The counter argument to what you are saying is that you, as an individual, can decide for yourself who you want to give your (presumed) millions of Euros, dingbats or whatever to when you die. If you don't want it going to your kids but instead to the government, fine, do that with your own money. Just don't tell me as an individual where I should put it, and please don't hold a gun to my head and tell me where to spend it.
Yes, government taxation is just armed robbery done legally, nothing more. There may be "public good" that comes from it (often not, and with corruption as well), but that is not the point. I can make my own decisions on how to deal with my own property and money, and I believe that I can make that decision much better than some silly government board or entity.
I support limited taxation for government "services" that are essential, and what is considered essential can be debated. The problem is that attitudes like yours encourage raw confiscation of wealth on the idea that working hard and building a comfortable life is something evil and wrong. And that I'm a stupid idiot who doesn't know where to spend my own money, but some other people (supposedly "enlightened" and "intelligent") can do a much better job of doing that then I can. That and you don't believe that millions of ordinary people can't come to a conclusion of trying to support worthy causes on our own without a government telling us what to do instead.
One huge difference in this case is not because he is merely an engineer, but the **Chief**, or somebody who is in a position to specifically make this call... or should be.
If there is anybody who should make this sort of call, and to whom it is expected should make a decision like this, it is this individual. By ignoring this advise, it is ignoring essentially the entire engineering team and the person who speaks for all of the engineers as a whole. It is not just one lone nut job that should be ignored.
God, I would hate to be in the position to replace this engineer, but the "honorable" thing to do here is for all subsequent engineers at NASA to follow suit, deny the request, until nobody is left to put into that position. Unfortunately not everbody is willing to stand for principles like this and eventually "sombody" will be found to sign off on the launch even if the concerns are not addressed. This is also a strong sign that bean counters and lawyers are making the decisions that are much better left for engineers, and that safety is not being taken seriously.
Comparing this to the A380 would be like having not just a single engineer who objects, but the whole engineering department, or at least the department head. If I were a shareholder and heard that department heads were being fired over safty issues that they objected to, I would be very concerned myself.
As a taxpayer (shareholder of sorts in this sense), I am very concerned about this issue regarding the Shuttle, and in some ways hope that this flight fails just to prove that NASA is screwed up and needs to be killed completely as an agency. Or a major overhaul where a guy like Camarda isn't just fired, he is promoted and made the agency head instead.
Furthermore, this guy is an astronaut to boot, and knows that his ass is on the line in terms of a flag-draped coffin if he is wrong. That sort of focuses your attention on these matters in a more personal way.
I know this is replying to an old thread written by an AC, but here goes...
It doesn't matter what the reason is why something (even a credit card or the electricity to your house) is being cancelled or disconnected. If the customer says "I don't want it any more", THAT should be more than sufficient as the justification.
All that was needed at that point was proving identity, which apparently had happened in this situation. Was the identity proven? Yes. Did Vincent (the person in this situation) make clear what he wanted to happen with his account? Yes. Were the additional rep challenges necessary? No.
I will say that the rep was acting on "orders" or at least the culture that has developed and been fostered by AOL to maintain accounts through intimidation and coersion. I'm not attacking the individual phone service rep (even though he was being an a**h***), but suggesting that companies like this need to get their hands slapped in this situation as well.
AOL completely deserved the negative publicity resulting from this incident.
I had AOL for some time myself, and the complaints I have had here about trying to cancel the service are very similar to the experience that most other people have had here.
I had a problem with AOL that was similar, where I even tried to cancel the damn thing at least three different times, all of them rebuffed with one time even being offered six months of free service.
Finally, as a last resort, I called my bank and told them that I lost my credit card that I had been using to pay for the AOL service. I actually lost it in my garbage can that afternoon, when it met an unfortunate accident with a pair of sissors. With very little complaint from my bank, they issued me a new card number, also informing me that any automatic payment must be re-established with the new card number.
I thanked the bank for that service, and "forgot" to tell AOL the new card number. How rude of me.
This was the only way for me to cancel my subscription. God forbid if banks ever have automatic account change notification to creditors (not credit bureaus, which is another issue altogether).
I would agree that a simple question for asking why you might be dissatified might be in order the first time he asked to cancel the call, but after he said "cancel the account" three times, that should have been more than sufficient.
Hell, from my perspective, canceling the account should be as easy to do on-line as it was to create the damn thing in the first place. You should be able to get to some silly URL (https) with AOL, enter in your password, have a big button that says "Are you sure you want to cancel this account?" with perhaps a compaint section to respond why you think the service sucks, and then you would be done.
The whole reason why you have to get with a telephone rep in the first place is because AOL wants to make life difficult to cancel their service.
Add to that sentiment, that there were only one geologist that even went up to the moon... the rest were test pilots and aviation specialists, or had degrees in very different fields from geology. Mind you, the brief survey that Harrison Schmitt performed revealed that a trained eye could find much, much more material.
In fact, here is an interview that Mr. Schmitt did with the Australian Broadcasting Company talking about why we need to go back and do a more extensive survey:
That Mr. Schmitt has decided to put his money where his mouth is and has formed a lunar mining company should speak volumes over the value that can be obtained from this sort of activity.
And who decided that the moon belongs to all humanity, equally? I didn't have a say in that decision, nor do I support the philosophy.
And futhermore, what environment is there on the Moon that can be damaged?
As far as having a corporation run mining operations on the moon, that is going to be a very necessary structure simply in terms of the raw manpower and capital resources necessary to put together any kind of mining on the Moon. Even mutli-billionaires like Wm. Gates don't have enough money to really put stuff like this together on their own because of the costs alone.
Also, the Moon has a surface area that is larger than North America. There is plenty of room there to have more than one corporation, and even multiple nations that can be involved, with elbow room to keep them from tripping over each other. While I would agree that any such endeavor would be profit oriented, why is that necessarily an evil thing? What would be a crying shame is if workers were being sent to the Moon only to be paid Mexican minimum wage. I think it is much more likely that any ordinary workers going to the moon for mining operations would come back millionaires (at today's monitary values) after just a year or two. So who is going to get the shaft out of lunar mining operations?
One of the problems with nuclear rockets is that no matter how you do the engineering, you end up with radioactive waste products in the thrust alone. Yes, there are ways to isolate that radioactivity, but that means more weight and reduced ISP in the rocket. That is not even taking into consideration the irrational fears of the anti-nuclear protestors of the type that were pissed over the launch of deep space probes like Gallileo (a very minor amount of radioactive material, and in a hardened case that would survive launch failure). I can just imagine what these idiots would say over a space-going reactor, much less something like Orion that uses actual nukes in its propulsion.
Having a rocket throw out radioactive debris just isn't something that people would feel comfortable with when you are standing downwind from the launch pads, and so for lifting off from the Earth, this is not even a reasonable for terrestrial launches. Indeed I would have to agree with Larry Niven and some other science fiction writers that even chemical propulsion is eventually going to have to be eliminated in favor of something like highly compressed air or laser propulsion, due to environmental damage alone.
For interplanetary missions, however, I would have to agree that nuclear rockets do come into practical use and for the next several centuries, nuclear rockets will be the primary means of passenger travel between planets. It will also be something that the military is going to use simply because they can get an armed spacecraft where they need it quickly, and with the armament needed to neutralize any idiots who challenges them. This is the foundation of a space navy.
If you think about it from environmental damage that even an open reactor is going to cause in deep interplanetary space shooting out raw plutonium gasses that have been superheated in a nuclear core, it would be insignificant even with massive human transit activity compared to radioactive components of the solar wind. In short, human activity couldn't even possibly compete with natural radioactive sources if that were a government goal.
As to why NASA hasn't gone further with any nuclear rocket studies: the above points illustrate the issue. NASA hasn't been able to get beyond basic low-earth orbit now for over 30 years with manned spacecraft. Robotic probes don't need nuclear rockets, so you are suggesting that NASA spend time researching a solution in search of a problem? Until there is significant human activity in space (the ISS doesn't count.... I'm talking much larger numbers of people in orbit than that), nuclear rockets will only stay something for the future.
BTW, when was the last time you actually tried to create a new user account on Wikipedia? There is now a persistant nag message to get you to confirm e-mail addresses, but this is only used to confirm the e-mail address that you put into your user profile (in case somebody wants to e-mail you through the MediaWiki software).
I would agree that this might be a useful roadblock in terms of trying to "legitimize" users, and perhaps even something to add to the checkuser scan to verify if somebody is using sock puppets. Something to think about for the future.
I would venture to guess that this e-mail confirmation is something that isn't being used simply because it is rocking the boat and changing policy. There are always political factions about changing anything on Wikipedia, and this is but one of those issues. Still, I like the idea enough that I might try to push it through as an experiment on one of the smaller Wikimedia projects.
The one thing that gets missed in discussions of gurella warfare is that you must have a secure supply base outside of the war zone that pours both manpower as well as equipment into the area under attack. This happened in Vietnam because equipment was being poured into that country by both the USA from places like California, and from Russia and their industrial areas. There were never any bombing campaigns by the USA over the Ukraine to destroy the industrial infrastructure that really did prolong the Vietnam war, nor any equivalent bombing attacks in California or Michigan either.
This is also happening in Iraq, and Iran is one of these secure industrial centers that is supplying arms and training to the people doing the attacks within Iraq. If you want to see who is helping to keep the attacks going on in Iraq, you need to see where the arms are coming from. Yes, I will admit that Hussein did prepare by placing arms caches all over Iraq for a gurella war, but that is a fixed and finite supply that is not being replenished, and I believe that attacks from that interal supply source is just about over.
When you think about Iran, who is going to be supplying the arms into Iran to keep a sustained gurella war going? China? I hope that the Chinese are not that stupid to be so overt as to supply the necessary levels of equipment necessary to sustain a massive Iranian gurella war. And Iran doesn't really have too many other friends.
Pakistan might also get involved, but their support for the Taliban has already made them a problem with the USA, not to mention that they have been surprisingly rather supportive of the USA since 9/11. And India wouldn't mind a co-bellergant in an attack on Pakistan as well.
Syria would have to go through Iraq to supply arms to Iran. That rules out much support from Syria, not to mention an invasion of Iran is also likely to include invading Syria at some point as well anyway.
Russian involvement? Not likely. While they are showing independence from U.S. political influence, they are not likely to be pulled into a global conflict like this where there are a number of reasons to stay out, and few reasons to get involved. Russian arms factories might get involved on a very low level, but no official support would ever be issued nor would the Russians want to be implicated as even peripheral participants.
European involvement? This is almost laughable in concept that Europe would want to conduct a low-level gurella operation against the USA.
In short, if Iran is invaded, it would be a conventional military attack and conventional military units from both Iran and the USA that would be involved. Any resistance efforts would be more along the lines of the occupation efforts after WWII in Germany and Japan (which did have some low-level gurella actions against the U.S. Army in both countries after the peace treaties).
1) Iran doesn't need to develop nukes.... near bomb grade stuff is already available in quantities that a soverign nation-state like Iran would have no problem getting the material if they really want it and it is a national priority. And making a nuke isn't really that complicated. I mean if India could have developed it 30 years ago, it isn't that big of a deal for Iran either.
2) The UN is totally irrelevant to the discussion, and from a conservative viewpoint rather than a liberal one, why would we care what the UN thinks about going into Iran or not in the first place? I for one advocate that the USA leave the UN as far as binding resolutions like the one you mentioned anyway.
3) As far as needing congressional approval to invade Iran, you had better believe that Pres. Bush needs it. It is spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, and if you think Bush is worthy of impeachment, this would put it over the top and get the conservative House members to get on board for impeachment as well, by the President clearly usurping congressional authority that would be unconstitutional. Only the U.S. Senate has authority to declare a state of war, and even Vietnam happened due to ambivilance on the part of the U.S. Senate during the 1960's. The makeup of the Senate has changed significantly since then, and IMHO no future sitting President will ever be able to pull off something like that again.
4) Conscripting 10 million Americans is going to be politcally feasable.... provided you have a 9/11 type attack and a real cause that would whip up U.S. political support. I mention this number because this is the number of U.S. military personnel during WWII and the number of soldiers that justified the Pentagon and its construction. That it has been over 60 years since the USA has mobilized on this level may be a reason why you may not appreciate the idea. And to get to equivalent of WWII level of particiaption, it could be almost 20 million soldiers instead, due to natural population increases in the USA. The U.S. Civil War had an even higher level of conscription than even this proportionally.
All told, however, I think if you assume that an invasion of Iran would occur, that it would be more like the Spanish-American War instead as far as the interal politics and proportional levels of citizen involvement in the war. That was rather significant, however. It would also take another 9/11 type attack on U.S. soil to start it as well, which was my original point. Iran will not be invaded unless Iran does something deliberately on the USA, or if you are a conspiracy theorist, that they are framed for causing an attack on the USA. Ordinary U.S. citizens must die first before anything like this happens.
5) I guess on this point about political opposition from within the Republican party to the idea of invading Iran doesn't make sense to you. Dispite the rhetoric, the USA is a democracy, and on top of that Bush is at the end of his presidency, for good or ill. Bush can not continue as President dispite the best of approval numbers, of which he really doesn't care anyway. You are correct that Pentagon resistance is a moot point, because they are there to take orders, not to give them in this regard. But congressional opposition is a real thing, and with real opposition to the idea of invading Iran on a whim.
As far as rationale to invade Iran, I believe they are the primary instigator of the problems in Iraq right now, providing both personnel, equipment, and training to the current idiots who are blowing up everything in Iraq. Syria and China are also involved with this, although Chinese involvment is more typical of what Russia did in Vietnam, and on a much lower level. I guess you and the rest of the Iranian invasion conspirists think this is going to play much as the invasion of Laos during the Vietnam era occured. I am suggesting that it is going to be all or nothing. If Iran is invaded, it will be a full military assult by land, sea, air, and space. I just d
This seems to be a boogyman argument that this is going to happen, but I state for the record that the USA will not be invading Iran, at least any time soon. Besides having to deal with the occupation of Iraq, there is a huge domestic issue as well that is going to stop this from happening.
The President of the United States can't simply go to war with whomever he chooses. Oh, he can drop a few bombs and rattle sabres, but any serious attempt to go to war with Iran is going to be bloody and vicious. It is also going to take a formal declaration of war by the U.S. Congress.
The point being here that hard-core conservatives aren't going to let Congress get bully-whipped into this pansy "resolution for the authorization of the use of force". There was some opposition in conservative circles to Iraq in part to do this, and Iran is simply going to be the point where these right-leaning people will force it to come to a head. Adding this conservative (aka Republican) opposition to the idea plus the Democrat opposition, makes the whole idea moot and even laughable that it might even happen.
In order for a declaration of war to really occur, it will likely require something like a nuke being detonated... particularly if it blew up inside U.S. borders, and could be traced or at least blamed on Iran. At that point all the Iranian government could do is kiss their hind ends goodbye. For their own sake, I highly doubt the Iranian government is that stupid. And that would open the possibility of nuclear war against Iran as well, where there would be targets that would be useful to nuke, unlike Afghanistan. The Taliban merited a nuke attack by the USA, but there was nothing that would be useful to nuke nor was there anything that couldn't be also taken care of by conventional arms just as easily.
And there won't be a gurrella war, it would be total war with mass conscription inside the USA with an expansion of the U.S. Army to over 10 million soldiers. This is something the U.S. economy does not need, nor would it be good for anybody in the world to see a U.S. Army of that size again (like it was during WWII).
I beg to differ that the current open archetechture PC platform wouldn't exist without IBM, but I conceed the point that it did open business opportunities that didn't exist before IBM "legitimized" the concept.... just as IBM also did for open source software as well, if you want to know the truth. And that was one area where IBM was clearly ahead of the curve with a more up-to-date and restructured IBM... even if it meant that their mainframe business was given an additional decade of life due to Linux and some other hard core business decisions going in that direction. There is no way Microsoft would have teamed up with IBM to work on similar operating system models for mainframe... even if perhaps they should have and was a lost opportunity for Microsoft, but as you point out that is the problem with being the top dog in the industry, where niche opportunities are lost that may not be so much of a niche.
I would hardly call IBM the company that spawned the PC age. If you had to point to who "spawned" PC, I would name Apple, Atari, Comodore, and perhaps even Radio Shack as early leaders (surprising as that may seem). IBM was the company to get major Fortune 500 companies to take the PC industry seriously, and then blew any potential lead with stupid architechtures like the Microchannel and other vendor lock-in stuff after they planted themselves firmly in the open architechture environment. I could draw parallels here with Microsoft as well, BTW.
And the PC was developed independently by a couple of IBM engineers who worked on it in their "spare time". It was not a major R&D investment by IBM when it was put together, and more of an afterthought where IBM felt they had essentially nothing to lose if they entered the business.
And when was the last time you saw an IBM nameplate on a PC that you bought?
Like IBM, Microsoft is not going to go away, so you do need to pay a little attention to what they are doing. However Microsoft is also not going to be on the leading edge of technologies, and their #1 fault is that they give a perception to non-techies that they are.
Of course this is also following the assumption that the administrator of the systems you are talking about are also not the users who are on the computer systems.
The whole admin/user philosophy is based on the religion called the "High Priesthood of the Computer Temple", where you have to make special requests to a special unique class of individuals who control computer resources.
As for PC operating systems, in particular Microsoft OS platforms, they were designed for independent system operations where the primary user was considered not only the "user" but also the "administrator". While in practice that may seem silly in a corporate environment (leading to fights between the ancient priests and the jonny come lately PC users), it is a fact of life.
I understand where you are coming from in this post, but it really is the result of the clash of two cultures, and Microsoft pretending that it is supporting one culture when its roots are firmly established in the other. And why security flaws like this abound.
And how can you possibly find out what is causing the problem if the politics are so much ingrained into the science that it is affecting the study of the results. You are treating this like an engineering problem that can be easily solved.
I equate this like your server example, but the boss has insisted that you will be using Windows '95 on the server and a propriatary software package known to crash hourly and the company who wrote the software went bankrupt five years ago. You can argue all you want to move the data to another server and software package, but the boss is being a big a%%%%#@ and is simply being irrational so you have to simply live with it. He doesn't want to relearn the command set for another software package, because he likes how this one does its stuff. BTW, it also controls a key aspect of your business, so it really has to keep running. It is a paycheck, isn't it?
Dealing with global warming is just like this, but you have foreign ministers and heads of state bumping heads and being irrational, with proposals being sent forth simply because they want to be seen as "doing something", so they can win the next election. Even dictators want to be looking good on something like this, so they can find a scape goat from a national enemy to blame why their country is all screwed up.
"See! The USA is such an evil country because they cause so much pollution in the world! If only they stopped making and selling SUV's/automobilies/raping the land in our country in the quest for oil our country would be so much better and gasoline would be cheaper for all of you ordinary people! And that would mean you would all have jobs and lots of money if the USA would only get its act together!"
The problem is not what is causing the global warming, but more what to do about it now that we know the temperature is rising.
Where this debate really gets complicated is the intermingling of politics and science, and that goes both directions. The political process is harmed because psuedo scientists go about spouting "proven scientific theories" about how to resolve the issue, and because of their appeal to science they are above reproach and respond violently when their political opinion is challenged. The political arena is one of compromise and trying to come to an understanding, where most people are usually not "correct", but simply have one or another philosophy of life that they are advocating their point of view. Over time political policies and philosophies can change, but it is a very slow process and no one philosophy is better than any other. Appealing to scientific theory usually gets the politician into trouble anyway, and is usually oppressive, such as the role that Facism had with eugenics and other popular (at the time) scientific theories. Many people see global warming as merely the latest incarnation of this sort of silly appeal to science in an arena where it simply doesn't apply.
The other huge issue is where the scientific data itself is being corrupted by the political process. Scientific inquiry does happen with scientists having sometimes a clear bias toward coming up with a specific result, either to appease the current orthodox dogma of scientific theories or to not piss off their employer. To demonstrate this away from the global warming issue, research scientists studying the effects of nicotine and were employed by tobacco companies often had to modify their conclusions to not demonstrate the negative effects of tobacco smoke on the people using their product. By coming to the conclusion that tobacco caused cancer, their employer was subject to legal liability, as did happen.
To suggest that the scientific papers on global warming are not influenced by the political process is to deny how science is really conducted. Funding for most of these research projects is paid for by either politicians who want to get their own political philosophy pushed forward somehow, or by non-profit organizations who clearly have a political stake in the whole process as well. Especially with anything connected to global warming debate at the moment, there is almost no unbiased research going on at the moment. Even the scientists themselves largely have a political opinion on the topic.
If all that weren't enough, the issues regarding what to do about global warming really cause some problems. I personally am not against being a reasonable steward to natural resources including reasonable urban planning and taking inexpensive steps to helping improve our overall environment. Planning is the word here, where you plan ahead with an idea of what the city or country is going to be like in 10, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 years from now. Few governments really plan for more than six months, and perhaps 3-8 years with very long-term plans (the length of their term in office usually being the metric). Any long-term planning is done by.... think tanks with political agendas. There goes the politics into the debate again. And these very long-term plans are usually not followed anyway.
Many of the supporters of the philosophy that mankind is 100% responsible for the current global warming trend also take the approach and philosophy that we must immediately reverse those steps that put us here in the first place, and that drastic actions should be done to fix the problems caused by our actions in the past. For those that are still hesitant about the effects of global warming, this becomes a point of political contention and a point of harsh words on both sides. More "conservative" (using the term very loosly here) people who don't like drastic change are going to be obviously against any rapid changes of policies. And the more feet dragging that happens to slow down th
A point to consider here is that launching dozens of rockets is not necessarily going to help you out on the scaling issues for creating a more powerful primary launch engine, such as what SpaceX has been doing here.
The Falcon I is using a prototype for a new engine that is one of the first such new rocket motors for a couple decades now in that level of power that it can deliver. Smaller engines unfortunately don't scale very well and it takes some incredible engineering skill to build a new high-power rocket motor that can get you to orbit.
The goal here is that once they work out the bugs with this motor, it can be used for the much larger Falcon V and Falcon IX, which will be surprisingly man-rated (at least that is the long-term goal). There are very few man-rated rocket motors that have ever been built by anybody, including NASA. It is also potentially one of the first that has been put up for general sale to anybody who wants to put the money down and use it, as the others were all either of Russian origin (with political ramifications) or required a special act of the U.S. Congress before you were going to be allowed to even buy them.
The real gem that NASA has right now is the Shuttle Main Engine, which is a marvel of engineering and the fact that it has never failed dispite many, many flights and that it has even been resued on many occasions with only occasional refurbishment. (failed flights, but nothing that was directly related to the engine itself). Unfortunately SpaceX is not going to be able to purcase this engine shy of an act of God.
From my own viewpoint, the Libertarian Party seems to be composed, nearly equally from what I've seen but varied from state to state, by those who emphasis the 2nd Ammendment and those who emphasis legalization of Marijuana.
I know this is a broad paintbrush for anybody, but this sums up pretty clearly general leanings of Libertarians (with the big L), even if there are other more pronounced differences and many other issues. Obviously those who lean toward strong enforcement of the 2nd Ammendment (aka give every citizen a gun and repeal all gun control laws) also tend to have some similar philosophies with rank and file Republicans, but it should also go to show how one political party in America can have such a diversity of opinion, even when the differences between Republicans and Democrats seem to be more pronounced lately.
More interestingly, how hard core Libertarians can justifiably point out that both parties are screwing up and there are other dimensions to the political spectrum than just conservatism vs. liberalism. Libertarianism (with a little l) is more the general belief that government is bad and most of the laws should be repealed because they over regulate our lives. Compare this to most members of congress, who openly brag on their web pages over their "accomplishments", as if creating new laws was the specific goal of their being in Washington D.C.
Unfortunately (and I actually did this), running for office on a platform that you will vote against everything doesn't get you very far. Even if it makes sense and something most legislators ought to be doing much more often. If I ever get elected to serve on another legislative board again, I am going to vote "NO" much more often than I did in the past. Far too many of my votes were of the sort "Issue blah, blah, blah, recommended by the staff, is of pressing importantce. Please read the following 150 page report and vote on this issue in the next 5 minutes." I just took the staff advise and voted for the bloody proposition even though I had no idea what was in there. In this regard I feel for congressmen who have to do this sort of stuff all of the time, where it is impossible for them to read all of the background reports and really get into the details of the laws before they are forced to make a vote on them.
The problem isn't that some idiot decided to do something like a hardware key or some other DRM tool. The issue is if you can send a programmer/hacker to jail for reverse engineering something (read DVD-Video here) that they bought and own themselves, indeed is a commodity consumer electronic device.
If some company wants to get into the copy-protection arms race, go ahead. Most software companies have given up on the concept a long, long time ago for a good reason. For very high end software packages it makes a little bit of sense, and it is still done by a few select companies, as you have mentioned. The problem is that groups like the RIAA havn't realized that they are killing their own market with approaches like this, and have decided that they want to impose legal penalties to private individuals who do this sort of reverse engineering, even if the copy protection is a trivial scheme like ROT-13. And yes, that has been used, and people even arrested under the DCMA over this.
I agree though that companies who put in the massive DRM protections are likely to find themselves without a customer unless it is a niche application that your business absolutely can't do without.
I had to add some dongle support to one software package I was writing, and I hated the whole process. The dongle support just added bugs to my software and slowed down performance at the most inopportune times. My boss at the time was insisting, however, and spent a whole bunch of money trying to get the tools and the licenses to get the dongle added to the package.
I also wish he would have GPL'd the software after the company went bankrupt, BTW. It was a cool software package and would have been used by a great many people if it were available on Source Forge. Instead there are a total of about 5 customers who got crippled version of the software.
How in the (*@&#%@#%(*& he** did these patents even get granted. To Paramount Studios no less. This is clearly the domain of copyright, and an overzealous attorney who wanted to extend copyright over things that copyright normally didn't apply.
Furthermore, I think the patents here could be invalidated due to the fact that the "inventor" is not the real person listed here.
One positive side aspect to all of these patent filings: Anthropologists from 1000 years in the future are going to have an incredibly rich source of original material about the 19th, 20th, and 21 Century culture of the USA by going through these patent filings.
If you are going to try to do this with the Supremes, it is better to go to a specialist who actually knows his stuff. aka a real lawyer. Not that intelligent tech people couldn't figure out the formatting and terminology, but it would be better to have a real lawyer who is helping you out both in terms of using words that lawyers are used to using and to avoid common mistakes that non-lawyers might make in a situation like this.
It would be useful, however, for that same lawyer to run it by you as a tech expert to make sure the technical accuracy is there, and it does demonstrate your opinion clearly. And this is an opinion that IMHO is not often brought into courtroom situations, nor really understood by judges.
I hate using the term too. It is overly broad, and is an attempt to regulate thoughts and speech, in the classic 1st Ammendment of the U.S. Constitution type of speech as well. I don't know how courts can interpret "Congress shall pass no law..." and at the same time enforce laws that have been written that restricts such speech.
BTW, that is the rationale, but unspoken by Mr. Crichton, as to why he thinks he can get away with what is being said in his essay. He is clearly invoking his freedom of speech here and in effect daring a real idiot to sue him, knowing that his celebrety nature alone would bring stature and status to any attempted lawsuit. That and trying to take on the New York Times about this issue would be legal suicide... for the pharmaceutical company trying to defend this patent in this manner.
I completely agree. I got into a major arguement earlier here on/. with a patent attorney over this very issue, and the conversation further convinced me of this concept.
Regardless of what endeavor of engineering I might participate in (and I do consider myself to be primarily an engineer), I fail to see any benefit at all to any kind of patent, including mechanical engineering... the classical example of patents.
I strongly consider patent attorneys to be simply fronts for a massive scam, and a modest revenue source for the U.S. Government. The expansion of patentable items is happening precisely because of the money that can be generated by this agency, which essentially pays for itself and even provides a modest surplus that doesn't need strict accounting, and can even be diverted to black ops if necessary. Talk about a conflict of interest on the part of the government here that is hearing the case.
Far too often I personnally know of people that have filed a patent, only to get themselves raked over the coals and have their "inventions" taken away anyway. A classical example is my grandfather, who patented about 30 different inventions and spent a minor fortune on attorney costs and filing fees for all that work. I think he got a total of about $2000 in royalties for all that work. One of his patents is explicitly cited as a fore-runner to Compact Discs (and subsequent technologies like the DVD) and developed encryption technologies that have been used by the NSA.
Unfortunately this is more of a typical example and not the exception. It is a very strong exception where a genuinely innovative concept is patented and a major company "buys" the patent and pays royalties to the inventor. Far too often a patent is filed strictly by a major company to protect themselves from any other idiot who also tries to file a competing patent that is subsequently accepted by the USPTO. The other use is to do a business negotiation where patents are "swapped", such as what happened with MPEG-4 and the DVD Forum (formerly the DVD Consortium).
The only practical benefit that I can see from patents right now is that they can preserve for future generations different techniques and manufacturing concepts, including assembly guidelines and how things are made. The problem with this attitude is that a typical patent application is so sparse that even somebody "learned in the art" can hardly recreate the patented process. They usually go into just enough detail to muddy the waters if there is an "infringement", and are so vague and interpreted so broadly by courts that you can't really even know if what you are doing violates a patent until after you have been slapped by a lawyer with a lawsuit.
Furthermore, engineers are explicitly told never to read any patents, under fear by management that they might "accidently" incorporate a patented idea into their design. So what is the real pratical benefit other than to keep a group of lawyers wealthy?
and please send the royalty recept to the heirs of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Seriously.
CBS television was sued, successfully, for copyright infringement because they played back the (now infamous from this perspective) "I Have a Dream" speech that they recorded with their own cameras and recording equipment.
This is yet another example of how intellectual property laws are simply getting absurd. It is driving me nuts enough that I wonder why I even write or do anything that requires thought.
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The counter argument to what you are saying is that you, as an individual, can decide for yourself who you want to give your (presumed) millions of Euros, dingbats or whatever to when you die. If you don't want it going to your kids but instead to the government, fine, do that with your own money. Just don't tell me as an individual where I should put it, and please don't hold a gun to my head and tell me where to spend it.
Yes, government taxation is just armed robbery done legally, nothing more. There may be "public good" that comes from it (often not, and with corruption as well), but that is not the point. I can make my own decisions on how to deal with my own property and money, and I believe that I can make that decision much better than some silly government board or entity.
I support limited taxation for government "services" that are essential, and what is considered essential can be debated. The problem is that attitudes like yours encourage raw confiscation of wealth on the idea that working hard and building a comfortable life is something evil and wrong. And that I'm a stupid idiot who doesn't know where to spend my own money, but some other people (supposedly "enlightened" and "intelligent") can do a much better job of doing that then I can. That and you don't believe that millions of ordinary people can't come to a conclusion of trying to support worthy causes on our own without a government telling us what to do instead.
One huge difference in this case is not because he is merely an engineer, but the **Chief**, or somebody who is in a position to specifically make this call... or should be.
If there is anybody who should make this sort of call, and to whom it is expected should make a decision like this, it is this individual. By ignoring this advise, it is ignoring essentially the entire engineering team and the person who speaks for all of the engineers as a whole. It is not just one lone nut job that should be ignored.
God, I would hate to be in the position to replace this engineer, but the "honorable" thing to do here is for all subsequent engineers at NASA to follow suit, deny the request, until nobody is left to put into that position. Unfortunately not everbody is willing to stand for principles like this and eventually "sombody" will be found to sign off on the launch even if the concerns are not addressed. This is also a strong sign that bean counters and lawyers are making the decisions that are much better left for engineers, and that safety is not being taken seriously.
Comparing this to the A380 would be like having not just a single engineer who objects, but the whole engineering department, or at least the department head. If I were a shareholder and heard that department heads were being fired over safty issues that they objected to, I would be very concerned myself.
As a taxpayer (shareholder of sorts in this sense), I am very concerned about this issue regarding the Shuttle, and in some ways hope that this flight fails just to prove that NASA is screwed up and needs to be killed completely as an agency. Or a major overhaul where a guy like Camarda isn't just fired, he is promoted and made the agency head instead.
Furthermore, this guy is an astronaut to boot, and knows that his ass is on the line in terms of a flag-draped coffin if he is wrong. That sort of focuses your attention on these matters in a more personal way.
I know this is replying to an old thread written by an AC, but here goes...
It doesn't matter what the reason is why something (even a credit card or the electricity to your house) is being cancelled or disconnected. If the customer says "I don't want it any more", THAT should be more than sufficient as the justification.
All that was needed at that point was proving identity, which apparently had happened in this situation. Was the identity proven? Yes. Did Vincent (the person in this situation) make clear what he wanted to happen with his account? Yes. Were the additional rep challenges necessary? No.
I will say that the rep was acting on "orders" or at least the culture that has developed and been fostered by AOL to maintain accounts through intimidation and coersion. I'm not attacking the individual phone service rep (even though he was being an a**h***), but suggesting that companies like this need to get their hands slapped in this situation as well.
AOL completely deserved the negative publicity resulting from this incident.
I had AOL for some time myself, and the complaints I have had here about trying to cancel the service are very similar to the experience that most other people have had here.
I had a problem with AOL that was similar, where I even tried to cancel the damn thing at least three different times, all of them rebuffed with one time even being offered six months of free service.
Finally, as a last resort, I called my bank and told them that I lost my credit card that I had been using to pay for the AOL service. I actually lost it in my garbage can that afternoon, when it met an unfortunate accident with a pair of sissors. With very little complaint from my bank, they issued me a new card number, also informing me that any automatic payment must be re-established with the new card number.
I thanked the bank for that service, and "forgot" to tell AOL the new card number. How rude of me.
This was the only way for me to cancel my subscription. God forbid if banks ever have automatic account change notification to creditors (not credit bureaus, which is another issue altogether).
Yeah, I think you might be.
I would agree that a simple question for asking why you might be dissatified might be in order the first time he asked to cancel the call, but after he said "cancel the account" three times, that should have been more than sufficient.
Hell, from my perspective, canceling the account should be as easy to do on-line as it was to create the damn thing in the first place. You should be able to get to some silly URL (https) with AOL, enter in your password, have a big button that says "Are you sure you want to cancel this account?" with perhaps a compaint section to respond why you think the service sucks, and then you would be done.
The whole reason why you have to get with a telephone rep in the first place is because AOL wants to make life difficult to cancel their service.
Add to that sentiment, that there were only one geologist that even went up to the moon... the rest were test pilots and aviation specialists, or had degrees in very different fields from geology. Mind you, the brief survey that Harrison Schmitt performed revealed that a trained eye could find much, much more material.
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In fact, here is an interview that Mr. Schmitt did with the Australian Broadcasting Company talking about why we need to go back and do a more extensive survey:
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2002/s603826.h
For a first-person account of the trip to the Moon by this astronaut to go into details about this "field survey", see: http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep602/LEC1/trip.html
That Mr. Schmitt has decided to put his money where his mouth is and has formed a lunar mining company should speak volumes over the value that can be obtained from this sort of activity.
And who decided that the moon belongs to all humanity, equally? I didn't have a say in that decision, nor do I support the philosophy.
And futhermore, what environment is there on the Moon that can be damaged?
As far as having a corporation run mining operations on the moon, that is going to be a very necessary structure simply in terms of the raw manpower and capital resources necessary to put together any kind of mining on the Moon. Even mutli-billionaires like Wm. Gates don't have enough money to really put stuff like this together on their own because of the costs alone.
Also, the Moon has a surface area that is larger than North America. There is plenty of room there to have more than one corporation, and even multiple nations that can be involved, with elbow room to keep them from tripping over each other. While I would agree that any such endeavor would be profit oriented, why is that necessarily an evil thing? What would be a crying shame is if workers were being sent to the Moon only to be paid Mexican minimum wage. I think it is much more likely that any ordinary workers going to the moon for mining operations would come back millionaires (at today's monitary values) after just a year or two. So who is going to get the shaft out of lunar mining operations?
One of the problems with nuclear rockets is that no matter how you do the engineering, you end up with radioactive waste products in the thrust alone. Yes, there are ways to isolate that radioactivity, but that means more weight and reduced ISP in the rocket. That is not even taking into consideration the irrational fears of the anti-nuclear protestors of the type that were pissed over the launch of deep space probes like Gallileo (a very minor amount of radioactive material, and in a hardened case that would survive launch failure). I can just imagine what these idiots would say over a space-going reactor, much less something like Orion that uses actual nukes in its propulsion.
Having a rocket throw out radioactive debris just isn't something that people would feel comfortable with when you are standing downwind from the launch pads, and so for lifting off from the Earth, this is not even a reasonable for terrestrial launches. Indeed I would have to agree with Larry Niven and some other science fiction writers that even chemical propulsion is eventually going to have to be eliminated in favor of something like highly compressed air or laser propulsion, due to environmental damage alone.
For interplanetary missions, however, I would have to agree that nuclear rockets do come into practical use and for the next several centuries, nuclear rockets will be the primary means of passenger travel between planets. It will also be something that the military is going to use simply because they can get an armed spacecraft where they need it quickly, and with the armament needed to neutralize any idiots who challenges them. This is the foundation of a space navy.
If you think about it from environmental damage that even an open reactor is going to cause in deep interplanetary space shooting out raw plutonium gasses that have been superheated in a nuclear core, it would be insignificant even with massive human transit activity compared to radioactive components of the solar wind. In short, human activity couldn't even possibly compete with natural radioactive sources if that were a government goal.
As to why NASA hasn't gone further with any nuclear rocket studies: the above points illustrate the issue. NASA hasn't been able to get beyond basic low-earth orbit now for over 30 years with manned spacecraft. Robotic probes don't need nuclear rockets, so you are suggesting that NASA spend time researching a solution in search of a problem? Until there is significant human activity in space (the ISS doesn't count.... I'm talking much larger numbers of people in orbit than that), nuclear rockets will only stay something for the future.
BTW, when was the last time you actually tried to create a new user account on Wikipedia? There is now a persistant nag message to get you to confirm e-mail addresses, but this is only used to confirm the e-mail address that you put into your user profile (in case somebody wants to e-mail you through the MediaWiki software).
I would agree that this might be a useful roadblock in terms of trying to "legitimize" users, and perhaps even something to add to the checkuser scan to verify if somebody is using sock puppets. Something to think about for the future.
I would venture to guess that this e-mail confirmation is something that isn't being used simply because it is rocking the boat and changing policy. There are always political factions about changing anything on Wikipedia, and this is but one of those issues. Still, I like the idea enough that I might try to push it through as an experiment on one of the smaller Wikimedia projects.
The one thing that gets missed in discussions of gurella warfare is that you must have a secure supply base outside of the war zone that pours both manpower as well as equipment into the area under attack. This happened in Vietnam because equipment was being poured into that country by both the USA from places like California, and from Russia and their industrial areas. There were never any bombing campaigns by the USA over the Ukraine to destroy the industrial infrastructure that really did prolong the Vietnam war, nor any equivalent bombing attacks in California or Michigan either.
This is also happening in Iraq, and Iran is one of these secure industrial centers that is supplying arms and training to the people doing the attacks within Iraq. If you want to see who is helping to keep the attacks going on in Iraq, you need to see where the arms are coming from. Yes, I will admit that Hussein did prepare by placing arms caches all over Iraq for a gurella war, but that is a fixed and finite supply that is not being replenished, and I believe that attacks from that interal supply source is just about over.
When you think about Iran, who is going to be supplying the arms into Iran to keep a sustained gurella war going? China? I hope that the Chinese are not that stupid to be so overt as to supply the necessary levels of equipment necessary to sustain a massive Iranian gurella war. And Iran doesn't really have too many other friends.
Pakistan might also get involved, but their support for the Taliban has already made them a problem with the USA, not to mention that they have been surprisingly rather supportive of the USA since 9/11. And India wouldn't mind a co-bellergant in an attack on Pakistan as well.
Syria would have to go through Iraq to supply arms to Iran. That rules out much support from Syria, not to mention an invasion of Iran is also likely to include invading Syria at some point as well anyway.
Russian involvement? Not likely. While they are showing independence from U.S. political influence, they are not likely to be pulled into a global conflict like this where there are a number of reasons to stay out, and few reasons to get involved. Russian arms factories might get involved on a very low level, but no official support would ever be issued nor would the Russians want to be implicated as even peripheral participants.
European involvement? This is almost laughable in concept that Europe would want to conduct a low-level gurella operation against the USA.
In short, if Iran is invaded, it would be a conventional military attack and conventional military units from both Iran and the USA that would be involved. Any resistance efforts would be more along the lines of the occupation efforts after WWII in Germany and Japan (which did have some low-level gurella actions against the U.S. Army in both countries after the peace treaties).
Repsonse:
1) Iran doesn't need to develop nukes.... near bomb grade stuff is already available in quantities that a soverign nation-state like Iran would have no problem getting the material if they really want it and it is a national priority. And making a nuke isn't really that complicated. I mean if India could have developed it 30 years ago, it isn't that big of a deal for Iran either.
2) The UN is totally irrelevant to the discussion, and from a conservative viewpoint rather than a liberal one, why would we care what the UN thinks about going into Iran or not in the first place? I for one advocate that the USA leave the UN as far as binding resolutions like the one you mentioned anyway.
3) As far as needing congressional approval to invade Iran, you had better believe that Pres. Bush needs it. It is spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, and if you think Bush is worthy of impeachment, this would put it over the top and get the conservative House members to get on board for impeachment as well, by the President clearly usurping congressional authority that would be unconstitutional. Only the U.S. Senate has authority to declare a state of war, and even Vietnam happened due to ambivilance on the part of the U.S. Senate during the 1960's. The makeup of the Senate has changed significantly since then, and IMHO no future sitting President will ever be able to pull off something like that again.
4) Conscripting 10 million Americans is going to be politcally feasable.... provided you have a 9/11 type attack and a real cause that would whip up U.S. political support. I mention this number because this is the number of U.S. military personnel during WWII and the number of soldiers that justified the Pentagon and its construction. That it has been over 60 years since the USA has mobilized on this level may be a reason why you may not appreciate the idea. And to get to equivalent of WWII level of particiaption, it could be almost 20 million soldiers instead, due to natural population increases in the USA. The U.S. Civil War had an even higher level of conscription than even this proportionally.
All told, however, I think if you assume that an invasion of Iran would occur, that it would be more like the Spanish-American War instead as far as the interal politics and proportional levels of citizen involvement in the war. That was rather significant, however. It would also take another 9/11 type attack on U.S. soil to start it as well, which was my original point. Iran will not be invaded unless Iran does something deliberately on the USA, or if you are a conspiracy theorist, that they are framed for causing an attack on the USA. Ordinary U.S. citizens must die first before anything like this happens.
5) I guess on this point about political opposition from within the Republican party to the idea of invading Iran doesn't make sense to you. Dispite the rhetoric, the USA is a democracy, and on top of that Bush is at the end of his presidency, for good or ill. Bush can not continue as President dispite the best of approval numbers, of which he really doesn't care anyway. You are correct that Pentagon resistance is a moot point, because they are there to take orders, not to give them in this regard. But congressional opposition is a real thing, and with real opposition to the idea of invading Iran on a whim.
As far as rationale to invade Iran, I believe they are the primary instigator of the problems in Iraq right now, providing both personnel, equipment, and training to the current idiots who are blowing up everything in Iraq. Syria and China are also involved with this, although Chinese involvment is more typical of what Russia did in Vietnam, and on a much lower level. I guess you and the rest of the Iranian invasion conspirists think this is going to play much as the invasion of Laos during the Vietnam era occured. I am suggesting that it is going to be all or nothing. If Iran is invaded, it will be a full military assult by land, sea, air, and space. I just d
This seems to be a boogyman argument that this is going to happen, but I state for the record that the USA will not be invading Iran, at least any time soon. Besides having to deal with the occupation of Iraq, there is a huge domestic issue as well that is going to stop this from happening.
The President of the United States can't simply go to war with whomever he chooses. Oh, he can drop a few bombs and rattle sabres, but any serious attempt to go to war with Iran is going to be bloody and vicious. It is also going to take a formal declaration of war by the U.S. Congress.
The point being here that hard-core conservatives aren't going to let Congress get bully-whipped into this pansy "resolution for the authorization of the use of force". There was some opposition in conservative circles to Iraq in part to do this, and Iran is simply going to be the point where these right-leaning people will force it to come to a head. Adding this conservative (aka Republican) opposition to the idea plus the Democrat opposition, makes the whole idea moot and even laughable that it might even happen.
In order for a declaration of war to really occur, it will likely require something like a nuke being detonated... particularly if it blew up inside U.S. borders, and could be traced or at least blamed on Iran. At that point all the Iranian government could do is kiss their hind ends goodbye. For their own sake, I highly doubt the Iranian government is that stupid. And that would open the possibility of nuclear war against Iran as well, where there would be targets that would be useful to nuke, unlike Afghanistan. The Taliban merited a nuke attack by the USA, but there was nothing that would be useful to nuke nor was there anything that couldn't be also taken care of by conventional arms just as easily.
And there won't be a gurrella war, it would be total war with mass conscription inside the USA with an expansion of the U.S. Army to over 10 million soldiers. This is something the U.S. economy does not need, nor would it be good for anybody in the world to see a U.S. Army of that size again (like it was during WWII).
I beg to differ that the current open archetechture PC platform wouldn't exist without IBM, but I conceed the point that it did open business opportunities that didn't exist before IBM "legitimized" the concept.... just as IBM also did for open source software as well, if you want to know the truth. And that was one area where IBM was clearly ahead of the curve with a more up-to-date and restructured IBM... even if it meant that their mainframe business was given an additional decade of life due to Linux and some other hard core business decisions going in that direction. There is no way Microsoft would have teamed up with IBM to work on similar operating system models for mainframe... even if perhaps they should have and was a lost opportunity for Microsoft, but as you point out that is the problem with being the top dog in the industry, where niche opportunities are lost that may not be so much of a niche.
I would hardly call IBM the company that spawned the PC age. If you had to point to who "spawned" PC, I would name Apple, Atari, Comodore, and perhaps even Radio Shack as early leaders (surprising as that may seem). IBM was the company to get major Fortune 500 companies to take the PC industry seriously, and then blew any potential lead with stupid architechtures like the Microchannel and other vendor lock-in stuff after they planted themselves firmly in the open architechture environment. I could draw parallels here with Microsoft as well, BTW.
And the PC was developed independently by a couple of IBM engineers who worked on it in their "spare time". It was not a major R&D investment by IBM when it was put together, and more of an afterthought where IBM felt they had essentially nothing to lose if they entered the business.
And when was the last time you saw an IBM nameplate on a PC that you bought?
Like IBM, Microsoft is not going to go away, so you do need to pay a little attention to what they are doing. However Microsoft is also not going to be on the leading edge of technologies, and their #1 fault is that they give a perception to non-techies that they are.
Of course this is also following the assumption that the administrator of the systems you are talking about are also not the users who are on the computer systems.
The whole admin/user philosophy is based on the religion called the "High Priesthood of the Computer Temple", where you have to make special requests to a special unique class of individuals who control computer resources.
As for PC operating systems, in particular Microsoft OS platforms, they were designed for independent system operations where the primary user was considered not only the "user" but also the "administrator". While in practice that may seem silly in a corporate environment (leading to fights between the ancient priests and the jonny come lately PC users), it is a fact of life.
I understand where you are coming from in this post, but it really is the result of the clash of two cultures, and Microsoft pretending that it is supporting one culture when its roots are firmly established in the other. And why security flaws like this abound.
And how can you possibly find out what is causing the problem if the politics are so much ingrained into the science that it is affecting the study of the results. You are treating this like an engineering problem that can be easily solved.
I equate this like your server example, but the boss has insisted that you will be using Windows '95 on the server and a propriatary software package known to crash hourly and the company who wrote the software went bankrupt five years ago. You can argue all you want to move the data to another server and software package, but the boss is being a big a%%%%#@ and is simply being irrational so you have to simply live with it. He doesn't want to relearn the command set for another software package, because he likes how this one does its stuff. BTW, it also controls a key aspect of your business, so it really has to keep running. It is a paycheck, isn't it?
Dealing with global warming is just like this, but you have foreign ministers and heads of state bumping heads and being irrational, with proposals being sent forth simply because they want to be seen as "doing something", so they can win the next election. Even dictators want to be looking good on something like this, so they can find a scape goat from a national enemy to blame why their country is all screwed up.
"See! The USA is such an evil country because they cause so much pollution in the world! If only they stopped making and selling SUV's/automobilies/raping the land in our country in the quest for oil our country would be so much better and gasoline would be cheaper for all of you ordinary people! And that would mean you would all have jobs and lots of money if the USA would only get its act together!"
See where the problem lies?
The problem is not what is causing the global warming, but more what to do about it now that we know the temperature is rising.
Where this debate really gets complicated is the intermingling of politics and science, and that goes both directions. The political process is harmed because psuedo scientists go about spouting "proven scientific theories" about how to resolve the issue, and because of their appeal to science they are above reproach and respond violently when their political opinion is challenged. The political arena is one of compromise and trying to come to an understanding, where most people are usually not "correct", but simply have one or another philosophy of life that they are advocating their point of view. Over time political policies and philosophies can change, but it is a very slow process and no one philosophy is better than any other. Appealing to scientific theory usually gets the politician into trouble anyway, and is usually oppressive, such as the role that Facism had with eugenics and other popular (at the time) scientific theories. Many people see global warming as merely the latest incarnation of this sort of silly appeal to science in an arena where it simply doesn't apply.
The other huge issue is where the scientific data itself is being corrupted by the political process. Scientific inquiry does happen with scientists having sometimes a clear bias toward coming up with a specific result, either to appease the current orthodox dogma of scientific theories or to not piss off their employer. To demonstrate this away from the global warming issue, research scientists studying the effects of nicotine and were employed by tobacco companies often had to modify their conclusions to not demonstrate the negative effects of tobacco smoke on the people using their product. By coming to the conclusion that tobacco caused cancer, their employer was subject to legal liability, as did happen.
To suggest that the scientific papers on global warming are not influenced by the political process is to deny how science is really conducted. Funding for most of these research projects is paid for by either politicians who want to get their own political philosophy pushed forward somehow, or by non-profit organizations who clearly have a political stake in the whole process as well. Especially with anything connected to global warming debate at the moment, there is almost no unbiased research going on at the moment. Even the scientists themselves largely have a political opinion on the topic.
If all that weren't enough, the issues regarding what to do about global warming really cause some problems. I personally am not against being a reasonable steward to natural resources including reasonable urban planning and taking inexpensive steps to helping improve our overall environment. Planning is the word here, where you plan ahead with an idea of what the city or country is going to be like in 10, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 years from now. Few governments really plan for more than six months, and perhaps 3-8 years with very long-term plans (the length of their term in office usually being the metric). Any long-term planning is done by.... think tanks with political agendas. There goes the politics into the debate again. And these very long-term plans are usually not followed anyway.
Many of the supporters of the philosophy that mankind is 100% responsible for the current global warming trend also take the approach and philosophy that we must immediately reverse those steps that put us here in the first place, and that drastic actions should be done to fix the problems caused by our actions in the past. For those that are still hesitant about the effects of global warming, this becomes a point of political contention and a point of harsh words on both sides. More "conservative" (using the term very loosly here) people who don't like drastic change are going to be obviously against any rapid changes of policies. And the more feet dragging that happens to slow down th
A point to consider here is that launching dozens of rockets is not necessarily going to help you out on the scaling issues for creating a more powerful primary launch engine, such as what SpaceX has been doing here.
The Falcon I is using a prototype for a new engine that is one of the first such new rocket motors for a couple decades now in that level of power that it can deliver. Smaller engines unfortunately don't scale very well and it takes some incredible engineering skill to build a new high-power rocket motor that can get you to orbit.
The goal here is that once they work out the bugs with this motor, it can be used for the much larger Falcon V and Falcon IX, which will be surprisingly man-rated (at least that is the long-term goal). There are very few man-rated rocket motors that have ever been built by anybody, including NASA. It is also potentially one of the first that has been put up for general sale to anybody who wants to put the money down and use it, as the others were all either of Russian origin (with political ramifications) or required a special act of the U.S. Congress before you were going to be allowed to even buy them.
The real gem that NASA has right now is the Shuttle Main Engine, which is a marvel of engineering and the fact that it has never failed dispite many, many flights and that it has even been resued on many occasions with only occasional refurbishment. (failed flights, but nothing that was directly related to the engine itself). Unfortunately SpaceX is not going to be able to purcase this engine shy of an act of God.
From my own viewpoint, the Libertarian Party seems to be composed, nearly equally from what I've seen but varied from state to state, by those who emphasis the 2nd Ammendment and those who emphasis legalization of Marijuana.
I know this is a broad paintbrush for anybody, but this sums up pretty clearly general leanings of Libertarians (with the big L), even if there are other more pronounced differences and many other issues. Obviously those who lean toward strong enforcement of the 2nd Ammendment (aka give every citizen a gun and repeal all gun control laws) also tend to have some similar philosophies with rank and file Republicans, but it should also go to show how one political party in America can have such a diversity of opinion, even when the differences between Republicans and Democrats seem to be more pronounced lately.
More interestingly, how hard core Libertarians can justifiably point out that both parties are screwing up and there are other dimensions to the political spectrum than just conservatism vs. liberalism. Libertarianism (with a little l) is more the general belief that government is bad and most of the laws should be repealed because they over regulate our lives. Compare this to most members of congress, who openly brag on their web pages over their "accomplishments", as if creating new laws was the specific goal of their being in Washington D.C.
Unfortunately (and I actually did this), running for office on a platform that you will vote against everything doesn't get you very far. Even if it makes sense and something most legislators ought to be doing much more often. If I ever get elected to serve on another legislative board again, I am going to vote "NO" much more often than I did in the past. Far too many of my votes were of the sort "Issue blah, blah, blah, recommended by the staff, is of pressing importantce. Please read the following 150 page report and vote on this issue in the next 5 minutes." I just took the staff advise and voted for the bloody proposition even though I had no idea what was in there. In this regard I feel for congressmen who have to do this sort of stuff all of the time, where it is impossible for them to read all of the background reports and really get into the details of the laws before they are forced to make a vote on them.
The problem isn't that some idiot decided to do something like a hardware key or some other DRM tool. The issue is if you can send a programmer/hacker to jail for reverse engineering something (read DVD-Video here) that they bought and own themselves, indeed is a commodity consumer electronic device.
If some company wants to get into the copy-protection arms race, go ahead. Most software companies have given up on the concept a long, long time ago for a good reason. For very high end software packages it makes a little bit of sense, and it is still done by a few select companies, as you have mentioned. The problem is that groups like the RIAA havn't realized that they are killing their own market with approaches like this, and have decided that they want to impose legal penalties to private individuals who do this sort of reverse engineering, even if the copy protection is a trivial scheme like ROT-13. And yes, that has been used, and people even arrested under the DCMA over this.
I agree though that companies who put in the massive DRM protections are likely to find themselves without a customer unless it is a niche application that your business absolutely can't do without.
I had to add some dongle support to one software package I was writing, and I hated the whole process. The dongle support just added bugs to my software and slowed down performance at the most inopportune times. My boss at the time was insisting, however, and spent a whole bunch of money trying to get the tools and the licenses to get the dongle added to the package.
I also wish he would have GPL'd the software after the company went bankrupt, BTW. It was a cool software package and would have been used by a great many people if it were available on Source Forge. Instead there are a total of about 5 customers who got crippled version of the software.
How in the (*@&#%@#%(*& he** did these patents even get granted. To Paramount Studios no less. This is clearly the domain of copyright, and an overzealous attorney who wanted to extend copyright over things that copyright normally didn't apply.
Furthermore, I think the patents here could be invalidated due to the fact that the "inventor" is not the real person listed here.
One positive side aspect to all of these patent filings: Anthropologists from 1000 years in the future are going to have an incredibly rich source of original material about the 19th, 20th, and 21 Century culture of the USA by going through these patent filings.
If you are going to try to do this with the Supremes, it is better to go to a specialist who actually knows his stuff. aka a real lawyer. Not that intelligent tech people couldn't figure out the formatting and terminology, but it would be better to have a real lawyer who is helping you out both in terms of using words that lawyers are used to using and to avoid common mistakes that non-lawyers might make in a situation like this.
It would be useful, however, for that same lawyer to run it by you as a tech expert to make sure the technical accuracy is there, and it does demonstrate your opinion clearly. And this is an opinion that IMHO is not often brought into courtroom situations, nor really understood by judges.
I hate using the term too. It is overly broad, and is an attempt to regulate thoughts and speech, in the classic 1st Ammendment of the U.S. Constitution type of speech as well. I don't know how courts can interpret "Congress shall pass no law..." and at the same time enforce laws that have been written that restricts such speech.
BTW, that is the rationale, but unspoken by Mr. Crichton, as to why he thinks he can get away with what is being said in his essay. He is clearly invoking his freedom of speech here and in effect daring a real idiot to sue him, knowing that his celebrety nature alone would bring stature and status to any attempted lawsuit. That and trying to take on the New York Times about this issue would be legal suicide... for the pharmaceutical company trying to defend this patent in this manner.
I completely agree. I got into a major arguement earlier here on /. with a patent attorney over this very issue, and the conversation further convinced me of this concept.
Regardless of what endeavor of engineering I might participate in (and I do consider myself to be primarily an engineer), I fail to see any benefit at all to any kind of patent, including mechanical engineering... the classical example of patents.
I strongly consider patent attorneys to be simply fronts for a massive scam, and a modest revenue source for the U.S. Government. The expansion of patentable items is happening precisely because of the money that can be generated by this agency, which essentially pays for itself and even provides a modest surplus that doesn't need strict accounting, and can even be diverted to black ops if necessary. Talk about a conflict of interest on the part of the government here that is hearing the case.
Far too often I personnally know of people that have filed a patent, only to get themselves raked over the coals and have their "inventions" taken away anyway. A classical example is my grandfather, who patented about 30 different inventions and spent a minor fortune on attorney costs and filing fees for all that work. I think he got a total of about $2000 in royalties for all that work. One of his patents is explicitly cited as a fore-runner to Compact Discs (and subsequent technologies like the DVD) and developed encryption technologies that have been used by the NSA.
Unfortunately this is more of a typical example and not the exception. It is a very strong exception where a genuinely innovative concept is patented and a major company "buys" the patent and pays royalties to the inventor. Far too often a patent is filed strictly by a major company to protect themselves from any other idiot who also tries to file a competing patent that is subsequently accepted by the USPTO. The other use is to do a business negotiation where patents are "swapped", such as what happened with MPEG-4 and the DVD Forum (formerly the DVD Consortium).
The only practical benefit that I can see from patents right now is that they can preserve for future generations different techniques and manufacturing concepts, including assembly guidelines and how things are made. The problem with this attitude is that a typical patent application is so sparse that even somebody "learned in the art" can hardly recreate the patented process. They usually go into just enough detail to muddy the waters if there is an "infringement", and are so vague and interpreted so broadly by courts that you can't really even know if what you are doing violates a patent until after you have been slapped by a lawyer with a lawsuit.
Furthermore, engineers are explicitly told never to read any patents, under fear by management that they might "accidently" incorporate a patented idea into their design. So what is the real pratical benefit other than to keep a group of lawyers wealthy?
and please send the royalty recept to the heirs of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Seriously.
CBS television was sued, successfully, for copyright infringement because they played back the (now infamous from this perspective) "I Have a Dream" speech that they recorded with their own cameras and recording equipment.
This is yet another example of how intellectual property laws are simply getting absurd. It is driving me nuts enough that I wonder why I even write or do anything that requires thought.