These ideas are so much against the traditional experience of most English-speaking people that is it no wonder that these ideas are rejected out of hand almost immediately.
English culture is one of assimilation and absorbtion. Even more so in America, where huge numbers of people are being absorbed into a mainstream culture that speaks essentially only one language. It takes time and a few generations, but this method has worked surprisingly well, and if we as English speakers relied upon some distant committee in London (or perhaps a counterpart in Boston, using a method similar to the Spanish langauge institutes are organized to deal with the Americas once population growth crossed the Atlantic) to come up with our langauge we wouldn't go anywhere or cope with linguistic situations that are far from the centers of academia.
The coining of new words and borrowing of word from other languages and cultures is so pervasive with English language users that it is almost like breathing air and is second nature to almost all native users of English. The truth is that most academic linguists trying to study English as a language are constantly trying to "catch up" and just simply catalog what is out there and identify what current usage of the language is right now.
Much of the coinage of new words in English also occur with rising generations, particularly the teen and young adult crowd (about from 15 to 35 years old). There are several reasons for this, including an attempt to distinguish themselves from their parents, coping with new experiences and realities, and in many cases just simply having fun. Importantly, this is the culture of the people that speak English and not just the language itself. The langauge and the culture are intertwined here, and it is no small wonder that as English as a language becomes more widespread throughout the world that cultural memes from English speaking countries (free speech laws, egalitarian authority, distrust of government, and more) both come into conflict in other cultures and have a way of creeping in as well.
When you sit down and think about it, there should be no reason for a small country the size of Denmark should have as significant of a cultural and linguistic impact on the world as England has except for geography and historical accident. The assimilation features of English had more to do with coping with the hoards of peoples who invaded England after the collapse of the Roman Empire than any specific political attempt to put those features into the language. The Saxons, the Vikings, and even the Normans were dealt with by simply absorbing their languages. English as a language arose from the ordinary working peasants and a tension between the French speaking rulers and the vulgar languages of the people living in England. Eventually the kings and rulers of England realized they needed to speak with the common people they were ruling over, and the children of nobility did pick up more ordinary English with each passing generation to make English as it exists today. The distinction still exists in English, with more "Latin-like" words being considered a "high calibur" word to use, such as "manure" instead of "shit". Or try "penus" instead of "dick Words with sexual connotations show this usage perhaps to an extreme, but there are others It also demonstrates in a small way how English successfully absorbs multiple cultures into one.
I prefer to control both Africa and South America. The #1 advantage of this strategy is that if you lose one or the other continents, you still have some armies coming in. And you are equal in strength to North America and Europe, and can lash out at both as well as knock out an aspiring soul trying to control Asia. South America + Africa + Middle East give you 4 countries to defend as the rest are all "interior" and don't need extra reinforcements.
That also gives you the strength to battle over North America if you want to go in that direction, or give you options of going into Europe as well. And you can usually get an Asian country if you just need a card.
Of course it depends on how the cards are dealt out in the beginning and what your starting position is. One time I acutally succeeded in doing Asian domination first, but that is a very difficult strategy and usually gets a big bullseye painted on you.
I would have thought that Deuterium would have been just fine, but I can understand perhaps that large quantities of Deuterium can indeed slow down some metabolic processes enough to cause some problems. I was thinking more along the lines of Tritium toxicity, but being radioactive that should make a little more sense. Deuterium is atomically stable but unusual because it is consumed quickly in stars to become other atomic products (the source of most deuterium found in nature). It is much harder to combine two simple hydrogen atoms to become Deuterium through fusion.
Yeah, the Hydrino would likely behave quite a bit different from normal hydrogen, but in this case it is more like an even lower quantum state than typical quantum state for hydrogen. I don't know where the "inventor" of this idea comes up with yet another elemental name for this quantum state, however. A photon hitting the electron is going to push the electron back into a more "typical" quantum state anyway, at least with current theory.
I have seen muon catalyzed fusion taking place using a theory similar to this one where the muon takes the place of the electron to form an exotic atom. The problem with muons, however, is that they have a relatively short half-life and are therefore not useful for large scale fusion production.
As a proportion to the economy of the USSR, I would say that the Russian effort was very comparable. They had to economize simply because Russia didn't have nearly the same size of economy as the USA did at the same time. Also, the raw costs of both programs were largely hidden within military budgets as well, although in some cases there were military programs that were hidden within the NASA budget as well, so trying to come up with exact monitary figures is going to be difficult at best.
Besides, the USSR never did send anybody to the Moon. They built a lunar lander, trained cosmonauts to do the job, and tried to build the booster but the last real effort blew up on the launch pad in the first part of 1969 and they were not able to make the necessary repairs to the launch facility not to mention the rocket design itself until well after the July 1969 landing of Apollo 11. As to if Russia could have gone to the moon in the next couple of years is IMHO likely, but for political reasons they choose not to do so. Early Russian spacecraft designs were quite hazardous and took quite a bit of brute force engineering (where people die first) before they finally have perfected the current Soyuz spacecraft design.
I think the Chinese are going to discover that going to the Moon is going to take a major 1st world economy to accomplish. They are borderline there right now and it will be interesting to see just how far they go, or if it will go down in flames like the Indian attempt to get to the Moon as well. At least China has sent somebody into LEO to start with, something that India has yet to accomplish. In this space race, I think it will be more India vs. China rather than China vs. USA.
I don't think China will be that big of an influence, but it will be interesting to see what the competition to bring people into space will have. I wouldn't count out countries like Brazil or India as well, and both have the beginnings of national space programs.
Nations I see having a major impact on space development would include:
USA
Russia (both obvious beyond doubt)
European Union (if they get their act together with the ESA)
China
Japan
India
Pakistan
Brazil
Iran
Israel
Australia (likely in joint endavor with NZ)
South Africa
South Korea
There are other countries that may be major players in this next frontier as well, but for the most part they are not currently even considering any rocket technology to independently get up into space. Interestingly, these are all either nuclear powers as well or are actively persuing nuclear weapon development...showing in part the size of the economies of each of these countries. I seriously doubt that Niue, for instance, will become a space power if only because they don't have the financial resource to get there, even though they may have some advantages in being a launch site.
I think you miss just how much in proportion to the overall economy that the Apollo Project cost the USA. Of course that was with 1960's technology and some concern that it could be done at all, but still it was one of the most expensive single research programs since the Manhattan Project. Certainly justified in the game Civilization as a "Great Wonder" in terms of raw resources needed to get it accomplished.
At one point, even during the height of the Vietnam War, NASA had close to 15% of the Federal Budget. Now it doesn't even get mentioned in the budget except for some occasional pork programs to some fairy god-senators. I would suspect that a similar kind of program would require a similar proportion of the GDP of China. Of course, China also has a tradition of major engineering projects made for national prestige, so it may not be that big of a deal either for them.
The IRS only started to ask for the SSN on tax documents in the mid 1970s. Part of this was to help with the automation of tax record keeping. They had access to the SSN earlier due to FICA information and other employer records, but at that time it was used only for payment into the social security trust fund directly, and tied more directly to the Social Security Administration.
In the mid-1970s the IRS decided to require you to demonstrate the existance of any dependants and/or spouse that you claim on the income tax return. Interestingly, about 10 million children suddenly ceased to exist as soon as this requirement was added, which encouraged Congress to expand the use of the SSN as a means to reduce fraud. Obviously the 10 million kids who disappeared never existed in the first place, and were often "made up" to help get a few more "dependents" to reduce tax liability.
I didn't apply for my SSN until I was 16 years old, and that was because I worked at a job that required a SSN for FICA payments. I didn't need it earlier. My children, on the other hand, had a social security application given to me in the hospital where they were born with a strongly worded statement that if I didn't apply while in the hospital that it would be considerably more difficult to apply afterward, and that I wouldn't be able to claim them for tax purposes until I applied for their SSN.
The number represented by the SSN is not that big of a deal to me, and is independent of the discussion regarding income taxes and social security existing at all. This is a number that is established by a government to uniquely identify all people within its borders. This unique identity can be done with letters or words even to make it less harsh, but that unique identity does have some practical value. I don't want to go to jail just because I happened to have the same name as somebody else who committed a crime, just as an example. That this number is tied to some political ideas that have sometimes negative connections leads to some general disparagement of the number in the first place. Also, being reduced to a mere number is a "de-humanizing" experience, and brings up things like soldier serial numbers and the numbers tatooed on Jews during the holocaust of Nazi Germany. Most people feel they are more than a mere number written down somewhere.
While I would agree almost completely with the protections and the current state of the use of SSNs in the USA, I strongly disagree with the assumption that the SSN should be something that should be protected and used as an identification, from a public policy standpoint.
The SSN is, as you have said, a serial number. It is a unique identifcation number to distinguish you from any other resident (not even citizen) of the USA even if otherwise you have the same or similar other related information. For example, my son and I have essentially the same name and live at the same address, but have very different SSNs to distinguish between the two of us.
In short, the SSN is a part of your name. If you make the SSN anything else, like banks and credit bureaus have done, you are inviting fraud to occur and deliberately setting up a crime opportunity where none should exist. The SSN should not be a password to establish identity, yet that is precisely what it has become. That is exactly why IMHO banks should be the subject of a huge class action lawsuit when they use a SSN in that fashion, and that law enforcement agencies should strongly discourage the practice of using SSNs as a password by financial instititions. So much that a prosecutor should refuse to prosecute fraud if a bank used public information like a SSN to gain access to financial resources, and legislators are stupid to think the SSN can be reasonably used as a password for financial resources.
The only real means to establish identity is through biometrics that are tied directly to that person. Things like a signature (not the electronic psuedo-signature), fingerprint, photo, retinal scan, DNA, or other increasingly difficult to copy/forge means of confirming identification should be used instead. I know that is difficult to do through telephone or on-line transactions, but then again such transactions should be constantly suspect and challenged when they occur. Private passwords/PINs/encryption keys can be established for use between individuals and instititions once that identity has been established in the first place and not before. That is unfortuately rare and seldom done, hence the problem with misuse of SSNs today.
Stopping people from withdrawing money from a checking account with a forged photo ID like a state driver's license is much easier than somebody who happens to have a SSN from a theft that took place at a local accountant's office with a huge database of SSNs. Even then, if somebody withdraws money from a bank with a fake driver's license photo, you still should have that photo of the person who did the fraud. Calling up a bank on the telephone and doing an electronic transfer with just basic contact information and an SSN with no other means of establishing identification should never happen, ever. That is the real problem.
This has nothing to do with CPU speed, but rather the bus speed that connects the CPU to other components. The last "major" upgrade on a common bus was increasing PCI frequency to 66 MHz from 33 MHz... and that took 10 years to accomplish, not the 18 month doubling of "Moore's Law" that everybody talks about. Even PCI-X is an "older technology" by many standards. And think about that too: If the bandwidth going to a peripheral card is limited by the fundimental bus architechture, why should peripheral designers try to push the bandwidth of their products as well? Gigabit ethernet is nice, but as a practical matter you can't get that gigabit bandwidth of data across the PCI bus to the CPU. PCI-X at full bandwidth is 66 MHz @ 64 bit parallell = 4 Gigabits/s (roughly). Keep in mind that you also have to include protocol overhead, bus interrupts, and other factors that also substantially reduce the actual throughput, not to mention legacy support for the 33 MHz devices as well.
An optical "bus" would indeed be a huge improvement, and something in the realm of where you can put TTL logic to optical converters and have them mean something. A 100 Gigabit/s bus would mean a 25 x improvement in bus throughput that would paint the bullseye on system speed improvement to memory designers, just as you have suggested. And memory designers are also hampered by bus bandwidth as well (memory bus in this case) because refinement of the memory chips designs themselves are trivial compared to CPU improvements.
I would also like to add a little bit regarding the lattitude of San Francisco, and general environmental conditions there compared to the Greek Isles and the Agean Sea: San Francisco has a substantially colder environment than Athens, even though surprisingly it is further south in lattitude than Athens (look it up if you don't believe me... I had to check myself).
Experiments like these that try to "disprove" a historical concept often have errors. I'd like to see a group 200 years from now try to reproduce the Apollo 11 spacecraft using only historical documents to try and figure out how people got to the moon in the 1960's. I think it would be similar difficulty, other than perhaps the documentation would be more extensive...although in 200 years who knows?
I tend to give more credit to people that were alive in the past. They may not have had all the electronic gadgets we have now, but they weren't stupid either.
Sid Meier: "The days of guys building a game in their garage and then selling it to a publisher are behind us, I'm afraid."
Guess somebody forgot to tell Marcos Healy.
The days are long gone when people will simply play your game just because it exists... a benefit that the early game designers had back elsewhen.
When the first personal computers were being marketed, it is hard to understand that the number of people involved with the industry was incredibly small. Apple Computer sold 10,000 computers their first year, and was considered a wild success at that, having a huge market share compared to the other computer manufacturers.
One thing that many of these early adopters were hungry for, because it took time, money, and effort to get going, was simply any sort of computer software. Simply put, if it compiled successfully and didn't crash your computer after 10 minutes, most software was considered successful. There were dozens of companies that threw together quick and dirty games covering almost every topic you can imagine, and many of these early computer games were successful simply because they existed. The tough part was trying to figure out how to "market" the software and get it into the hands of ordinary computer users when not only was the internet not available, neither were BBSs. A few computer clubs, swap meets, and some early computer hobbiest magazines were about all you had, or conventions like COMDEX, but even then those gatherings would only have a regional draw of just a few hundred people.
Into this sort of environment, you could put together a computer software company in your garage, and the logistics of trying to get your software into the hands of 10% of all computer users for a particular brand of computer weren't all that difficult. If you tried to ship a CD to 10% of the PC owners in the USA alone.... it would take a major investment and be a huge task. Of course, the internet makes a huge difference today on distribution methods and targeting smaller niche communities. That is really where a garage computer company still is able to succeed: a small niche application where major software development companies don't want to bother or don't think it is worth their time to develop specalized software for a small audience. Even then, there are enough programmers out there now that even these small niches are getting filled. That just wasn't the case 30 years ago.
This is spoken like a true lawyer. I do like the "rule of law", but even the most corrupt politician can clearly see that the legal system is in dire need of reform. It doesn't have to be like this, where every little petty detail has to be examined and umpired into oblivion for every action.
Most lawyers that I have ever the unpleasant opportunity to deal with (other than through social connections completely unrealted to the legal profession) were usually such horrible jackasses (that is the kind polite word for it. I could call them m(*(*& f****** instead or worse) that if it weren't for my person code of ethics I would take a shotgun to their head and blow them away for what they have called both myself and my family. Things that normally in a professional setting would get your ass fired for even saying that to a customer or client. They think they have the power to control people's lives and could care less about ordinary civility.
Generally, when you are in a business relationship and you play the "lawyer" card, you know the deal has gone south and is no longer worth keeping. Essentially a nuclear option in most business relationships.
As far as trusting a judge to research and consider all arguments.... this is exactly what the so-called arbitration agreements try to push you into doing as well. In some ways it would be nice to have a neutral 3rd party to review an argument or disagreement.
One "reform" to the legal system would be some substantial punishment to lawyers who abuse the system with frivlous lawsuits. The penalties for sloppy legal work (where the lawyer filing a lawsuit doesn't understand the law) or trying to enforce "rights" that are clearly illegal or unwarrented... obvious to any recent law school grad, should result in curtailment of legal privileges and ultimately disbarrment or even prison time. As it is, most lawyers get a slap on the hand and told to "play nice in the future" if they seem to cross the line.
Saying all of this, I do know some honest lawyers, and some people who try to help others genuinely navigate the legal system with a hope that wrongs can be righted. I just fail to see how those that spoil the reputation of these few honest souls get what they deserve and the punishment for often destroying the lives of ordinary people.
NASA was totally pissed about this happening. They were single before being selected for the mission, but got married during the long hours and years of training for the mission. They didn't seek nor feel it was up to NASA to grant permission to get married, and NASA had to find out from their media relations office when a reporter asked a question about the couple being the first married couple to fly in space. By the time NASA officials in charge of flight assignments found out, it was too late into mission preparations to bring in a replacement, and besides, the crew was getting along just fine so the mission commander refused to budge on breaking up the team just a few weeks before the flight.
The "official" reason NASA didn't want to have couples fly together on space missions wasn't space sex concerns, but a concern that if a shuttle blew up that it wouldn't wipe out an entire family at once. Kinda like why companies don't like their officers taking the same flights when traveling to business meetings. I worked for a company that refused to let two engineers take the same flight for fear of having the whole engineering department get taken out in a single plane crash or terrorist incident.
Are you sure that you did proper "advertising" to get the word out about your product? I'm not talking a Super Bowl spot, but there are ways to let people know you have a cool piece of software that don't cost much money, or have any cost for that matter, especially if it is genuinely "open source" as you suggest.
Was the software buggy? Was it easy to use? Did it run on computers/operating systems other than Debian Linux? Why did particularly an open source project require "enough subscribers to get funding"? Where were the funds you did get go? That you even got a single penny out of any supporters already puts you ahead of 90% of all open source projects.
It might be nice to have a robotic "companion" with you if you are being chased by sharks... the robot gets in the way or makes itself appealing somehow to the shark while swimming in another direction away from you. Dropping some "blood" or some other lure while you try to get the hell out of the way.
I would imagine it would be nice to have a "fish" with a camera as well that could help with the fliming of whatever you are doing underwater. The AI on that could be programmed to simply follow you whereever you go, or follow some sort of sonic beeper to keep things even simpler.
I'm sure other uses could be made for this besides the two I mentioned above.
When doing a chip design, sometimes you put in some "don't care" conditions where output conditions can be of any logic level. This is done to help simplify the logic of the chips and to reduce complexity of the overall design. The problem comes when those "don't care" conditions become something that you need to worry about. That is just one possible issue that he is dealing with here. Other issues can include numeric overflow, where the number values seem to take on a "random value", even though in normal operation the values are just fine. I've had all of these problems come up with designs I've done, and they were non-critical applications.
Apparently he was doing his job very well, and testing all kinds of conditions that he presumed would be faced by the equipment and found an error condition that would cause some problems.
I faced a similar kind of issue when I was using a vendor component that had a serious design flaw. As I was the senior engineer, I had to bring the bad news to the CEO, who was a saleman by traning and experience, not an engineer. He didn't take the news very well, particularly because we were trying to get the product out the door under a short time frame and had already committed to purchasing a large lot of the component. I ended up losing my job over the issue, but I didn't want to put my name on a product that was a piece of crap either.
BTW, that project was for a law-enforcement application that would process evidence. While not as important as aircraft parts or medical equipment, I wouldn't want shoddy stuff being used against me in court when I got pulled over by an overworked police officer, especially if I was the one who designed it in the first place.
This also appears to be somebody who is facing "culture shock" and not completely understanding the laws of the country where he is living, and instead using the cultural standards of where he is from (the USA in this case) to try and decide what to do. In America, such a gag order can only be temporary and can be appealed, and is even then often overturned. There is a huge difference between being a tourist and having to live somewhere else under a whole different legal system. I've done that myself and I never completely knew or understood all of the laws that I had to live under. Instead, I just tried to "keep my nose clean" and tried real hard not to piss off anybody... especially the local police. I ended up making friendships with some local law-enforcement officers of the country I was living in, which didn't hurt either.
It does appear that he made several mistakes, not the least of which was that he should have left Austria for the USA before he started to make some serious waves about the issue. At least there he would be having a familiar legal system to navigate and could have made a decision to never return to Austria. Now he appears to be stuck in Austria and subject to extradition if he decides to leave, with extra penalties slapped on top of that if he did leave now. In short he is screwed until all of the legal issues get resolved and can't get any other work until he either finishes his sentence in prison or is aquitted.
I don't know what planes you are flying, but most flights I've been on (domestic flights within the USA mainly) have been at least 35,000 to 40,000 feet depending on weather conditions and the position of the jet stream as well as the direction I'm traveling. I've been to 45,000 feet (as announced by the pilot). If the cities from origin to destination are more than a couple hundred miles apart, I would assume that this is fairly common. That I live in the Rockies may also have an influence on the altitude (they need to get over the peaks that are commonly above 10,000 feet around where I live) but that isn't the only reason...and the mountains look pretty small when I'm flying at the crusing altitude.
I would hate to be in one of those planes that have sudden decompression, and yes, I am very much aware of the air intake/outflow of the plane, but then again I've had a few engineering classes so I notice things like that even if I havn't designed them.
In case you havn't noticed, Israel has had nukes for several decades now. They got them in a seemingly unhold alliance with South Africa (pre-Mandella) and Taiwan. All three of those countries have nukes now, although none of them openly proclaim the fact. All three are seemingly surrounded by enemies and only very distant geographical allies.
I even got a codename for you: The main Israeli nuke is called the "Jericho". I think it is an appropriate name as well, at least from a historical perspective. I think they even have one call "Gamorrah", but I'm not so sure on that last name. All told, I think Israel has about 50-100 nukes in their arsenal. There are many reasons why there hasn't been a major war in the Middle East involving Israel since the 1973 war, and the nukes are one of them. Think about it and do some research if you think I'm wrong.
U.S. Postage is not copyrightable by itself, but the USPS does contract out designs to private artists, sometimes duplicating prior art that was not done specifically for the Post Office. They usually get a "license" to publish the artwork as a stamp, but they don't get subsequent "licenses" to redistribute the image elsewhere, so if you want to get a license to redistribut the stamp image you need to contact the original creator of the artwork.
Confusing? Yes, it it. The Post Office in this case is not claiming copyright on it, but they are not going out of their way to let you copy the stamps either.
Stamps that are of "classical" images, such as the bust of George Washington or federal monuments would be (or may be...you still have to be careful here) free to copy, but stamps are also "legal tender" in the USA as well. Litterally, they are money and can be exchanged just like dollar bills. Rarely are they used for that purpose, but they can be and are backed by the U.S. Congress and federal government just like a dollar bill. I wouldn't want to be an ass and try to buy a car with a box of stamps, however, even if the law says you can.
I think you have totally missed the point of public domain works. While it is true that it is harder to make money off of the sale of items in the public domain, because of competition, there are many business that indeed make money off of classical literature and music, for example. Copyright can be done on a performance so the Boston Pops can claim copyright on the 1812 Overture performace done for last year's 4th of July celebration, as an example, even though the music itself is in the public domain. If you add new illustrations to a classical story, like some of the Grimm Brother's stories, you can claim copyright on those new illustrations. That is generally how book publishers continue to make money off of classical children's literature.
In the case of the map, the map information itself is not necessarily copyrighted as you can use the information from the map and generate your own map. You just can't use the exact version of the map that has been copyrighted. I think that is a critical point that is missing from the article. Has a new map been created with the station stop information, etc. by a "fan" of the particular subway system, and then that was either placed in the public domain or with a copyleft license like the GFDL or Create Commons, there would have been no major issue involved. As far as "derived information" is concerned, you could even spend a day or two on the subway system and even "generate" the map information on your own if you had to prove that it wasn't a direct derivation of the copyrighted map.
The only kind of map that wouldn't work for would be maps of fantasy worlds, where you have copyright issues to contend with anyway as it would be a derivitive work of the original book or piece of literature you are trying to map (such as a map of Harry Potter's England).
The legal term you are seeking about compulsory aquisition of property is emminant domain. The government claims soverignty on land and can force you to vacate a piece of property for what the government entity feels is a greater public good. Conneticut just did this to a bunch of homes so they could build a Wal-mart in a neighborhood where the residents didn't want to sell their homes for the shopping center. That made for some interesting case law and really marks the outer extremes of how much this power can be use (for just about anything). I don't know how far that would extend to so-called intellectual property, but I can imagine circumstances where that might also happen.
As far as copyright being a cash cow for a company is hardly going to be a good legal point, however. And as for UK law on copyright, it was incredibly abusive in the 18th and 19th Centuries where perpetual copyright was granted on some key kinds of documents, including the Bible (King James edition no less) and some important legal documents that many businesses needed in order to simply operate and comply with the law. And abusive prices were charged to obtain those documents as the copyright holders could charge whatever they wanted. Crown copyright can also be perpetual in many cases, and it was this "royal charter" copyright grant that was heavily abused. American copyright law originally was written to overcome some of those blatant abuses, and there is common law practice in America (unknown to current jurists, unfortunately) that tried to overcome some of these previous abuses. In particular the "limited time" clause in the U.S. Constitution was written specifically to avoid the problems of early British copyright law that even applied in the colonies before the American Revoluntion. Believe it or not, that was one (minor) cause of the American Revolution.
I forgot to add this point: BART is not a state agency, so this California law doesn't apply. BART (Bay-area Rapid Transit) is a private for-profit company that just happens to get a bunch of tax dollars and acts like a government, so for copyright purposes it can claim copyright status on all of the things it generates, including maps of its system. Kinda stinks, doesn't it.
Some states, notably California, have also placed all of its content into the public domain. Most other states, however, don't have a state policy and most state agencies "claim" copyright on all materials that are generated by state employees. State universities are particularly awful at this issue and will claim copyright on just about everything, including submitted homework (i.e. if you write a term paper or a piece of software as a class assignment, the university claims ownership on the stuff that you did.)
I agree that if it was created by a governmental agency, some sort of license should be made available that at least does something like copyleft for the citizens of the respective juristiction.
The #1 reason nobody in the climatological community will speak out against global warming is that it has been so politically charged that speaking out will be a career killer. To say anything other than the current scientific dogma that global warming is caused by humans and is the bane of modern society. That is true in other scientific disciplines (speaking out against accepted views... like a biologist who questions evolution, for example) but this one in particular has a hard following.
For myself, I don't doubt that there is global warming, but I do strongly question its causes. I also strongly question some of the measurement techniques used for climate research, and in particular question most global temperature models for a substantial lack of data and using only the past 30 years or so as the "benchmark" for future measurements. That human-caused pollution does have an impact may be true, but to what extent and how far it changes the global climate is IMHO the part that I question. I also strongly question why I need to have a low-flow toilet when I need to flush the darn thing two or three times to get the stuff down, as an example. Other environmental laws that adversely affect my lifestyle I also feel like I should question when they are based on emotion rather than scientific fact. Be a responsible steward with your environment, sure, and take care of things we can afford. If automobile efficiency can be improved, it will help more than just the environment as well. We shouldn't have to worry, however, about the global warming impacts of trying to pump out the water in New Orleans from the current hurricane season...especially when people's lives are on the line at the moment.
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These ideas are so much against the traditional experience of most English-speaking people that is it no wonder that these ideas are rejected out of hand almost immediately.
English culture is one of assimilation and absorbtion. Even more so in America, where huge numbers of people are being absorbed into a mainstream culture that speaks essentially only one language. It takes time and a few generations, but this method has worked surprisingly well, and if we as English speakers relied upon some distant committee in London (or perhaps a counterpart in Boston, using a method similar to the Spanish langauge institutes are organized to deal with the Americas once population growth crossed the Atlantic) to come up with our langauge we wouldn't go anywhere or cope with linguistic situations that are far from the centers of academia.
The coining of new words and borrowing of word from other languages and cultures is so pervasive with English language users that it is almost like breathing air and is second nature to almost all native users of English. The truth is that most academic linguists trying to study English as a language are constantly trying to "catch up" and just simply catalog what is out there and identify what current usage of the language is right now.
Much of the coinage of new words in English also occur with rising generations, particularly the teen and young adult crowd (about from 15 to 35 years old). There are several reasons for this, including an attempt to distinguish themselves from their parents, coping with new experiences and realities, and in many cases just simply having fun. Importantly, this is the culture of the people that speak English and not just the language itself. The langauge and the culture are intertwined here, and it is no small wonder that as English as a language becomes more widespread throughout the world that cultural memes from English speaking countries (free speech laws, egalitarian authority, distrust of government, and more) both come into conflict in other cultures and have a way of creeping in as well.
When you sit down and think about it, there should be no reason for a small country the size of Denmark should have as significant of a cultural and linguistic impact on the world as England has except for geography and historical accident. The assimilation features of English had more to do with coping with the hoards of peoples who invaded England after the collapse of the Roman Empire than any specific political attempt to put those features into the language. The Saxons, the Vikings, and even the Normans were dealt with by simply absorbing their languages. English as a language arose from the ordinary working peasants and a tension between the French speaking rulers and the vulgar languages of the people living in England. Eventually the kings and rulers of England realized they needed to speak with the common people they were ruling over, and the children of nobility did pick up more ordinary English with each passing generation to make English as it exists today. The distinction still exists in English, with more "Latin-like" words being considered a "high calibur" word to use, such as "manure" instead of "shit". Or try "penus" instead of "dick Words with sexual connotations show this usage perhaps to an extreme, but there are others It also demonstrates in a small way how English successfully absorbs multiple cultures into one.
I prefer to control both Africa and South America. The #1 advantage of this strategy is that if you lose one or the other continents, you still have some armies coming in. And you are equal in strength to North America and Europe, and can lash out at both as well as knock out an aspiring soul trying to control Asia. South America + Africa + Middle East give you 4 countries to defend as the rest are all "interior" and don't need extra reinforcements.
That also gives you the strength to battle over North America if you want to go in that direction, or give you options of going into Europe as well. And you can usually get an Asian country if you just need a card.
Of course it depends on how the cards are dealt out in the beginning and what your starting position is. One time I acutally succeeded in doing Asian domination first, but that is a very difficult strategy and usually gets a big bullseye painted on you.
This is just an FYI for a link to more info about Deuterium toxicity:
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http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mheavywater.h
I would have thought that Deuterium would have been just fine, but I can understand perhaps that large quantities of Deuterium can indeed slow down some metabolic processes enough to cause some problems. I was thinking more along the lines of Tritium toxicity, but being radioactive that should make a little more sense. Deuterium is atomically stable but unusual because it is consumed quickly in stars to become other atomic products (the source of most deuterium found in nature). It is much harder to combine two simple hydrogen atoms to become Deuterium through fusion.
Yeah, the Hydrino would likely behave quite a bit different from normal hydrogen, but in this case it is more like an even lower quantum state than typical quantum state for hydrogen. I don't know where the "inventor" of this idea comes up with yet another elemental name for this quantum state, however. A photon hitting the electron is going to push the electron back into a more "typical" quantum state anyway, at least with current theory.
I have seen muon catalyzed fusion taking place using a theory similar to this one where the muon takes the place of the electron to form an exotic atom. The problem with muons, however, is that they have a relatively short half-life and are therefore not useful for large scale fusion production.
As a proportion to the economy of the USSR, I would say that the Russian effort was very comparable. They had to economize simply because Russia didn't have nearly the same size of economy as the USA did at the same time. Also, the raw costs of both programs were largely hidden within military budgets as well, although in some cases there were military programs that were hidden within the NASA budget as well, so trying to come up with exact monitary figures is going to be difficult at best.
Besides, the USSR never did send anybody to the Moon. They built a lunar lander, trained cosmonauts to do the job, and tried to build the booster but the last real effort blew up on the launch pad in the first part of 1969 and they were not able to make the necessary repairs to the launch facility not to mention the rocket design itself until well after the July 1969 landing of Apollo 11. As to if Russia could have gone to the moon in the next couple of years is IMHO likely, but for political reasons they choose not to do so. Early Russian spacecraft designs were quite hazardous and took quite a bit of brute force engineering (where people die first) before they finally have perfected the current Soyuz spacecraft design.
I think the Chinese are going to discover that going to the Moon is going to take a major 1st world economy to accomplish. They are borderline there right now and it will be interesting to see just how far they go, or if it will go down in flames like the Indian attempt to get to the Moon as well. At least China has sent somebody into LEO to start with, something that India has yet to accomplish. In this space race, I think it will be more India vs. China rather than China vs. USA.
Nations I see having a major impact on space development would include:
(both obvious beyond doubt)
There are other countries that may be major players in this next frontier as well, but for the most part they are not currently even considering any rocket technology to independently get up into space. Interestingly, these are all either nuclear powers as well or are actively persuing nuclear weapon development...showing in part the size of the economies of each of these countries. I seriously doubt that Niue, for instance, will become a space power if only because they don't have the financial resource to get there, even though they may have some advantages in being a launch site.
I think you miss just how much in proportion to the overall economy that the Apollo Project cost the USA. Of course that was with 1960's technology and some concern that it could be done at all, but still it was one of the most expensive single research programs since the Manhattan Project. Certainly justified in the game Civilization as a "Great Wonder" in terms of raw resources needed to get it accomplished.
At one point, even during the height of the Vietnam War, NASA had close to 15% of the Federal Budget. Now it doesn't even get mentioned in the budget except for some occasional pork programs to some fairy god-senators. I would suspect that a similar kind of program would require a similar proportion of the GDP of China. Of course, China also has a tradition of major engineering projects made for national prestige, so it may not be that big of a deal either for them.
The IRS only started to ask for the SSN on tax documents in the mid 1970s. Part of this was to help with the automation of tax record keeping. They had access to the SSN earlier due to FICA information and other employer records, but at that time it was used only for payment into the social security trust fund directly, and tied more directly to the Social Security Administration.
In the mid-1970s the IRS decided to require you to demonstrate the existance of any dependants and/or spouse that you claim on the income tax return. Interestingly, about 10 million children suddenly ceased to exist as soon as this requirement was added, which encouraged Congress to expand the use of the SSN as a means to reduce fraud. Obviously the 10 million kids who disappeared never existed in the first place, and were often "made up" to help get a few more "dependents" to reduce tax liability.
I didn't apply for my SSN until I was 16 years old, and that was because I worked at a job that required a SSN for FICA payments. I didn't need it earlier. My children, on the other hand, had a social security application given to me in the hospital where they were born with a strongly worded statement that if I didn't apply while in the hospital that it would be considerably more difficult to apply afterward, and that I wouldn't be able to claim them for tax purposes until I applied for their SSN.
The number represented by the SSN is not that big of a deal to me, and is independent of the discussion regarding income taxes and social security existing at all. This is a number that is established by a government to uniquely identify all people within its borders. This unique identity can be done with letters or words even to make it less harsh, but that unique identity does have some practical value. I don't want to go to jail just because I happened to have the same name as somebody else who committed a crime, just as an example. That this number is tied to some political ideas that have sometimes negative connections leads to some general disparagement of the number in the first place. Also, being reduced to a mere number is a "de-humanizing" experience, and brings up things like soldier serial numbers and the numbers tatooed on Jews during the holocaust of Nazi Germany. Most people feel they are more than a mere number written down somewhere.
While I would agree almost completely with the protections and the current state of the use of SSNs in the USA, I strongly disagree with the assumption that the SSN should be something that should be protected and used as an identification, from a public policy standpoint.
The SSN is, as you have said, a serial number. It is a unique identifcation number to distinguish you from any other resident (not even citizen) of the USA even if otherwise you have the same or similar other related information. For example, my son and I have essentially the same name and live at the same address, but have very different SSNs to distinguish between the two of us.
In short, the SSN is a part of your name. If you make the SSN anything else, like banks and credit bureaus have done, you are inviting fraud to occur and deliberately setting up a crime opportunity where none should exist. The SSN should not be a password to establish identity, yet that is precisely what it has become. That is exactly why IMHO banks should be the subject of a huge class action lawsuit when they use a SSN in that fashion, and that law enforcement agencies should strongly discourage the practice of using SSNs as a password by financial instititions. So much that a prosecutor should refuse to prosecute fraud if a bank used public information like a SSN to gain access to financial resources, and legislators are stupid to think the SSN can be reasonably used as a password for financial resources.
The only real means to establish identity is through biometrics that are tied directly to that person. Things like a signature (not the electronic psuedo-signature), fingerprint, photo, retinal scan, DNA, or other increasingly difficult to copy/forge means of confirming identification should be used instead. I know that is difficult to do through telephone or on-line transactions, but then again such transactions should be constantly suspect and challenged when they occur. Private passwords/PINs/encryption keys can be established for use between individuals and instititions once that identity has been established in the first place and not before. That is unfortuately rare and seldom done, hence the problem with misuse of SSNs today.
Stopping people from withdrawing money from a checking account with a forged photo ID like a state driver's license is much easier than somebody who happens to have a SSN from a theft that took place at a local accountant's office with a huge database of SSNs. Even then, if somebody withdraws money from a bank with a fake driver's license photo, you still should have that photo of the person who did the fraud. Calling up a bank on the telephone and doing an electronic transfer with just basic contact information and an SSN with no other means of establishing identification should never happen, ever. That is the real problem.
This has nothing to do with CPU speed, but rather the bus speed that connects the CPU to other components. The last "major" upgrade on a common bus was increasing PCI frequency to 66 MHz from 33 MHz... and that took 10 years to accomplish, not the 18 month doubling of "Moore's Law" that everybody talks about. Even PCI-X is an "older technology" by many standards. And think about that too: If the bandwidth going to a peripheral card is limited by the fundimental bus architechture, why should peripheral designers try to push the bandwidth of their products as well? Gigabit ethernet is nice, but as a practical matter you can't get that gigabit bandwidth of data across the PCI bus to the CPU. PCI-X at full bandwidth is 66 MHz @ 64 bit parallell = 4 Gigabits/s (roughly). Keep in mind that you also have to include protocol overhead, bus interrupts, and other factors that also substantially reduce the actual throughput, not to mention legacy support for the 33 MHz devices as well.
An optical "bus" would indeed be a huge improvement, and something in the realm of where you can put TTL logic to optical converters and have them mean something. A 100 Gigabit/s bus would mean a 25 x improvement in bus throughput that would paint the bullseye on system speed improvement to memory designers, just as you have suggested. And memory designers are also hampered by bus bandwidth as well (memory bus in this case) because refinement of the memory chips designs themselves are trivial compared to CPU improvements.
I would also like to add a little bit regarding the lattitude of San Francisco, and general environmental conditions there compared to the Greek Isles and the Agean Sea: San Francisco has a substantially colder environment than Athens, even though surprisingly it is further south in lattitude than Athens (look it up if you don't believe me... I had to check myself).
Experiments like these that try to "disprove" a historical concept often have errors. I'd like to see a group 200 years from now try to reproduce the Apollo 11 spacecraft using only historical documents to try and figure out how people got to the moon in the 1960's. I think it would be similar difficulty, other than perhaps the documentation would be more extensive...although in 200 years who knows?
I tend to give more credit to people that were alive in the past. They may not have had all the electronic gadgets we have now, but they weren't stupid either.
The days are long gone when people will simply play your game just because it exists... a benefit that the early game designers had back elsewhen.
When the first personal computers were being marketed, it is hard to understand that the number of people involved with the industry was incredibly small. Apple Computer sold 10,000 computers their first year, and was considered a wild success at that, having a huge market share compared to the other computer manufacturers.
One thing that many of these early adopters were hungry for, because it took time, money, and effort to get going, was simply any sort of computer software. Simply put, if it compiled successfully and didn't crash your computer after 10 minutes, most software was considered successful. There were dozens of companies that threw together quick and dirty games covering almost every topic you can imagine, and many of these early computer games were successful simply because they existed. The tough part was trying to figure out how to "market" the software and get it into the hands of ordinary computer users when not only was the internet not available, neither were BBSs. A few computer clubs, swap meets, and some early computer hobbiest magazines were about all you had, or conventions like COMDEX, but even then those gatherings would only have a regional draw of just a few hundred people.
Into this sort of environment, you could put together a computer software company in your garage, and the logistics of trying to get your software into the hands of 10% of all computer users for a particular brand of computer weren't all that difficult. If you tried to ship a CD to 10% of the PC owners in the USA alone.... it would take a major investment and be a huge task. Of course, the internet makes a huge difference today on distribution methods and targeting smaller niche communities. That is really where a garage computer company still is able to succeed: a small niche application where major software development companies don't want to bother or don't think it is worth their time to develop specalized software for a small audience. Even then, there are enough programmers out there now that even these small niches are getting filled. That just wasn't the case 30 years ago.
This is spoken like a true lawyer. I do like the "rule of law", but even the most corrupt politician can clearly see that the legal system is in dire need of reform. It doesn't have to be like this, where every little petty detail has to be examined and umpired into oblivion for every action.
Most lawyers that I have ever the unpleasant opportunity to deal with (other than through social connections completely unrealted to the legal profession) were usually such horrible jackasses (that is the kind polite word for it. I could call them m(*(*& f****** instead or worse) that if it weren't for my person code of ethics I would take a shotgun to their head and blow them away for what they have called both myself and my family. Things that normally in a professional setting would get your ass fired for even saying that to a customer or client. They think they have the power to control people's lives and could care less about ordinary civility.
Generally, when you are in a business relationship and you play the "lawyer" card, you know the deal has gone south and is no longer worth keeping. Essentially a nuclear option in most business relationships.
As far as trusting a judge to research and consider all arguments.... this is exactly what the so-called arbitration agreements try to push you into doing as well. In some ways it would be nice to have a neutral 3rd party to review an argument or disagreement.
One "reform" to the legal system would be some substantial punishment to lawyers who abuse the system with frivlous lawsuits. The penalties for sloppy legal work (where the lawyer filing a lawsuit doesn't understand the law) or trying to enforce "rights" that are clearly illegal or unwarrented... obvious to any recent law school grad, should result in curtailment of legal privileges and ultimately disbarrment or even prison time. As it is, most lawyers get a slap on the hand and told to "play nice in the future" if they seem to cross the line.
Saying all of this, I do know some honest lawyers, and some people who try to help others genuinely navigate the legal system with a hope that wrongs can be righted. I just fail to see how those that spoil the reputation of these few honest souls get what they deserve and the punishment for often destroying the lives of ordinary people.
There is a legal term for that... it is called barrity, and it is illegal as well. The problem with trying to enforce this common law idea:
Another lawsuit
It is a neat game that lawyers have got themselves into, divirting money and resources from useful and productive activities.
Or like the classic legal saying: One attorney will go broke in town. Two will both become rich to no end.
NASA was totally pissed about this happening. They were single before being selected for the mission, but got married during the long hours and years of training for the mission. They didn't seek nor feel it was up to NASA to grant permission to get married, and NASA had to find out from their media relations office when a reporter asked a question about the couple being the first married couple to fly in space. By the time NASA officials in charge of flight assignments found out, it was too late into mission preparations to bring in a replacement, and besides, the crew was getting along just fine so the mission commander refused to budge on breaking up the team just a few weeks before the flight.
The "official" reason NASA didn't want to have couples fly together on space missions wasn't space sex concerns, but a concern that if a shuttle blew up that it wouldn't wipe out an entire family at once. Kinda like why companies don't like their officers taking the same flights when traveling to business meetings. I worked for a company that refused to let two engineers take the same flight for fear of having the whole engineering department get taken out in a single plane crash or terrorist incident.
Are you sure that you did proper "advertising" to get the word out about your product? I'm not talking a Super Bowl spot, but there are ways to let people know you have a cool piece of software that don't cost much money, or have any cost for that matter, especially if it is genuinely "open source" as you suggest.
Was the software buggy? Was it easy to use? Did it run on computers/operating systems other than Debian Linux? Why did particularly an open source project require "enough subscribers to get funding"? Where were the funds you did get go? That you even got a single penny out of any supporters already puts you ahead of 90% of all open source projects.
It sounds like sour grapes to me on this one.
It might be nice to have a robotic "companion" with you if you are being chased by sharks... the robot gets in the way or makes itself appealing somehow to the shark while swimming in another direction away from you. Dropping some "blood" or some other lure while you try to get the hell out of the way.
I would imagine it would be nice to have a "fish" with a camera as well that could help with the fliming of whatever you are doing underwater. The AI on that could be programmed to simply follow you whereever you go, or follow some sort of sonic beeper to keep things even simpler.
I'm sure other uses could be made for this besides the two I mentioned above.
When doing a chip design, sometimes you put in some "don't care" conditions where output conditions can be of any logic level. This is done to help simplify the logic of the chips and to reduce complexity of the overall design. The problem comes when those "don't care" conditions become something that you need to worry about. That is just one possible issue that he is dealing with here. Other issues can include numeric overflow, where the number values seem to take on a "random value", even though in normal operation the values are just fine. I've had all of these problems come up with designs I've done, and they were non-critical applications.
Apparently he was doing his job very well, and testing all kinds of conditions that he presumed would be faced by the equipment and found an error condition that would cause some problems.
I faced a similar kind of issue when I was using a vendor component that had a serious design flaw. As I was the senior engineer, I had to bring the bad news to the CEO, who was a saleman by traning and experience, not an engineer. He didn't take the news very well, particularly because we were trying to get the product out the door under a short time frame and had already committed to purchasing a large lot of the component. I ended up losing my job over the issue, but I didn't want to put my name on a product that was a piece of crap either.
BTW, that project was for a law-enforcement application that would process evidence. While not as important as aircraft parts or medical equipment, I wouldn't want shoddy stuff being used against me in court when I got pulled over by an overworked police officer, especially if I was the one who designed it in the first place.
This also appears to be somebody who is facing "culture shock" and not completely understanding the laws of the country where he is living, and instead using the cultural standards of where he is from (the USA in this case) to try and decide what to do. In America, such a gag order can only be temporary and can be appealed, and is even then often overturned. There is a huge difference between being a tourist and having to live somewhere else under a whole different legal system. I've done that myself and I never completely knew or understood all of the laws that I had to live under. Instead, I just tried to "keep my nose clean" and tried real hard not to piss off anybody... especially the local police. I ended up making friendships with some local law-enforcement officers of the country I was living in, which didn't hurt either.
It does appear that he made several mistakes, not the least of which was that he should have left Austria for the USA before he started to make some serious waves about the issue. At least there he would be having a familiar legal system to navigate and could have made a decision to never return to Austria. Now he appears to be stuck in Austria and subject to extradition if he decides to leave, with extra penalties slapped on top of that if he did leave now. In short he is screwed until all of the legal issues get resolved and can't get any other work until he either finishes his sentence in prison or is aquitted.
I don't know what planes you are flying, but most flights I've been on (domestic flights within the USA mainly) have been at least 35,000 to 40,000 feet depending on weather conditions and the position of the jet stream as well as the direction I'm traveling. I've been to 45,000 feet (as announced by the pilot). If the cities from origin to destination are more than a couple hundred miles apart, I would assume that this is fairly common. That I live in the Rockies may also have an influence on the altitude (they need to get over the peaks that are commonly above 10,000 feet around where I live) but that isn't the only reason...and the mountains look pretty small when I'm flying at the crusing altitude.
I would hate to be in one of those planes that have sudden decompression, and yes, I am very much aware of the air intake/outflow of the plane, but then again I've had a few engineering classes so I notice things like that even if I havn't designed them.
In case you havn't noticed, Israel has had nukes for several decades now. They got them in a seemingly unhold alliance with South Africa (pre-Mandella) and Taiwan. All three of those countries have nukes now, although none of them openly proclaim the fact. All three are seemingly surrounded by enemies and only very distant geographical allies.
I even got a codename for you: The main Israeli nuke is called the "Jericho". I think it is an appropriate name as well, at least from a historical perspective. I think they even have one call "Gamorrah", but I'm not so sure on that last name. All told, I think Israel has about 50-100 nukes in their arsenal. There are many reasons why there hasn't been a major war in the Middle East involving Israel since the 1973 war, and the nukes are one of them. Think about it and do some research if you think I'm wrong.
U.S. Postage is not copyrightable by itself, but the USPS does contract out designs to private artists, sometimes duplicating prior art that was not done specifically for the Post Office. They usually get a "license" to publish the artwork as a stamp, but they don't get subsequent "licenses" to redistribute the image elsewhere, so if you want to get a license to redistribut the stamp image you need to contact the original creator of the artwork.
Confusing? Yes, it it. The Post Office in this case is not claiming copyright on it, but they are not going out of their way to let you copy the stamps either.
Stamps that are of "classical" images, such as the bust of George Washington or federal monuments would be (or may be...you still have to be careful here) free to copy, but stamps are also "legal tender" in the USA as well. Litterally, they are money and can be exchanged just like dollar bills. Rarely are they used for that purpose, but they can be and are backed by the U.S. Congress and federal government just like a dollar bill. I wouldn't want to be an ass and try to buy a car with a box of stamps, however, even if the law says you can.
I think you have totally missed the point of public domain works. While it is true that it is harder to make money off of the sale of items in the public domain, because of competition, there are many business that indeed make money off of classical literature and music, for example. Copyright can be done on a performance so the Boston Pops can claim copyright on the 1812 Overture performace done for last year's 4th of July celebration, as an example, even though the music itself is in the public domain. If you add new illustrations to a classical story, like some of the Grimm Brother's stories, you can claim copyright on those new illustrations. That is generally how book publishers continue to make money off of classical children's literature.
In the case of the map, the map information itself is not necessarily copyrighted as you can use the information from the map and generate your own map. You just can't use the exact version of the map that has been copyrighted. I think that is a critical point that is missing from the article. Has a new map been created with the station stop information, etc. by a "fan" of the particular subway system, and then that was either placed in the public domain or with a copyleft license like the GFDL or Create Commons, there would have been no major issue involved. As far as "derived information" is concerned, you could even spend a day or two on the subway system and even "generate" the map information on your own if you had to prove that it wasn't a direct derivation of the copyrighted map.
The only kind of map that wouldn't work for would be maps of fantasy worlds, where you have copyright issues to contend with anyway as it would be a derivitive work of the original book or piece of literature you are trying to map (such as a map of Harry Potter's England).
The legal term you are seeking about compulsory aquisition of property is emminant domain. The government claims soverignty on land and can force you to vacate a piece of property for what the government entity feels is a greater public good. Conneticut just did this to a bunch of homes so they could build a Wal-mart in a neighborhood where the residents didn't want to sell their homes for the shopping center. That made for some interesting case law and really marks the outer extremes of how much this power can be use (for just about anything). I don't know how far that would extend to so-called intellectual property, but I can imagine circumstances where that might also happen.
As far as copyright being a cash cow for a company is hardly going to be a good legal point, however. And as for UK law on copyright, it was incredibly abusive in the 18th and 19th Centuries where perpetual copyright was granted on some key kinds of documents, including the Bible (King James edition no less) and some important legal documents that many businesses needed in order to simply operate and comply with the law. And abusive prices were charged to obtain those documents as the copyright holders could charge whatever they wanted. Crown copyright can also be perpetual in many cases, and it was this "royal charter" copyright grant that was heavily abused. American copyright law originally was written to overcome some of those blatant abuses, and there is common law practice in America (unknown to current jurists, unfortunately) that tried to overcome some of these previous abuses. In particular the "limited time" clause in the U.S. Constitution was written specifically to avoid the problems of early British copyright law that even applied in the colonies before the American Revoluntion. Believe it or not, that was one (minor) cause of the American Revolution.
I forgot to add this point: BART is not a state agency, so this California law doesn't apply. BART (Bay-area Rapid Transit) is a private for-profit company that just happens to get a bunch of tax dollars and acts like a government, so for copyright purposes it can claim copyright status on all of the things it generates, including maps of its system. Kinda stinks, doesn't it.
Some states, notably California, have also placed all of its content into the public domain. Most other states, however, don't have a state policy and most state agencies "claim" copyright on all materials that are generated by state employees. State universities are particularly awful at this issue and will claim copyright on just about everything, including submitted homework (i.e. if you write a term paper or a piece of software as a class assignment, the university claims ownership on the stuff that you did.)
I agree that if it was created by a governmental agency, some sort of license should be made available that at least does something like copyleft for the citizens of the respective juristiction.
The #1 reason nobody in the climatological community will speak out against global warming is that it has been so politically charged that speaking out will be a career killer. To say anything other than the current scientific dogma that global warming is caused by humans and is the bane of modern society. That is true in other scientific disciplines (speaking out against accepted views... like a biologist who questions evolution, for example) but this one in particular has a hard following.
For myself, I don't doubt that there is global warming, but I do strongly question its causes. I also strongly question some of the measurement techniques used for climate research, and in particular question most global temperature models for a substantial lack of data and using only the past 30 years or so as the "benchmark" for future measurements. That human-caused pollution does have an impact may be true, but to what extent and how far it changes the global climate is IMHO the part that I question. I also strongly question why I need to have a low-flow toilet when I need to flush the darn thing two or three times to get the stuff down, as an example. Other environmental laws that adversely affect my lifestyle I also feel like I should question when they are based on emotion rather than scientific fact. Be a responsible steward with your environment, sure, and take care of things we can afford. If automobile efficiency can be improved, it will help more than just the environment as well. We shouldn't have to worry, however, about the global warming impacts of trying to pump out the water in New Orleans from the current hurricane season...especially when people's lives are on the line at the moment.