an ever increasing licensing fee, or meeting "public good" restrictions to keep that license.
There is a long and sad history that once a license is created for anything (for example, driving automobiles), that it tends to get abused to the point of absurdity after awhile. I mean, what does paying child support have to do with the operation of automobiles? Or voter registration for that matter?
That any restrictions are here at all is clearly a violation of the U.S. Consitution. Of course, who reads that document anymore, especially in the U.S. Senate?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I don't know what part of Congress shall make no law can't be understood by the U.S. Supreme Court, but I think the wording here is very clear. And for political speech, I would have to agree even more with your sentiment, there can't be any regulation of any kind in any way, even if it is for more noble aims. This is not yelling "fire" in a theater, to give a classic excuse to regulate speech in some situations.
If they want to regulate speech, these election campaign reformers need to first ammend the U.S. Constitution.
Of course, how often does the current U.S. Government (any one of the three branches) really care about what is written in this governing document? That the Constitution isn't being followed should hardly be surprising any more.
I think he has mistaken the idea that Voyager will leave the solar system in 2009, as defined by the region of space where the solar wind is overcome with other stellar matter from the rest of the Milky Way, and presumably in the region of space roughly where the Oort Cloud is likly to be located at. At that point you could presumably suggest that it is in interstellar space and the gravitational influence of the Sun is insignificant compared to other objects in the rest of the Galaxy.
While that is in reality a major accomplishment in terms of having a human artifact leave the solar system, it is a far cry from being able to reach another star system, especially Alpha Centauri. Especially as Alpha Centauri is hardly in the plane of the ecliptic (where most of the planets are located at), requiring some very precise trajectory calculations that would have made the visit to the outer planets by Voyager too difficult to perform.
The primary mission of Voyager was to visit the gas giants of the Solar System, and it did that spectacularly. Anything else it has done or is doing now is incidental extra science, as we are now getting scientific measurements of the environment that is very far from the Earth.
If you are refering to the "Drake Equations" about the likelihood of extra-terrestrial life in the Milky Way, that certainly is something that is debateable. There is no reasonable way to form a scientific hypothesis based on a statistical sample of one.
If we ever find even life that didn't originate on the Earth (or wasn't cross contaminated with life spores from the Earth.... aka Mars and going back), it will be considerably easier to try and come up with some valid scientific theories about what the actual likelyhood would be that we might just be the first technological lifeform to have ever developed capable of spaceflight.
About the only significant progress that has been made on the Drake Equation in recent years is that we are getting closer to being able to determine what the liklihood of finding a terrestrial (aka rock-like planet like we are living on right now) planet would be around a typical star, and what kinds of stars are likly to have planets at all.
There are other factors that are not included in the standard Drake Equation that may actually significantly reduce the number of candidate stars in our galaxy. Most notably that I've seen is the possibility that the star (aka our Sun) needs to be in a nearly circular orbit around the galactic center, in order to avoid the lethally hazardous environment of being near the galactic core. Our Sun is in one of these nearly circular orbits, and is in a region of the galaxy that also is rich in many metals, particularly heavier metals like iron, and even uranium. The time to have enough stars that have gone Supernova in order to build up enough metalic components sufficient to have an iron-core planet like the Earth is not an insignificant amount of time. In fact, it could be argued that the Earth is just old enough (and our Sun old enough) that we may be living on one of the first planets to have this unique blend of environment and minerals capable of spaceflight, or even having intelligent life at all.
Add all of that to the very unique evoluntionary path our species has taken, and it is remarkable that we even exist at all. While there is evidence that other intelligent species do exist here on the Earth, and may have in the past, they are not technological nor capable of building a spacecraft to even give the possibility of getting to another stellar system. I just don't see dolphins building spacecraft except in a Douglas Adams novel.
I don't know of anything that we have built that would last 1000 years without some sort of maintenance or intervention. Sure, we could assume there are repair systems on board, but what repairs the repair system? Even if we ignore that, where does it get the materials to make repairs if something happens between solar systems?
When you are talking about things that have lasted but have been built more than 1000 years ago, I can think of mainly only two types of "human artifacts" that apply:
1) Things so simple that they don't need repairs. That would be like coins, pottery, or other very basic "machines" like ramps, levers, wheels, etc. 2) Simply massive buildings, most notably pyramids. They have survived wars and dense jungle growth (especially in southern Mexico). The pyramids in Giza (Egypt) certainly fit the class as one of the very oldest of all human artifacts that has enough complexity to show it was created not just by people but also by an organized and technologically inclined civilization. While it might be an interesting theoretical exercise, I think a pyramid might just survive a thermo-nuclear detonation. How many human artifacts do you know that can do that? About the only thing they can't survive is a million tourists from Europe and America trying to cart pieces of it back to their "home".
As far as repairing these probes, there is one repair system that would work after 1000 years to provide continuous maintainence: Manned spaceflight. I'm not saying that the issues are trivial, and this would imply some sort of generation ship construction, but it is somthing that in theory could be done to facilitate repairs over a very long period of time. Again, Cathedrals in Europe and even some large public clocks (to give an example of a mechanical device that might be comparable to a space probe) have been kept in working order for hundreds of years, if not close to 1000 years. It is at least a possibility in the regard that these devices certainly have been maintained for that length of time.
Frankly, I think there would be/. readers who would be willing to get on one of these generation ships (with appropriate companionship of the opposite sex) if they knew their grandkids would get the opportunity to set foot on a planet that orbits another stellar system than the Earth. Not millions of people, perhaps, but enough that it wouldn't be a problem trying to find volunteers.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. DeCSS was GPL'd computer software, with the minor provision that the content of the software was a publicly known trade secret, whatever that really means. It wasn't a device, it was an algorithm that would describe how to decrypt the CSS encryption found on the data stream produced by content conforming to the DVD-Video specification.
This wouldn't even be like a GPL'd MP3 player, where at least there is a patent issue that would potentially prevent you from redistributing the software, although it is certainly in the same realm of IP issue. And the MP3 player comparison is about as close to what happened with DeCSS as you can get otherwise.
Perhaps another analogy would be is it legal to have a link to top secret military documents that have been previously published in the New York Times that shows England was behind the 9/11 attacks? The NYT would be in hot legal trouble, perhaps, but I don't think the other 2000 media websites that would copy the information and link to the NYT would be guilty of "spilling the beans" about the documents. Yet this is precisely what happened to those who spread knowledge about DeCSS and had the links.
One thing that should be a glaring point to be made to almost all Hollywood and RIAAA studios is this simple thought:
If preventing duplication of electonic content were so successful and could legitimately be enforced through technical means, it would be software development companies that would have the most successful and the most experience in trying to prevent the duplication.
I see the motion picture and recording industry going through the same cycles of trying to protect their content that software companies tried nearly 30 years ago: Scrambing the content, requring special "hardware" keys, messing around with the distribution media format and more.
If you look at a piece of software (distributed by somebody other than Microsoft), you will find that most software publishers gave up on the idea of trying to prevent software duplication decades ago. All it seems to accomplish except perhaps on the most exclusive and most expensive software packages is to piss off customers and push them onto their competitors.
I would say the jury is still out on Windows Vista and how successful it will be with the incredible DRM restrictions. I've heard recurring problems with Windows XP where people with legitimate "licenses" are suddenly discovering that Microsoft has crippled their operating system, forcing them to buy yet another license even though they were assured that they had a completely legal version of XP from the store where they bought the computer. And it even worked for many months until the warnings poped up.
In the long run, these attempts to control electronic duplication simply don't work. Instead, you have to put the duplcation of the software into your business model, and add services that would justify paying for the extra "seats" if you want to have people pay for each copy of the software/music/movies seperately.
For movies and music, ease of distribution and quality of content are something that can be offered to be superior to something you would pull off of a P2P network, and would therefore be something of value that people would be willing to pay for. Blatant copyright violations can and should be dealt with as well... if copyright is even a policy that is even valued at all for society.
In terms of open and truly free multimedia specification standards, I don't think you can get anywhere better than the PNG specification.
The actual standard is free (as in beer and FLOSS), has some significant extentions that provide unique features found for nearly any other graphical format, and has a very open process to try and extend the specification... if you want to really take the effort to try and do so.
The developers of the PNG standard were also paranoid almost to a fault about avoiding patent encumberance. As a result, it is one of the few graphical standards that can reliabily be used on GPL'd software without any fear of future retaliation by patent and copyright holders (the reference software was even released into the public domain).
I would agree that the MPEG specification falls signifcantly short when compared to this kind of very open process that went into the PNG standard. While technically outstanding on a number of levels, the MPEG standard is something that is fraught with legal landmines almost everywhere that you step. Only MPEG-1 is something I would even recommend to people as something to legitimately try and implement... and that only because most of the major patents that cover the algorithms have simply expired due to how old the specification has become.
If you are a for-profit company, you can get by with the MPEG-2 specs as the licensing terms aren't too bad for a commercial product, but you are absolutely correct that a GPL'd project that needs these specs to implement a Linux-based DVD player has to stick their necks out legally if they really care to develop anything using those standards. This is one reason why DVD-Video development on Linux, while not dead, is certainly severely lacking and lacks some of the best and brightest minds working on it.
I got that you didn't like MediaWiki. Yeah, it is slow, but it is slow because of what it does.
As far as the actual studies involved, I would have to at the moment refer you to the Wikimedia development team directly, although I've seen some published values that do go into some details.
For general statistics of Wikimedia projects, I would have to refer you to http://stats.wikimedia.org/ that goes into some depth about individual projects and what the general demands on them are, including statistical summaries of leading contributors, growth of content, and edit counts that would certainly be of general interest in terms of trying to compare to other Wiki environments.
I also would like to mention that Erik Zachte, the person who has written this statistical summary mentioned above, has also gone into depth regarding general usage data where he has been given direct access to the Apache server logs and has noted areas that were critical for Wikimedia projects. Brion Vibber is also actively involved with these reviews, and several of these statistical summaries were noted among the internal developers lists, with hints of these studies being mentioned from time to time on other foundation mailing lists.
There have also been formal requests for performing this sort of statistical analysis by several university research teams that have been eager to get such a statistical set, which also prompted the WMF to establish specific guidelines for obtaining this sort of raw data.
Is this specific enough? I don't know right off hand besides these direct studies, but I do know there are others that do exist as well. Wikipedia is a heavily studied topic in part because much of the data is open and available, which gives some interesting sociological interpretations as well if studied through the lens of a statistical review. And there is enough raw data to come to conclusions that may not fit the traditional orthodoxy, so you can also tweak some noses at the same time.
The reason I mention MediaWiki's feature set is that you are (I'm presuming here) claiming that one of the reasons why the Wikimedia Foundation is running out of money is due in part because they are foolishly spending money on server resources that could be better run had they only selected the proper Wiki software. I am offering a rebuttal that this is hardly the case, and that almost (because I can't claim absolute knowledge here) any other Wiki editing software package would die a horrible and nearly instant death if they had to deal with the same feature set and bandwidth issues that currently confront Wikipedia. Or that the other software packages are so lacking in the essential requirements needed to run Wikipedia that there is hardly room to even justify a valid comparison based off of only one single comparison.... content distribution bandwidth on the CPU.
The suggestion to move Wikipedia to Freenet is simply something so over the top that I don't know where to begin. Freenet simply does not scale to the level that Wikipedia has in terms of the raw number of pages in Wikipedia alone, not to mention all of the images that would have to be included. And Freenet is slow... as in the very definition of Freenet is a snails pace of activity even on a dedicated private T1 line.
Distributed algorithms certainly could be improved somewhat over Freenet if you didn't want to worry about all of the security paranoia in Freenet. Freenet is explicitly designed so somebody looking at your cache can't see what you've requested, or for somebody monitoring your node to know for certain if you were the one requesting the kiddy porn or if it was a node connected to yours, or something even further downstream yet.
And freenet doesn't have the content editing capabilities for Wikipedia.... which would still require a massive server farm if you decided to simply send the "edit" data back to the central server.
If you can answer these questions effectively and still come up with a good distributed version of Wikipedia... patent it immediately. You will have found a very significant killer app for the internet and you are bound to become the next dot-com billionaire.
While I might have some strong criticisms about Wikipedia, I think the software is very near the bottom of something you have cause to criticize about here. MediaWiki has been written in such a manner to deal with so many possible situations that to compare a mirror that doesn't even offer editing of the content.
Some very competent computer scientists (and I don't use that term lightly here either) have done some serious algorithmic studies and have evaluated the bandwidth, and have gone over the current network demands on a statistical basis to see where areas of improvement are needed. While things could certainly improve, suggesting such a massive software switch without looking at all of the system requirements is a foolhardy suggestion at best.
If you can come up with a much more effective piece of software that can scale to the degree of MediaWiki, and be able to cope with all of the community demands (including vandalism protection, user rights management, social networking, content markups, and the host of plug-in tools that are asked for in most MediaWiki situations including template transclusion issues), I would suggest that you make a formal presentation to the Wikimedia Foundation. I seriously doubt you can find such a piece of software, particularly one that also competes as being available for change using the GPL.
For a small Wiki community, yeah, I would agree MediaWiki is lousy software. But for Wikipedia.... it is exactly what it needed and is constantly being tweaked to fit the changing needs of that community. Only when you have more than about 1000 active users does MediaWiki really become something that is really necessary.
And where was the last home built that was chartered and registered under the Homestead Act?
Alaska. See http://www.dced.state.ak.us/oed/student_info/lear
The final official "homestead" was granted by the U.S. Department of the Interior (and signed by Ronald Reagan) in 1986. This law was repealed in 1976.
People have done it and still want to go to Alaska to establish a hunk of real estate that they can call their own, although I would like to point out that a significant portion of Alaska was declared wilderness and has been put under legal protection so you simply can't go there anymore... at least to build a house, a farm, or a business (beyond perhaps some very incidental tourist business under strict annual licensing). You certainly can't take an unclaimed mountain in Alaska and start digging for minerals and build a steel mill and smelter.
You would actually have an easier time trying to start a business of that nature in New York City, at least to get the legal permits to even get the business going. So why is it so easy to get to Alaska and do something there?
As for Antartica, you have the Antartic Treaty that specifically prohibits commercial development of that continent. You are also prohibited from owning real estate at all as a private citizen. The reason people are not mining Antartica has to do with legal issues, not people willing to take a chance and try to make a living there.
While I admit that you wouldn't (perhaps) see millions of people running to Antartica for a "gold rush" the way that happened in 1849 for California if suddenly it did become legal to go there and stake a claim and build a mining company there, I do believe it would not necessarily be zero people involved. Oil companies are willing to drill on the North Slope of Alaska, and the environment in that part of Alaska is hardly much different than Antartica. I'm not sure if a proper oil reserve exploration has ever really been done in Antartica, although some general geological studies have suggested that there may be some significant oil fields alone.
The point here is that the only real reason why more people aren't in Alaska, and why Antartica isn't inhabited with permanent groups of people has to do with international legal requirments and people's concerns about the global environment. While that may be some exceedingly good reasons, you shouldn't be using the excuse that people won't be willing to live in harsh environments like Antartica as rationale for suggesting that people don't want to live on Mars, or anywhere else in the Solar System besides the Earth.
All that is stopping people from getting into space at the moment are legal issues from people worried about "safty" and "the environment on Mars". There is even a group of hard core environmentalists that want to stop lunar development, claiming that it will change the appearance of the face of the moon and somehow affect wildlife here on the Earth. As if even detonating nuclear bombs on the Moon at a large scale could significantly change the current environment there. Lunar environmentalism will be a major issue of the latter half of the 21st Century, trust me!
Short answer:
No! It is a copyright violation to use those images.
More developed answer:
I am very unconfortable with the very widespread usage of fair use on Wikipedia, as most justifications for fair use are merely rationalizations of copyright violations. I don't see where the fair-use aspect of critical commentary comes in, such as would be used by a movie critic doing a review of the movie. Such an article is also something akin to an editorial, which is not permitted on any Wikimedia project much less on Wikipedia.
Still, if you want to say that an NPOV community-written article regardng the asthetics of a movie can be written, you might be able to use a very limited number of images from publicity photos or frames grabbed from the movie, when the text of the article goes into details about that particular image.
Fair-use is not rationale for simply making something look asthetically pleasing, and the photos used in such a manner should almost never be used in any other article. I say almost never, because there may be a few very rare exceptions, but most often multiple uses of a fair-use image are usually violations of fair use misappropriated into an article just to have something for asthetics.
I also believe that if Wikipedia had a stronger "no fair use" or even "very limited fair use", that in situations like this you would find Wikipedia contributors trying to push for free content images that could be used instead to do the same thing. The GPL and GFDL don't stop copyright... they just limit how copyright can be enforced or what the terms of use for content might be. You might just see some movie companies be willing to release a few limited frames under FLOSS licenses if they knew that was the only way to splash up their Wikipedia page.
Instead, particularly for movies (since you broached the subject), I've seen some "Wikipedia use only" licenses be aserted for some frame selections and publicity photos by movie companies just because they are being allowed. These smaller indy film producers who have done this would likely have released these same images under the GFDL or Creative Commons license had that been the only option available to them.
Flickr also allows you to "tag" the images so you can know what license they have been released under. Google images simply is a scan of pratically everything on the internet and there is not a standard format for tagging images under a given license on a web page.
OK, you might be able to put CC-by-SA as a search term to help, but from a technical side, I don't know how you could set up a web crawler and have it identify what legal license each image is going to be available under... particularly as free content (FLOSS-style licenses) would be the vast minority of images available.
I just don't know how from a technical viewpoint you could catalog images, or what the incentive would be for a website owner/developer would be to tag all of the images with some sort of copyright license tag. For Wikipedia to tag the images, there is incentive as it provides rationale to keep or delete the images and cites where the content came from. Others perhaps ought to be just as paranoid about copyright, but unfortunately in most cases they usually aren't.
In all seriousness, if you really feel this way, you perhaps ought to of your house with the U.S. Library of Congress by taking a few photographs from various angles and doing the formal registration. Copyrighting ship hull designs is permitted, and I don't see how that is any different than somebody's house.
That way, if somebody else does take a photo of your house, you can go after them not only for "actual damages" but "statutory damages" as well. I believe this is currently $250,000 for statutory damages... so this isn't necessarily something trivial, especially as the formal registration is only $45.
I'm sure you could easily recover the $45+legal fees alone if this Canadian company were to take a photo of your house without your permission, if you just wanted to go after them on the basis of principle alone. And let your lawyer buy a new BMW with the $1/4 million if he wants to go after the rest.
So what is wrong with including a link to a blog on your own user page? I fail to see what the problem is there, as external links are quite common on user pages from what I've seen, as long as it is about you personally in some manner. Even then, user pages are usually quite open and very rarely do admins even enforce the few rules that do exist on them. BTW, I do include a link to my blog on my user page.
About the only hard rule about user pages is that you shouldn't go messing around with another user page unless you have been given permission somehow. There is a controvercy over userboxes and other silly stuff like that, but it is a controvercy in part because it is some users trying to tell others what they can and can't do with their user pages.
It sounds like you are uploading images that you don't own the copyright over. If you own the copyright (as in you took the image yourself or personally know the person who did and has given you permission to upload the image), uploading an image to Wikipedia is not a problem at all. Or if you can clearly demonstrate that the image is in the public domain. Or as good can demonstrate that the person who does own the image has given copyright permission (usually in the form of the GFDL or something compatable) for the image.
Frankly I think that far too many fair-use images are being used on Wikipedia and what is there needs to be reduced even more. Grabbing random content from Google Images is not appropriate and is simply a copyright violation.
If only that had been true. Unfortunately it took the creation of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation to even create the basic infrastructure necessary to even license commercial spacecraft.
In other words, the "FAA" of outer space is..... the Federal Aviation Administration... the FAA!
I would have to agree that had NASA administrators been using their head, that they would have created an office of commercial space transportation when the Gemini spacecraft were being launched... or perhaps when the NASA administrators started to use the terminology of "Space Transportation System" for the Shuttle program.
I do know of private investors who had raised the necessary capital to "buy" a private space shuttle, and only wanted the production line to continue for another couple of iterations with the opportunity that the privately owned shuttle would be used primarily for commercial payloads. And NASA did "sell" some space on some of the early shuttle flights to private companies, including some astronauts that were employees of private for-profit companies that only used the shuttle to help work on various projects for these private companies. This is something that since the Challenger disaster has all but stopped, when the shuttle was considered too much of a risk and the flights became government projects only.
The demand for commercial spaceflight never really stopped after Challenger, and many of the companies that wanted to get into space instead opted for unmanned rockets instead. There is a small but active fleet of private spacecraft that do get into space from time to time in part because of this demand, but the price to get there is driven, unfortunately, by government contracts and nobody willing to try and drive the cost of the rockets down as the economics for the few extra spacecraft that would be flown at cheaper rates is comparatively fewer than would make up for the loss in revenue due to keeping the price at the rates government agencies are willing to pay.
The economics that open up due to spacecraft like Spaceship One and tourism models like Virgin Galactic are of the level that whole new kinds of customers are able to pay for real spaceflight. Something like a medium sized university can also afford to launch something on these cheaper rockets and spacecraft where they are simply unable to get the money together for an unmanned rocket like the Delta-4 made by Boeing.
Keep in mind that the NASA budget in the 1960's was a full 10% of the U.S. Federal budget, second only to spending on the Department of Defense.
Today, even the DoD doesn't rank in the top 5 appropriation categories, and NASA falls into the budget at a measly 0.6% of the budget. That is still rather significant in terms of absolute dollars on a $2.6 trillion budget, but it certainly can't be compared to what happened in the 60's.
I'm also not certain I would want to ride in an Apollo spacecraft, and that was rather well-built compared to the Mercury capsules. There have been some considerable improvements over the years in spacecraft design, where the Soyuz spacecraft are much more reliable and better built today than the Apollo spacecraft were of yesteryear.
As far as education, healthcare, and the other things you are griping about, they are just a giant economic black hole that will never get filled. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some reasonable efforts in these areas, but completely cutting out NASA or even all military spending isn't going to make that much of a difference in those program. Can you guess what items #1 and #2 are today?
#1 - Interest on the federal debt
#2 - Social Security benefits
So instead of the usual refrain of "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we....", it should be instead "If grandfathers can golf in Palm Springs, why can't we...."
Just to add a little bit of extra here, that the "inverted pyramid" style was originally created due to the deficiencies of the medium that was used to transmit messages throughout most of the 19th Century: The electric telegraph.
If you thought communications systems have a horrid "uptime" now, it is downright miserable when the telegraph first was up and going. Having a good connection for a few minutes or hours was considered good service, and it would often go down even for "natural events", much less from ranchers or Indians who would push down the telegraph poles deliberately because they thought it adversly affected the "buffalo" or the cattle. Or simply seemed ugly.
It didn't help during the U.S. Civil War that reporters trying to send messages back to their editors that telegraph lines where also a deliberate target of sabotage either.
The point here being that the telegraph reinforced the inverted pyramid, because for larger stories it was common for the final few paragraphs simply to be cut off when the telegraph line when down. That perhaps the story would be re-transmitted later on, but that would often result in missing deadlines and more.
There are two other "news delivery" mediums that you also missed out here: radio and (movie) news reels. Of these the news reels are perhaps the most interesting because they set many of the preceedents for television news coverage, even though they did overlap TV news broadcasts for a brief period of time. Both of them had some very interesting methodologies for their delivery that were also tied directly to their media, and are unique to all other kinds of news media delivery.
While Scaled Composites was certainly the only "fully funded entry", there were other contestants that may have likely succeeded had Burt Ruton not sent in his entry.
Notably Armadillo Aerospace certainly has been showing some surprising results, as has the Romanian ARCA group. Both have gone off to other areas now that the X-Prize has been "won".
I will admit though that many of the other 30 teams were there in name only, and it seems as though the entry fee they paid was only to help boost the overall success of the X-Prize Foundation. Only a small handful of groups ever got to the point of actually having some sort of flyable hardware at all. And that would put Homer Hickam from the "Big Creek Missile Agency" as one of the major contenders (had they decided to enter the contest).
As for prizes that lead to supposed "dead end" technologies, I would argue that the "Spirt of St. Louis" did help spur on additional aeronautical development, as once Lindburg did cross the atlantic, it then became more of a contest to say how to do it more comfortably, reliably, and with more cargo (the Spirt of St. Louis had esentially no payload except perhaps the pilot himself). Once you could show to some investor that the idea was technically feasable because it had already been done once by somebody else, it opens up many other ideas to try the same task again and again.
I would argue that Spaceship One does the same thing: It is possible to build a spacecraft that would get you to the edge of space, and to build one cheaply. It certainly has opened the doors up for other groups who are also building spacecraft, and has "legitimized" the idea of personal spaceflight that does not involve working with NASA. While this may have happened without the X-Prize, the contest certainly did focus the contestants on a concrete goal and also provided a forum to share their ideas and experiences.
Orbital spaceflight costing substantially less than $20 million (per passenger) will be possible in the next couple of decades, and possibly sooner. How much less and by whom is going to be part of the fun to see what exactly will happen.
Yeah, you've opened a can of worms here.
To really mess things up here, I remember back in my (analog pre-computer days) typewriter class where the instructor suggested that to determine a classical "words per minute" for typing that written English had on average five characters per word.
That is at least a reasonable approximation that does have some standard to compare to that is outside of the realm of computer science, even though the number "five" doesn't really fit in too well with binary numbers as a divisor.
2000 words (English) = 10K bytes (roughly) is a good translation.
BTW, the Gutenberg version of the Declaration of Independence is a bit larger than this (with headers), but not by much.
Without trying to belabor this more than it needs, one of the problems with trying to read/interpret legislation like this that is in the process of being drafted and ammended is that it is very much a moving target. While at one point it may be exactly as you suggest that only highly paid lobbyists need concern themselves with this, that, or the other thing, other incarnations are much more inflamatory and concern private citizens and indeed require formal registration.
BTW, the analogy with lawyers and the various bar associations, while true, is flawed so far as I would hope and pray that nothing of the sort ever gets created for journalists and those who want to engage in political speech. Even putting together an organized group should not be regulated in any way, as the constitution clearly notes that no law should ever be created regarding this activity. That perhaps some minor regulations may by necessary in terms of the content delivery systems (aka broadcast television, mailing periodicals, etc.) but those regulations should be completely agnostic in terms of what sorts of content and speech is delivered. All they should regulate is the medium itself, and wheither you are talking about the upcoming 2008 Presidential election or the latest MMORPG should be irrelevant.
Collecting and spending money from like-mined individuals to further the goals of that group is by definition political activity. I fail to see the constitutional basis and justification for doing any sort of regulation of this kind of activity.
Thanks for the link. What I find interesting is that the actual boundary of the heliopause is something that still is an area of significant investigation at the moment. I have heard all kinds of ranges in estimates regarding when Voyager would actually cross that threshold, with the date getting pushed back more and more as Voyager actually gets to the point they thought would be the heliopause. It also seems to be affected by things like the sunspot cycle and other solar activity (with an appropriate time lag due to the distances involved).
2009, I believe, was one of the earlier estimates given back when Voyager was still close to Neptune. What is cool is that real science is still happening with the Voyager spacecraft as it heads for the very frontier of the solar system, as the only way to do this sort of science is to get something "out there" in the first place.
Since this portion of the bill has been stripped out of the final "ethics" bill, it is at this point irrelevant. But the provision to even require "registration" is one of the first steps toward any sort of regulation, and the suggestion that at the moment there are no fees or anything else to worry about is unfortunately repeated many times throughout modern American history. Once established, fees and formal licensing requirements often follow, later if not right away.
Once you put somebody on a list, that list can be used, and the point here is that it would be illegal for you to engage in political commentary without getting onto that list in the first place. Particularly if you were advocating a particular poliitcal party, candidate, or political issue.
This is really an attack on the "Swift Boat Vets", and trying to write legislation to keep groups like that from attacking an incumbant congressman. As if logevity in Congress is necessarily a problem at the moment.
The point I was trying to make about having senators actually read the U.S. Constitution is that they need to read the part of the 1st Ammendment that says "Congress shall make no law". I think that applies directly here in this case, nor can I possibly see how it fits the sort of regulated speech that the SCOTUS has laid down in terms of abusive speech that can cause public harm, such as the classic yelling "Fire!" in a crowded room.
Saying that Nancy Polosi needs to be kicked out of office in the '08 elections and advocating that position on a blog, or even paying for a two minute Super Bowl ad advocating that position should not be regulated in any way, shape, or form. There should never be any "registration" for this sort of political speech, and you shouldn't have to fill out a political equivalent of a 1040 form either if you engage in that sort of political activity. Nor should advocacy of the impeachment of George W. Bush for that matter. That is political speech and the whole purpose of the 1st Ammendment provisions of the freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
The legal requirement to register means that you have to have a license to perform that activity. And once you segregate those who have a license from those who don't, it means that you can then add subsequent restrictions just to keep that license, such as an ever increasing licensing fee, or meeting "public good" restrictions to keep that license.
There is a long and sad history that once a license is created for anything (for example, driving automobiles), that it tends to get abused to the point of absurdity after awhile. I mean, what does paying child support have to do with the operation of automobiles? Or voter registration for that matter?
That any restrictions are here at all is clearly a violation of the U.S. Consitution. Of course, who reads that document anymore, especially in the U.S. Senate?
I don't know what part of Congress shall make no law can't be understood by the U.S. Supreme Court, but I think the wording here is very clear. And for political speech, I would have to agree even more with your sentiment, there can't be any regulation of any kind in any way, even if it is for more noble aims. This is not yelling "fire" in a theater, to give a classic excuse to regulate speech in some situations.
If they want to regulate speech, these election campaign reformers need to first ammend the U.S. Constitution.
Of course, how often does the current U.S. Government (any one of the three branches) really care about what is written in this governing document? That the Constitution isn't being followed should hardly be surprising any more.
I think he has mistaken the idea that Voyager will leave the solar system in 2009, as defined by the region of space where the solar wind is overcome with other stellar matter from the rest of the Milky Way, and presumably in the region of space roughly where the Oort Cloud is likly to be located at. At that point you could presumably suggest that it is in interstellar space and the gravitational influence of the Sun is insignificant compared to other objects in the rest of the Galaxy.
While that is in reality a major accomplishment in terms of having a human artifact leave the solar system, it is a far cry from being able to reach another star system, especially Alpha Centauri. Especially as Alpha Centauri is hardly in the plane of the ecliptic (where most of the planets are located at), requiring some very precise trajectory calculations that would have made the visit to the outer planets by Voyager too difficult to perform.
The primary mission of Voyager was to visit the gas giants of the Solar System, and it did that spectacularly. Anything else it has done or is doing now is incidental extra science, as we are now getting scientific measurements of the environment that is very far from the Earth.
If you are refering to the "Drake Equations" about the likelihood of extra-terrestrial life in the Milky Way, that certainly is something that is debateable. There is no reasonable way to form a scientific hypothesis based on a statistical sample of one.
If we ever find even life that didn't originate on the Earth (or wasn't cross contaminated with life spores from the Earth.... aka Mars and going back), it will be considerably easier to try and come up with some valid scientific theories about what the actual likelyhood would be that we might just be the first technological lifeform to have ever developed capable of spaceflight.
About the only significant progress that has been made on the Drake Equation in recent years is that we are getting closer to being able to determine what the liklihood of finding a terrestrial (aka rock-like planet like we are living on right now) planet would be around a typical star, and what kinds of stars are likly to have planets at all.
There are other factors that are not included in the standard Drake Equation that may actually significantly reduce the number of candidate stars in our galaxy. Most notably that I've seen is the possibility that the star (aka our Sun) needs to be in a nearly circular orbit around the galactic center, in order to avoid the lethally hazardous environment of being near the galactic core. Our Sun is in one of these nearly circular orbits, and is in a region of the galaxy that also is rich in many metals, particularly heavier metals like iron, and even uranium. The time to have enough stars that have gone Supernova in order to build up enough metalic components sufficient to have an iron-core planet like the Earth is not an insignificant amount of time. In fact, it could be argued that the Earth is just old enough (and our Sun old enough) that we may be living on one of the first planets to have this unique blend of environment and minerals capable of spaceflight, or even having intelligent life at all.
Add all of that to the very unique evoluntionary path our species has taken, and it is remarkable that we even exist at all. While there is evidence that other intelligent species do exist here on the Earth, and may have in the past, they are not technological nor capable of building a spacecraft to even give the possibility of getting to another stellar system. I just don't see dolphins building spacecraft except in a Douglas Adams novel.
When you are talking about things that have lasted but have been built more than 1000 years ago, I can think of mainly only two types of "human artifacts" that apply:
1) Things so simple that they don't need repairs. That would be like coins, pottery, or other very basic "machines" like ramps, levers, wheels, etc.
2) Simply massive buildings, most notably pyramids. They have survived wars and dense jungle growth (especially in southern Mexico). The pyramids in Giza (Egypt) certainly fit the class as one of the very oldest of all human artifacts that has enough complexity to show it was created not just by people but also by an organized and technologically inclined civilization. While it might be an interesting theoretical exercise, I think a pyramid might just survive a thermo-nuclear detonation. How many human artifacts do you know that can do that? About the only thing they can't survive is a million tourists from Europe and America trying to cart pieces of it back to their "home".
As far as repairing these probes, there is one repair system that would work after 1000 years to provide continuous maintainence: Manned spaceflight. I'm not saying that the issues are trivial, and this would imply some sort of generation ship construction, but it is somthing that in theory could be done to facilitate repairs over a very long period of time. Again, Cathedrals in Europe and even some large public clocks (to give an example of a mechanical device that might be comparable to a space probe) have been kept in working order for hundreds of years, if not close to 1000 years. It is at least a possibility in the regard that these devices certainly have been maintained for that length of time.
Frankly, I think there would be