I think we need to dispell the idea the e-books are not successful. They are incredibly successful, but not in the way that traditional booksellers would like them to be. The traditional bookseller business model is something like this:
Find an author... hopefully one that can write well.
Sign a contract with the author for publication.
Publish the book.
Sell to book stores.
Make $$$$$
If that is what you want to do with e-books, you are sadly mistaken on their ultimate use. All of the DRM stuff is to try and keep the literature in the traditional distribution pipeline, which in reality doesn't exist at all anyway with books of this kind.
E-books are alive and well, but not in the format that you will find for books in the top 10 list at the New York Times. Nor of that sort of literature. You pointed out Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, and other "open" literature. There are also many for-profit companies that put out stuff that is copyrighted (not in the public domain) but don't mind you redistibuting the stuff or at least getting a copy for yourself. The Microsoft API libraries, for example, can be downloaded from Microsoft, are clearly not public domain, but are a form of e-books. Many software manuals are also distributed as e-books... sometimes only as e-books to keep the cost down.
The point here is that e-books can be successful, but no major popular literature is going to be done as an e-book and be successful that way. And coming up with a whole new e-book format that requires special tools and password protection is going to really turn people off, just as coming up with a whole new image format with passwords and DRM is going to piss off people who just want to see it on their current web browser. Why should books be different?
I would agree that most people who look at e-books can't find a legitimate use for them, as you've mention, that is any different than conventional books.
Here is IMHO where an e-book is far and away superior to conventional literature:
Archival of old/ancient manuscripts
Essentially Project Gutenberg and similar related projects. An e-book offers the ability to provide to ordinary people archival documents that normally they wouldn't have access to because of the cost of publication and distribution. Here are some documents that I have been able to access that prior to the advent of an e-book was simply out of my ability to obtain because no traditional book distributor/book store was willing to sell them:
Classic Literature - Specifically I never read the original Grimm Brother's collection of stories until I got it from P.G. Sure, you can find many adaptations all over the place, and retellings of the stories, but until I found a (translated to English) copy of the original text, I was never able to see the original stories... or discover stories that have been left out of the "mainstream" publications.
Historical Documents - While many of these can also be found in bookstores and elsewhere, it is usually in an obscure reference somewhere and often hard to find unless you have acess to a major University library. For example, it was through e-book format I read the Federalist Papers for the first time, and got an insight into the founding of the USA that a traditional history book simply doesn't cover.
Supreme Court rulings and other legal documents - Again, a traditional bookstore will never carry items like this, nor would a typical small-town library be able to keep up with all of the documents that come from the court system. Being able to read the full text of Eldridge vs. Ashcroft straight from the U.S. Supreme Court was able to give me information that no newspaper account or/. opinion could have possibly given to me. I've also read other legal concepts and had access to my state legal code... which I've used into convincing some people to get money to me rather than going to court with a lawsuit. When you point out that a particular activity is illegal and can cite specific legal code to support your argument, generally you will find people will agree with you unless they also happen to be a lawyer. Even then they will try to avoid getting in your hair.
Obscure languages - Often you can get foreign literature and instructions on how to speak those languages for some of the major languages that are widely spoken. French, German, even Chinese can be found in many book stores. About the only place to learn Cherokee or Hawaiian is from an e-book or other on-line resources...or hunt down a native speaker if you happen to be lucky enough to find one. Why learn an obsure language like these? Why not? There are stories to be told and a cultural understanding that is lost when you don't know these ancient cultures and the way they express their thoughts.
Missing manuals - If for some reason I am trying to figure out how to work with my 2 year old DVD player trying to make an obscure setting, or trying to troubleshoot why my dishwasher isn't working, I have been able to grab the original instruction manuals for my appliances straight from the manufacturer. While it may not have influenced my decision to purchase an appliance the first time when I bought the stuff from the store, having access to these manuals is invaluable and useful. I see no reason why car manufacturers couldn't keep repair manuals and other in-depth information literature on-line and available as an e-book download. Usually the bandwidth needed to keep stuff like this on-line is trivial anyway.
Technical documents - this should be dear and near to the heart of all/. readers. Where else are you going to get the original RFC documents but by e-book? W3C literature? other technical specs? If you are v
That is far from true either. Composite materials (like made the name Scaled Composites) have advanced incredibly for a number of different areas, and in particular aviation.
And a large number of rocket propulsion systems have been tested by private researchers...particularly in regards on how to make propulsion cheaper per pound sent up. That is something that NASA has done little if any research toward.
Space Medicine has also had huge leaps of knowledge since the 1960's. We know quite a bit now (thanks in part to the Russians, MIR, and a little bit from the ISS) about how the human body works in space, what dangers to look for, and what major concerns there are. Prior to the 1960's we didn't even know about the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth.
Solar Weather observations are being done regularly now. This is something that was completely ignored by NASA, and only a bare coincidence that 1968-1973 (the time of the Apollo flights) occured during a solar sunspot minimum cycle. Being in a small spacecraft with just a couple millimeters of aluminum as protection is not going to stop the radiation effects of a solar flare hitting the moon. At the moment we can predict not only when the sun might erupt, but where the solar storms are going to be strongest at and what damage they can cause.
As far as sustainable systems are concerned, quite a bit of research has already been done about that as well. NASA has run several "missions" where people have lived in sealed habitats (like Biosphere2, but without the P.R. hoopla). More can be learned from those experiences, but to suggest we know little more than 1970 about this stuff is ignoring a huge amount of research.
Of course Derek, you just like to argue and suggest that all of us are just clueless as well.
If you told the "typical" American that NASA doesn't launch any spacecraft, including the shuttle, they would generally try to contridict you. Yes, you are technically correct that the people doing the launches are not NASA employees but rather NASA subcontractors, but that is really splitting hairs. The people doing the launches just go through a different heirarchy of management than through the Federal Government civil service appointments, and a few for-profit companies get to milk the Federal money cow a little bit more. Just more graft and corruption, IMHO, but that doesn't matter.
In terms of general voter support, most ordinary citizens still do support NASA, which is why there is still incredible desire on the part of people to view space launches (the Florida space coast always has its hotels fill up before a manned launch) and huge ratings for television networks that cover those launches for its news programming. That is some sort of support. As far as the P.R. stuff I was talking about... this is perception from ordinary folks, not to those informed about the real community. And yes, speeches by John F. Kennedy, LBJ, and even Nixon did indeed promise that eventually ordinary Americans would eventually go into space thanks to the pioneering efforts of the original astronauts. That is a failed promise by NASA, and one they don't want to talk about, and was a part of the sales job to convince voters to have several percentage points of the GDP going into the space program back in the 1960's. You can argue that it was to help fuel military spending as well, but that was not the bill of goods sold the the American public.
As far as actual revenue from "space-tourism", the best current example I can come up with is Space Adventures, which has indeed sold several flights into space.
Zero-G Adventure has been booking flights as well. Just for the "Vomit Comet" style free-fall experience, people are willing to pay about $4000 per flight, and they don't seem to be hurting for customers at the moment. Indeed, they are expanding into many other areas with more planes, and in particular Las Vegas seems to be the next major city they will be flying out of. Maybe they are Baby Boomers and greying Gen-X'ers who want to be "Buck Rogers" in their own mind, but these are still people with a passion that want to get into space.
And right now manned space exploration is indeed "non-existant". With an average of one launch per year, that is hardly anything to get excited over, even if it is an improvement over the past couple of years. That is even hardly the workaday grind stuff, but rather mismanagement to an extreme degree. Going into LEO was well established and perhaps could be argued even perfected with the Gemini program. The most ambitious manned spaceflight program that seems to be in the future of NASA is more going back to Gemini, with perhaps a return to the "Big-G" spacecraft that never got built in the 1970's except as a mock-up. If that isn't a step backward, I don't know what is. That is not exploration, nor is it pushing into new frontiers and gaining any new knowledge. Apollo did push technology, and indeed did discover some incredible things about the Moon and in turn more about the Earth itself. That there was some show about it, and perhaps it could have been more science oriented than it was is true, but real science did happen there and back elsewhen.
I don't think you have any idea about the magnitude of the problem facing NASA right now. Two major facilities have been damaged, and in particular the Michoud Assembly Facility which is located right in New Orleans itself has been shut down almost indefinitely. This is the facility that manufactures and services the external fuel tanks for the Shuttle. Not exactly something that the Shuttle can live without.
One problem that NASA is facing is the fact that NASA can't even locate some of its own employees, or those of its major contractors. Some have presumably died from the Hurricane, and most of them at this facility have lost their homes completely. Many of them have been forced to flee with the other survivors in New Orleans and have been scattered all over the United States. There is an attempt to try and relocate some of the employees to other NASA facilities until repairs can be completed in New Orleans, but that may take some time. All access to Michoud is cut off due to washed out bridges and other routes, so you can only get there by helicopter or by boat, although they do have some emergency backup generators and other utilities at the moment.
This isn't incompetence, but a sheer disaster that has affected things far beyond a few football games in the New Orleans' Superdome. This is not bullshit either but a loss of life and a sign of just how important New Orleans really is to the USA, and why it can't simply be written off as a city.
Keep in mind that even the Feds themselves, in a normal emergency situation (which New Orleans is not) has claimed that it will take them about 2-3 days just to get their act together before you can expect any help. Attend any emergency preparedness clinic and you will find that out for yourself.
To be generally safe, you should have at least a 3 days supply of food and water somewhere in your house, even if you end up eating the food on a regular basis. One huge problem was that residents of New Orleans didn't even have a supply of food and water that was even that large, as they usually bought just enough food for just that day alone or maybe for the next day. For sheer survival reasons, that is not a good idea.
I've been a long-time advocate of pulling NASA out of the LEO launch service. I think if you put it in terms like that, where science, engineering, and commerce have made huge strides to the point that having NASA do this sort of "pickup to LEO" just isn't a smart thing.
All NASA programs, including unfortunately the Shuttle Program as well, have been working under the assumption of "get it done, regardless of the cost". The private sector companies working for NASA have had little incentive to try and knock the price of their efforts down to capture the next level of the market either.
Think about it in terms of just pure economics for the moment, if you will. Larger governments around the world have a few projects, like communication satellites, military surveilance equipment, orbital nuclear weapons (don't say they don't exist... you are fooling yourself if you think that dream), scientific research equipment, and things like the GPS satellite constellation. All of these items are of the sort (with the exception of perhaps strictly comm sats) that will be needed by governments regardless of the cost. Or more to the point, in a competitve global launch market the general price level per launch and what the "market" is willing to pay to get these kind of payloads to go up is about $100 million to $500 million per launch. And that is roughly what traditional commercial space launchers are charging in order to send stuff up.
The next "level" of economic demand to go up into space is for space tourism, but even multi-millionaires are only willing to spend between $10 million and at the upper end about $30 million for a trip into orbit. There is slightly more demand for this than is currently handled by the Russians, but this is about the very upper limit for what a private individual can come up with after nearly a lifetime of incredible success as a private entrepreneur. Those that have more money just aren't the type that would want to spend larger amounts of money (unless you are more like H. Ross Perot and don't care if you blow $100 million on a silly personal PR campaign that goes nowhere). The Russians have been able to capture this market exclusivly, but it is also very small. Boeing is not really interested in servicing this market in part because of how very few people there are that are willing to pay even those modest amounts. Keep in mind that the SpaceX rockets are going to be competitive in this general price range, but there really isn't going to be that many more rocket flights at $10 million per flight as opposed to $200 million per flight, so these private companies are saying essentially, "Why kill the golden eggs when we can continue to charge $200 million per flight?"
Do some simple math: If there are only 100 flights per year at $200 million per flight, compared to about maybe 300 flights per year at $10 million per flight, which price point are you going to try and market your stuff at? You actually start to seriously lose money by lowering your cost, with no real benefits except pissing off your investors and a general "goodwill" to mankind.... usually not a part of the corporate charters of any of these companies.
As Virgin Atlantic and some of the current space tourism companies have found out, there is a huge market for space travel that is in the range of $100,000 to $1 million, especially closer to the $100,000 range. Most middle-income people in 1st world countries will have that sort of money in their lifetime. Perhaps they have to mortgage their house, and certainly it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try and go up in space for that kind of money, but it is something that many very ordinary people are willing to do.
Not only is space tourism going to be feasable when you can get space launches this cheap, but there are whole new tiers of commercial applications when you can get prices down to this level, including same day or previous day parcel delivery.... when crossing the international date line as an example. This pr
If we ever get off this planet, how about we start over the right way and try not to pollute everything we touch?
Mass genocide of the human species. That is everybody, including yourself, your relatives, and mine as well.
Seriously.
Life pollutes everything it touches in all forms, and advanced life that consums resources pollutes even faster. Humans are not BTW the only creature that substantially modifies their environment for their own purposes, but certainly are proficient at doing so. Going into space isn't going to be any different.
Long live the Luna City chapter of the Sierra Club: Preservation of the Moon to restoring lunar ecology to pre-Armstrong days!
If this were a company with a proven record in more "down to earth" space ventures, a participant with the X-Prize (and actual vehicles... not cool "artist renderings and grandiose ideas), had legitimate plans for space tourism or even lunar transfer vehicles for unmanned cargo, I might actually believe that they could do this for real.
As it is, I have to agree with you. Just the/. article headlines alone made me think "boy, what a wonderful way to fleece a bunch of gullible investors and other idiots."
I disagree with many of the posters, including you guacamolefoo, that there will never be people on Mars. I think that there will be human colonization there, and people going still further into the outer and inner Solar System. On the other hand, human progress is made usually in incremental changes and only on a very rare circumstance do huge changes every happen. And that is usually a change in thinking rather than a change in actual technological means. We need to have a large and healthy commercial presence in LEO well before anything happens on the Moon or Mars, which certainly hasn't happened yet. On the other hand, Richard Branson and a bunch of other crazy fools are trying to make that happen, so it doesn't seem like so much pie in the sky anymore. We will be lucky to see government sponsored manned travel to Mars in the next 30-50 years. I think that is indeed possible, and technically we are capable of doing that now but for the willpower and political mandate. A private company can't possibly compare against the resources of major nations that are trying as well, and failing.
NASA's big PR problem seems to be "What have they done lately?" They do have a very difficult time to answer that, and only through the robotic missions can they claim any success at all lately. The Shuttle certainly seems to be a disaster in the making in the eyes of the gereral public as well as the general popular press. To watch shuttle launches now is to see if they blow up, like watching a NASCAR race or something. "If it bleeds... it leads."
As far as the NASA purchasing office as well as NASA contracts and grants are concerned, there is a whole lot of ink spilled over that whole issue. I'll defer to that body of arguments to explain what is being done, and why privitazation efforts at NASA seem to fail as well.
That is it grows if they are successful and don't make too many mistakes... easy to do in spaceflight. It has been said even of the computer industry that more money has been sunk into crazy ideas and into production equipment than has ever been made by the industry as a whole. That some companies have been profitable is true, but they also pass by the ashes of sometime very large companies that went under making the wrong decisions, being overly conservative, or just simply betting on the wrong technoogies. Private space seems to be no different in this aspect.
I've long suggested that the real money to be made in sub-orbital flight is not mere tourism but intercontinental transportation, including parcel service. If you can get a package from Sydney to London in 7 hours or less, including corrier signatures and fighting street traffic in both cities, I think you will have a very good revenue stream for that premium service alone. Or try Tokyo to New York City, where the package "arrives" the day before it "left" (at least according to local time). Talk about same day service, or even previous day service. Ballistic missiles might do this cheaply, but when getting close to population centers most people would probably like to have a "pilot" in charge to make sure that the damage is minimized or to take over when things go wrong, even if that pilot is mainly a passenger.
NASA will never get into the courrier business, nor should they. The role of NASA is to be explorers and going to the "frontier" of human existance. Orbiting the Earth at 300 km above the surface in shuttles unfortunately is way too modest of a goal and is the wrong place for NASA to be at, and should be relequished to ordinary people that can make it there now on their own without government assistance.
I do admire Rutan for the most part. He has a very successful company and a very well proven track record. It is too bad that the current Virgin Galatic guys don't share that same philosophy, but then again they are PR people and salemen at the moment, not engineers that have their nose to the grindstone.
As an engineer myself, sometimes I'll talk to a saleman to try and get customer's reactions to certain product lines and future concepts. During that conversation, sometimes I "leak out" a little bit of what we are doing in engineering. Unfortunately and through years of sad experience, most salesmen can't keep secrets even if their life depended on it (and it sometimes does), so to an especially good client who has been doing a lot of business with the saleman (with a huge commission going to the salesman as well) they will sometimes "spill the beans" about new product ideas before the concept has matured completely. I think this is exactly what has happened in the case of Virgin Atlantic.
That is for the most part a very good sign for Scaled Composites because once they do have a working product, I have no doubt that Virgin can sell the seats. The only unfortunate part is that it may put some unnecessary time pressure on Scaled Composites to try and get SS2 into production before its time. Hopefully Richard Branson (the guy most likely to mess things up right now in the wrong ways) knows how to keep that pressure off Rutan & Company before the product is in production. Rutan also appears to be a very capable engineering manager in all of the right ways, and is likely to deflect a lot of this pressure as well.
Look, I am certainly a "fan" of Scaled Composites, and I think that Burt Rutan is a very skilled aeronautical engineer. I was not aware of Rutan's involvement in the Pegasus rocket (this is the first time I've seen it mentioned, but then again I am not a deep insider of the hard core aerospace industry either.) I was aware of the Pegasus, and it is a neat design.
It is still going to be an engineering trick to move from either the Pegasus or SS1 into an orbital vehicle, and I think that there is going to be a bit of a struggle to get there. Just like aviation companies who build commercial aircraft make mistakes as well. Not all commercial aircraft are successful, although in the current market one bad mistake in an aircraft design can financially ruin a company, so they are very reluctant to make huge technological leaps and changes. That is precisely what Scaled Composites are doing.
BTW, this "news" about Rutan going into space is really old news anyway, as Rutan himself made a casual remark about orbital spacecraft (and perhaps even mentioned SS3 by name, but I'm not sure) during his interview by the American CBS television network TV show "60 Minutes". Rutan showed off his space station plans on the show as well, showing that he intends to eventually get into competition with Robert Bigelow as well. The orbiting swimming pool I thought was the neatest thing of all in the interview, by describing what it would be like to go swimming at 0.3 G's (Martian gravity BTW).
I have to agree that I prefer to buy products from (and work for) companies that tend to keep their PR under wraps until they actually have something to show for what they have been spending all of their R&D budgets. I have done too many projects that I call "design by press release", where my boss tells me what the product is supposed to do by sending out the press release, and they I have to try and shoehorn the project to meet those expectations (including customer expectations). It is never a good thing.
In the computer software industry, you can sometimes get away with that sort of mentality, but in aviation and especially rocketry I would say that is an absolute mistake. If I were running an aerospace company there is only one way I would dare make that sort of press release, and that would be if I already had the designs "on the drawing board" and had already proven most of the major technological hurdles (at least from a test lab viewpoint). Obviously Scaled Composites hasn't sent anything up besides SS1, and you (as well as others) are correct that SS1 by itself simply won't scale up to orbital velocities without some very substantial structural and raw materials changes. Essentially a whole new spacecraft from the ground up.
SpaceX I think has at least been doing the right thing, and they got a bunch of real rocket scientists that know their stuff. They will get to orbit (unmanned), and if their Falcon I is successful, the Falcon V has a very good chance of success. The Falcon V is also a "next generation" spacecraft, and does demonstrate what scaling in the aerospace industry is really all about. There are also no major "show stoppers" to the Falcon V other than government bureaucracy and idiots in congress calling it a "munition".
I see a number of things that will prevent a scaled up or modified version of SS1 from being successful as an orbital spacecraft. On the other hand, if you compare the DC-3 to the DC-10, there are some similar features between the two aircraft, but it also shows huge leaps of logic as the aeronautical engineers finally figuered out how to build aircraft. I'm willing to do a "wait and see" on this new design by Scaled Composites, but I am very skeptical.
Ah, but it does require people making a Linux distro to pay a licensing fee. That is precisely the point of this whole conversation. If you don't want to pay the fee, you must not use the name in advertising purposes (at least to be "legally safe") you can't even use the term "Linux" anywhere in any promotional literature, at least to infer that your "product" contains the Linux kernel. At most you can only use the term Linux to compare to other product, and that is only through fair-use provisions, not licensing requirments.
The trademark term "Linux(tm)" is indeed a scam from my viewpoint, precisely because it was taking a community commons concept and term (Linux) and turning it into a registered trademark that must be licensed.
Trademarks ought to be an adjective, and in this context I guess Linux is. It is the Linux(tm) brand kernel, as opposed to Mach and Win32 (or NT in the case of Windows 2000 & XP). It is indeed going to change the legal and community landscape in a subtle but major way. I do understand my trademark/patent/copyright law and the role of a brand.
In terms of brands, I like the old cattlemen's brands the best because it shows exactly what a brand is all about: They stick the "branding iron" in the fire and sear the "trademark" onto cattle so they can tell what cow belongs to whom. That is the role of a trademark, and anything else is just positioning in the legal community that is an abuse of the law. Realator should not be considered a trademark, for instance, because it is a noun, but has become such due to abuse of trademark law by real estate agents.
In the case of Linux, it was a "brand" that was used widely in the software development community for quite some time, and widely used among a great many people. Linux has also been transformed into a noun, in the case of a product like Red Hat(tm) Linux, where the trademark is Red Hat, not Linux. Similar arguments were used against Asprin and Elevator that became nouns and the word passed into common usage, and I would argue that Linux has done that and more. In essence, I am arguing that the trademark usage of the work Linux has expired from abuse in the past, and that what is happening right now is tantamount to legal extortion. Therefore a scam. It just takes somebody to suggest that the "emperor has no clothes" and take the idiots defending the Linux trademark to court. I hope that happens someday soon.
But an airline (often cited as a typical example) often does have a crew that size () will have only a very small ground crew of about 50-100 for each launch, and they don't anticipate being too much larger for the Falcon V launches which are supposed to be man-rated. Manned launches may be slightly larger, but not much more than about 200. And they do have a goal to trim that number down over time.
The Saturn V was built with an attitude of "built at whatever cost... we need to go now!" That attitude also carried over into the current Shuttle program, and has affected the economics of the whole thing, even though it was sold to congress as a cost-cutting project. Breaking free of the mindset at NASA has proved to be very difficult, even to the best administrators. Also, Presidential oversight has been lacking in part because NASA is by nature a very technical agency and trying to fix NASA requires somebody who is both very politically astute as well as technically brilliant. Usually those two qualities are not shared by the same person. I don't have them as I tend to piss people off, particularly over technical matters that I happen to know something about. I'm not even sure if you can mix engineering and politics effectively (at least in the larger realm of general politics, not politics within engineering of which there is plenty as well).
I'd like to add that the 25,000 ground crew personnel positions required to keep the shuttle operations going... rain or shine, lanuch or no launch, certainly add a huge portion of the cost to launch a single shuttle mission. If an airplace going to Europe from America would require 25,000 people to get it there and only flew once every six months, with safety reports and equipment tests that the paperwork alone would make a pile of debris in a landfill larger than the plane + "launch system" on each flight, those flights to Europe would cost about $20-$100 million each as well and would only be done as a congressional junket.
Most private initives are to try and cut the ground crew for launches down to a very manageable number, like 5-10, and to try and increase the number of launches to keep that ground crew busy. Assuming the rest of the cost of manufacturing is kept the same for private launches, that savings alone makes a huge difference. The CEV (and other designs at NASA) mainly try to keep that same 25,000 support personnel in their jobs.
As far as using the name "Linux", if you are going to have the Linux kernel in a distro you need to call it by what it really is: The Linux kernel. Anything less is not going to work, although there might be some circumlocation like "an Open Source operating system kernel that charges ungodly royalties to use their supposed registered trademark" when people are discussing a particular distro.
Perhaps RMS will finally get his way: Everybody will call the operating system GNU instead of Linux, which is just the kernel anyway. Crazy distros like "Cow-Breath Linux" are going to be a thing of the past. Oh, they will still happen, but the use of Linux as a name will slowly fade away until it is no longer used by the community, and will always be used as hate words instead.
"Oh, you are going to linux that name?" "That product is going to turn out just like linux." "What is going to be the next scam like linux?"
Mark my words... if this doesn't get resolved in a friendly manner and overturned/retracted, that is precisely what is going to happen.
Look, I do not have a Linux distribution, nor have I even contributed to the Linux kernel, nor have I made any substantial amounts of money (even for hire) off of Linux, although I have recommended it to several people over the years.
Apparently I may have been mistaken in that notion (of recommendation of Linux) and this is going to do nothing IMHO but fracture the FOSS community even more. If that is your objective, you have succeeded.
As far as $200/year... yes, that is going to keep people like myself from "trying the waters out" and doing things that might make a huge difference. Linus himself would never have started Linux under such a license with what he first released back ages ago... he wouldn't have been able to afford it as a young hacker/college student. And for myself, I'm an American, not somebody from Ethiopia, and I have some very dear friends that are from Ethiopia that such are remark is very offensive as well from their viewpoint. That this is common in the computer industry is besides the point.
As far as a certain person spending a 1/4 of a million dollars on some legal stuff... perhaps he should have sought community support for such legal costs through a non-profit foundation or some other legal structure to organize the effort to defend such a fight. Pure donations (especially for a mere $250,000 to defend a trademark?) would have been more than enough to cover these expenses, particularly over 10 years as you point out. And defend from what? Microsoft releasing a distribution called MS-Linux? Yes, there have been expenses, and perhaps the name Linux was being abused from time to time. But there is more than merely a name and a formal trademark.
I don't mind Linus trying to "get back" from the investment of time and effort he has put into his little project. What I am objecting to is the change in ground rules well after it has "matured" and common practice has long been established. Major brands like Red-Hat and others who are vested in using the Linux trademark have no choice but to pay the required fee, and apparently you are also assuming that everybody else can pay as well. Many people asked Linus and other FOSS "leaders" what it meant to have the name trademarked, and there were worries that precisely this sort of thing would happen. At the time everybody was "reassured" that nothing of the sort would happen, so "go about your business and keep contributing to the community."
I have made my own contributions in my own way, to the larger FOSS community, and plan to do more. I am glad that I haven't contributed to the kernel, and with this issue if it isn't resolved I seriously doubt that I care to do any contributions either. Or even encourage anybody I know to do so.
More to the point, Linux as an OS kernel is part of a volunteer effort from a great many people whose only "reward" was that they got a better kernel from contributing to the group than what they possibly could have come up with on their own. By charging for the trademark in this manner, it is a slap on the face of all of these volunteers and in effect telling them to go away, they aren't needed anymore now that commercial enterprises are around that can foot the bill. "Shut up and leave the computer OS software to us big guys and you little guys can play around in ignorance." Without these volunteers and others who contributed to the growth of Linux over the past many years, Linux as a trademark would have little if any value what so ever. It is from those labors that I am raising an objection, and noting that very few of the contributors to the Linux kernel are ever going to see even a single penny from these "royalty" payments, nor does it seem as though there is any effort to further the efforts of this community.
That is still BS from at least the general community viewpoint that the Linux name was trademarked to keep it out of the hands of would-be opportunists that would gouge the community. I guess the community faith here has been broken again, but by Linus himself? What is next, GNU being trademarked (it is) and similar fees for GNU projects?
Licensing fees like this only serve one purpose: To keep potential competition out of the marketplace and to "raise the bar" for any potential entrants. This is totally against anything the Free Software/Open Source community has ever stood for, and is taking from the community instead of giving back. That is why there is such resistance to this idea, and the open hostility. It is also a major example of what is wrong with the computer industry in general, where this sort of practice is commonly accepted as a normal activity.
OK, if I suspend reality long enough to believe one is nearby and as massive as you suggest, doing a gravity assist acceleration via super massive black hole, think of the other consequences:
Tidal forces alone would rip your head from your feet due to the incredible gravitational gradient from getting as close to the black hole as you suggest. And may the gods be kind to your soul if you are anywhere but precisely in the very center of whatever craft you are using for that slingshot. The remaining mucus that is left over from the remains of your body would pool in whatever location the gravity would be left at. And that is assuming that the spaceship itself is made out of unobtanium with a tensil strength on the hull sufficient to build a space elevator or better. Probably a lot stronger than that. And soldering joints on all electronics going to heck.
Debris around the black hole is the least of your worries.
Of course inertial dampners might be able to help you out if you can possibly invent something like them... but at that point you are likely to have FTL transportation technology available to you as well, in addition to your teleportation machine.
While Apollo 13 did do a partial orbit around the moon to return back to the Earth (setting an all-time aviation record for the furthest any human has ever been from the Earth), it was not a gravity assist acceleration that you seem to be indicating. The Galileo space probe was perhaps the most unique spacecraft, however, to use the gravity assist method for acceleration, including going by the Earth twice (after going around the sun completely first) to get extra momentum.
I was going to say the same thing. This is very old news... almost ancient (from my young mind's viewpoint). I had an astronomy prof. who even suggested this almost 15 years ago, and I had just assumed that everybody..... well, you just can't save the ignorant. It is also hard to keep up on all of the latest astronomy news, especially the/. editorial staff.
I'm sorry that I get a little rough on-line. Some of it may be sleep deprivation (from reading/. at ungodly hours of the night) and from a usually combatative on-line environment that/. usually gets.
I agree that things can be done to improve the system... and that is why I'm involved in doing exactly that myself. I tend to hang out at Wikibooks instead of Wikipedia. This is a much smaller community, and one that has been overrun by vandals from Wikipedia that see it as an easy target. Some recent changes are going to make life a little harder on the vandals, but I don't care to discuss them in so public of a forum as/.
One thing I'm involved with right now is trying to tighten up the standards for Wikibooks, and your comments about citations apply doubly so for textbooks and educational materials to be taken seriously in an acedemic environment. One of the successful projects is a textbook for high school physics that apparently is going to be used in South Africa this fall (if it can be completed as far as a version 1.0 is conerned). There are a couple of "best of" that look promising, but almost nothing at this site is really up to publishing quality yet.
I've been spending so much time on organization issues and trying to clean up messes left behind by others that unfortunately I havn't been spending as much time writing content as I have wanted to do. And there are a couple of cool books I'm working on that may make a minor impact in this world. Hopefully I can get back to them soon.
One of the problems with articles about the humanities (history, antrhopolgy, sociology, linguistics, ect.) is that there isn't ONE TRUTH but rather a multitude of opinions and viewpoints. Wikipedia tries to push forward a Neutral Point of View (usually abbreviated NPOV in editor talk), and most often that resolves the issue.
You are correct that controvercial pages (like Israel or George W. Bush) are going to have people from very different viewpoints that are participating.
The voting process on Wikipedia does leave a little to be desired. When you have one loose cannon the voting process can be used to put that person into check, but when you have out right controversy (even over inane petty details that aren't necessarily right vs. left political philosophies) the resolution process does seem to grind to a halt and the stronger personalities start to "take over" the process. This results in the edit wars you are talking about.
In terms of the English-speaking countries dominating the English-language Wikipedia.... what do you expect? Of course they are going to be dominating where they speak it naturally. If you want to see cultural biases, try to read some of the Wikipedias in other languages. You will find that instead of a U.S. or British bias, that it will be more toward the dominant countries for that language instead.
The Chinese Wikipedia is particularly harsh as it is being dominated by politics in the P.R.C. So much so that it has been accused of being very close to an "official organ" of the communist government.
German and French Wikipedias also have some policies that more directly reflect their cultures. Writing content about the Nazi party that would be accepted as normal in the USA might be heavily edited in the German Wikipedia, and certainly casual use of the swastika is not permitted... they are particularly sensitive to the subject.
The Japanese culture has an interesting viewpoint toward copyright. By cultural custom and even Japanese law it is impossible to have public domain works. They don't seem to have too much of a problem with copyleft, but the idea of trying to hack apart and rework public domain content to the point it is no longer recognizable from its original form is frowned upon and considered unethical. This is also reflected in the Japanese Wikipedia and some of their unique policies that are different from the English-language based Wikipedia.
An ongoing discussion is wheither a language-based Wikipedia ought to conform to the copyright laws and standards of the dominating country or should it be more standardized across all Wikipedia projects. Considering the physical servers are located in Florida, a point can be made that only U.S. law applies to what can and can't be put on the servers, and that French law and customs don't apply. But if in the case of the French Wikipedia, most of the contributors are from France or Quebec. Should French law apply if the main authors are from France? It is different from U.S. law in some substantial details, so it can make a difference. Generally everybody just tries to muddle their way through it all and not get caught up in the ugly details.
Slashdot Mirror
If that is what you want to do with e-books, you are sadly mistaken on their ultimate use. All of the DRM stuff is to try and keep the literature in the traditional distribution pipeline, which in reality doesn't exist at all anyway with books of this kind.
E-books are alive and well, but not in the format that you will find for books in the top 10 list at the New York Times. Nor of that sort of literature. You pointed out Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, and other "open" literature. There are also many for-profit companies that put out stuff that is copyrighted (not in the public domain) but don't mind you redistibuting the stuff or at least getting a copy for yourself. The Microsoft API libraries, for example, can be downloaded from Microsoft, are clearly not public domain, but are a form of e-books. Many software manuals are also distributed as e-books... sometimes only as e-books to keep the cost down.
The point here is that e-books can be successful, but no major popular literature is going to be done as an e-book and be successful that way. And coming up with a whole new e-book format that requires special tools and password protection is going to really turn people off, just as coming up with a whole new image format with passwords and DRM is going to piss off people who just want to see it on their current web browser. Why should books be different?
Here is IMHO where an e-book is far and away superior to conventional literature:
Archival of old/ancient manuscripts
Essentially Project Gutenberg and similar related projects. An e-book offers the ability to provide to ordinary people archival documents that normally they wouldn't have access to because of the cost of publication and distribution. Here are some documents that I have been able to access that prior to the advent of an e-book was simply out of my ability to obtain because no traditional book distributor/book store was willing to sell them:
That is far from true either. Composite materials (like made the name Scaled Composites) have advanced incredibly for a number of different areas, and in particular aviation.
And a large number of rocket propulsion systems have been tested by private researchers...particularly in regards on how to make propulsion cheaper per pound sent up. That is something that NASA has done little if any research toward.
Space Medicine has also had huge leaps of knowledge since the 1960's. We know quite a bit now (thanks in part to the Russians, MIR, and a little bit from the ISS) about how the human body works in space, what dangers to look for, and what major concerns there are. Prior to the 1960's we didn't even know about the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth.
Solar Weather observations are being done regularly now. This is something that was completely ignored by NASA, and only a bare coincidence that 1968-1973 (the time of the Apollo flights) occured during a solar sunspot minimum cycle. Being in a small spacecraft with just a couple millimeters of aluminum as protection is not going to stop the radiation effects of a solar flare hitting the moon. At the moment we can predict not only when the sun might erupt, but where the solar storms are going to be strongest at and what damage they can cause.
As far as sustainable systems are concerned, quite a bit of research has already been done about that as well. NASA has run several "missions" where people have lived in sealed habitats (like Biosphere2, but without the P.R. hoopla). More can be learned from those experiences, but to suggest we know little more than 1970 about this stuff is ignoring a huge amount of research.
Of course Derek, you just like to argue and suggest that all of us are just clueless as well.
If you told the "typical" American that NASA doesn't launch any spacecraft, including the shuttle, they would generally try to contridict you. Yes, you are technically correct that the people doing the launches are not NASA employees but rather NASA subcontractors, but that is really splitting hairs. The people doing the launches just go through a different heirarchy of management than through the Federal Government civil service appointments, and a few for-profit companies get to milk the Federal money cow a little bit more. Just more graft and corruption, IMHO, but that doesn't matter.
In terms of general voter support, most ordinary citizens still do support NASA, which is why there is still incredible desire on the part of people to view space launches (the Florida space coast always has its hotels fill up before a manned launch) and huge ratings for television networks that cover those launches for its news programming. That is some sort of support. As far as the P.R. stuff I was talking about... this is perception from ordinary folks, not to those informed about the real community. And yes, speeches by John F. Kennedy, LBJ, and even Nixon did indeed promise that eventually ordinary Americans would eventually go into space thanks to the pioneering efforts of the original astronauts. That is a failed promise by NASA, and one they don't want to talk about, and was a part of the sales job to convince voters to have several percentage points of the GDP going into the space program back in the 1960's. You can argue that it was to help fuel military spending as well, but that was not the bill of goods sold the the American public.
As far as actual revenue from "space-tourism", the best current example I can come up with is Space Adventures, which has indeed sold several flights into space.
Zero-G Adventure has been booking flights as well. Just for the "Vomit Comet" style free-fall experience, people are willing to pay about $4000 per flight, and they don't seem to be hurting for customers at the moment. Indeed, they are expanding into many other areas with more planes, and in particular Las Vegas seems to be the next major city they will be flying out of. Maybe they are Baby Boomers and greying Gen-X'ers who want to be "Buck Rogers" in their own mind, but these are still people with a passion that want to get into space.
And right now manned space exploration is indeed "non-existant". With an average of one launch per year, that is hardly anything to get excited over, even if it is an improvement over the past couple of years. That is even hardly the workaday grind stuff, but rather mismanagement to an extreme degree. Going into LEO was well established and perhaps could be argued even perfected with the Gemini program. The most ambitious manned spaceflight program that seems to be in the future of NASA is more going back to Gemini, with perhaps a return to the "Big-G" spacecraft that never got built in the 1970's except as a mock-up. If that isn't a step backward, I don't know what is. That is not exploration, nor is it pushing into new frontiers and gaining any new knowledge. Apollo did push technology, and indeed did discover some incredible things about the Moon and in turn more about the Earth itself. That there was some show about it, and perhaps it could have been more science oriented than it was is true, but real science did happen there and back elsewhen.
I don't think you have any idea about the magnitude of the problem facing NASA right now. Two major facilities have been damaged, and in particular the Michoud Assembly Facility which is located right in New Orleans itself has been shut down almost indefinitely. This is the facility that manufactures and services the external fuel tanks for the Shuttle. Not exactly something that the Shuttle can live without.
One problem that NASA is facing is the fact that NASA can't even locate some of its own employees, or those of its major contractors. Some have presumably died from the Hurricane, and most of them at this facility have lost their homes completely. Many of them have been forced to flee with the other survivors in New Orleans and have been scattered all over the United States. There is an attempt to try and relocate some of the employees to other NASA facilities until repairs can be completed in New Orleans, but that may take some time. All access to Michoud is cut off due to washed out bridges and other routes, so you can only get there by helicopter or by boat, although they do have some emergency backup generators and other utilities at the moment.
This isn't incompetence, but a sheer disaster that has affected things far beyond a few football games in the New Orleans' Superdome. This is not bullshit either but a loss of life and a sign of just how important New Orleans really is to the USA, and why it can't simply be written off as a city.
Keep in mind that even the Feds themselves, in a normal emergency situation (which New Orleans is not) has claimed that it will take them about 2-3 days just to get their act together before you can expect any help. Attend any emergency preparedness clinic and you will find that out for yourself.
To be generally safe, you should have at least a 3 days supply of food and water somewhere in your house, even if you end up eating the food on a regular basis. One huge problem was that residents of New Orleans didn't even have a supply of food and water that was even that large, as they usually bought just enough food for just that day alone or maybe for the next day. For sheer survival reasons, that is not a good idea.
I've been a long-time advocate of pulling NASA out of the LEO launch service. I think if you put it in terms like that, where science, engineering, and commerce have made huge strides to the point that having NASA do this sort of "pickup to LEO" just isn't a smart thing.
All NASA programs, including unfortunately the Shuttle Program as well, have been working under the assumption of "get it done, regardless of the cost". The private sector companies working for NASA have had little incentive to try and knock the price of their efforts down to capture the next level of the market either.
Think about it in terms of just pure economics for the moment, if you will. Larger governments around the world have a few projects, like communication satellites, military surveilance equipment, orbital nuclear weapons (don't say they don't exist... you are fooling yourself if you think that dream), scientific research equipment, and things like the GPS satellite constellation. All of these items are of the sort (with the exception of perhaps strictly comm sats) that will be needed by governments regardless of the cost. Or more to the point, in a competitve global launch market the general price level per launch and what the "market" is willing to pay to get these kind of payloads to go up is about $100 million to $500 million per launch. And that is roughly what traditional commercial space launchers are charging in order to send stuff up.
The next "level" of economic demand to go up into space is for space tourism, but even multi-millionaires are only willing to spend between $10 million and at the upper end about $30 million for a trip into orbit. There is slightly more demand for this than is currently handled by the Russians, but this is about the very upper limit for what a private individual can come up with after nearly a lifetime of incredible success as a private entrepreneur. Those that have more money just aren't the type that would want to spend larger amounts of money (unless you are more like H. Ross Perot and don't care if you blow $100 million on a silly personal PR campaign that goes nowhere). The Russians have been able to capture this market exclusivly, but it is also very small. Boeing is not really interested in servicing this market in part because of how very few people there are that are willing to pay even those modest amounts. Keep in mind that the SpaceX rockets are going to be competitive in this general price range, but there really isn't going to be that many more rocket flights at $10 million per flight as opposed to $200 million per flight, so these private companies are saying essentially, "Why kill the golden eggs when we can continue to charge $200 million per flight?"
Do some simple math: If there are only 100 flights per year at $200 million per flight, compared to about maybe 300 flights per year at $10 million per flight, which price point are you going to try and market your stuff at? You actually start to seriously lose money by lowering your cost, with no real benefits except pissing off your investors and a general "goodwill" to mankind.... usually not a part of the corporate charters of any of these companies.
As Virgin Atlantic and some of the current space tourism companies have found out, there is a huge market for space travel that is in the range of $100,000 to $1 million, especially closer to the $100,000 range. Most middle-income people in 1st world countries will have that sort of money in their lifetime. Perhaps they have to mortgage their house, and certainly it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try and go up in space for that kind of money, but it is something that many very ordinary people are willing to do.
Not only is space tourism going to be feasable when you can get space launches this cheap, but there are whole new tiers of commercial applications when you can get prices down to this level, including same day or previous day parcel delivery.... when crossing the international date line as an example. This pr
Mass genocide of the human species. That is everybody, including yourself, your relatives, and mine as well.
Seriously.
Life pollutes everything it touches in all forms, and advanced life that consums resources pollutes even faster. Humans are not BTW the only creature that substantially modifies their environment for their own purposes, but certainly are proficient at doing so. Going into space isn't going to be any different.
Long live the Luna City chapter of the Sierra Club: Preservation of the Moon to restoring lunar ecology to pre-Armstrong days!
If this were a company with a proven record in more "down to earth" space ventures, a participant with the X-Prize (and actual vehicles... not cool "artist renderings and grandiose ideas), had legitimate plans for space tourism or even lunar transfer vehicles for unmanned cargo, I might actually believe that they could do this for real.
/. article headlines alone made me think "boy, what a wonderful way to fleece a bunch of gullible investors and other idiots."
As it is, I have to agree with you. Just the
I disagree with many of the posters, including you guacamolefoo, that there will never be people on Mars. I think that there will be human colonization there, and people going still further into the outer and inner Solar System. On the other hand, human progress is made usually in incremental changes and only on a very rare circumstance do huge changes every happen. And that is usually a change in thinking rather than a change in actual technological means. We need to have a large and healthy commercial presence in LEO well before anything happens on the Moon or Mars, which certainly hasn't happened yet. On the other hand, Richard Branson and a bunch of other crazy fools are trying to make that happen, so it doesn't seem like so much pie in the sky anymore. We will be lucky to see government sponsored manned travel to Mars in the next 30-50 years. I think that is indeed possible, and technically we are capable of doing that now but for the willpower and political mandate. A private company can't possibly compare against the resources of major nations that are trying as well, and failing.
NASA's big PR problem seems to be "What have they done lately?" They do have a very difficult time to answer that, and only through the robotic missions can they claim any success at all lately. The Shuttle certainly seems to be a disaster in the making in the eyes of the gereral public as well as the general popular press. To watch shuttle launches now is to see if they blow up, like watching a NASCAR race or something. "If it bleeds... it leads."
As far as the NASA purchasing office as well as NASA contracts and grants are concerned, there is a whole lot of ink spilled over that whole issue. I'll defer to that body of arguments to explain what is being done, and why privitazation efforts at NASA seem to fail as well.
That is it grows if they are successful and don't make too many mistakes... easy to do in spaceflight. It has been said even of the computer industry that more money has been sunk into crazy ideas and into production equipment than has ever been made by the industry as a whole. That some companies have been profitable is true, but they also pass by the ashes of sometime very large companies that went under making the wrong decisions, being overly conservative, or just simply betting on the wrong technoogies. Private space seems to be no different in this aspect.
I've long suggested that the real money to be made in sub-orbital flight is not mere tourism but intercontinental transportation, including parcel service. If you can get a package from Sydney to London in 7 hours or less, including corrier signatures and fighting street traffic in both cities, I think you will have a very good revenue stream for that premium service alone. Or try Tokyo to New York City, where the package "arrives" the day before it "left" (at least according to local time). Talk about same day service, or even previous day service. Ballistic missiles might do this cheaply, but when getting close to population centers most people would probably like to have a "pilot" in charge to make sure that the damage is minimized or to take over when things go wrong, even if that pilot is mainly a passenger.
NASA will never get into the courrier business, nor should they. The role of NASA is to be explorers and going to the "frontier" of human existance. Orbiting the Earth at 300 km above the surface in shuttles unfortunately is way too modest of a goal and is the wrong place for NASA to be at, and should be relequished to ordinary people that can make it there now on their own without government assistance.
I do admire Rutan for the most part. He has a very successful company and a very well proven track record. It is too bad that the current Virgin Galatic guys don't share that same philosophy, but then again they are PR people and salemen at the moment, not engineers that have their nose to the grindstone.
As an engineer myself, sometimes I'll talk to a saleman to try and get customer's reactions to certain product lines and future concepts. During that conversation, sometimes I "leak out" a little bit of what we are doing in engineering. Unfortunately and through years of sad experience, most salesmen can't keep secrets even if their life depended on it (and it sometimes does), so to an especially good client who has been doing a lot of business with the saleman (with a huge commission going to the salesman as well) they will sometimes "spill the beans" about new product ideas before the concept has matured completely. I think this is exactly what has happened in the case of Virgin Atlantic.
That is for the most part a very good sign for Scaled Composites because once they do have a working product, I have no doubt that Virgin can sell the seats. The only unfortunate part is that it may put some unnecessary time pressure on Scaled Composites to try and get SS2 into production before its time. Hopefully Richard Branson (the guy most likely to mess things up right now in the wrong ways) knows how to keep that pressure off Rutan & Company before the product is in production. Rutan also appears to be a very capable engineering manager in all of the right ways, and is likely to deflect a lot of this pressure as well.
Look, I am certainly a "fan" of Scaled Composites, and I think that Burt Rutan is a very skilled aeronautical engineer. I was not aware of Rutan's involvement in the Pegasus rocket (this is the first time I've seen it mentioned, but then again I am not a deep insider of the hard core aerospace industry either.) I was aware of the Pegasus, and it is a neat design.
It is still going to be an engineering trick to move from either the Pegasus or SS1 into an orbital vehicle, and I think that there is going to be a bit of a struggle to get there. Just like aviation companies who build commercial aircraft make mistakes as well. Not all commercial aircraft are successful, although in the current market one bad mistake in an aircraft design can financially ruin a company, so they are very reluctant to make huge technological leaps and changes. That is precisely what Scaled Composites are doing.
BTW, this "news" about Rutan going into space is really old news anyway, as Rutan himself made a casual remark about orbital spacecraft (and perhaps even mentioned SS3 by name, but I'm not sure) during his interview by the American CBS television network TV show "60 Minutes". Rutan showed off his space station plans on the show as well, showing that he intends to eventually get into competition with Robert Bigelow as well. The orbiting swimming pool I thought was the neatest thing of all in the interview, by describing what it would be like to go swimming at 0.3 G's (Martian gravity BTW).
I have to agree that I prefer to buy products from (and work for) companies that tend to keep their PR under wraps until they actually have something to show for what they have been spending all of their R&D budgets. I have done too many projects that I call "design by press release", where my boss tells me what the product is supposed to do by sending out the press release, and they I have to try and shoehorn the project to meet those expectations (including customer expectations). It is never a good thing.
In the computer software industry, you can sometimes get away with that sort of mentality, but in aviation and especially rocketry I would say that is an absolute mistake. If I were running an aerospace company there is only one way I would dare make that sort of press release, and that would be if I already had the designs "on the drawing board" and had already proven most of the major technological hurdles (at least from a test lab viewpoint). Obviously Scaled Composites hasn't sent anything up besides SS1, and you (as well as others) are correct that SS1 by itself simply won't scale up to orbital velocities without some very substantial structural and raw materials changes. Essentially a whole new spacecraft from the ground up.
SpaceX I think has at least been doing the right thing, and they got a bunch of real rocket scientists that know their stuff. They will get to orbit (unmanned), and if their Falcon I is successful, the Falcon V has a very good chance of success. The Falcon V is also a "next generation" spacecraft, and does demonstrate what scaling in the aerospace industry is really all about. There are also no major "show stoppers" to the Falcon V other than government bureaucracy and idiots in congress calling it a "munition".
I see a number of things that will prevent a scaled up or modified version of SS1 from being successful as an orbital spacecraft. On the other hand, if you compare the DC-3 to the DC-10, there are some similar features between the two aircraft, but it also shows huge leaps of logic as the aeronautical engineers finally figuered out how to build aircraft. I'm willing to do a "wait and see" on this new design by Scaled Composites, but I am very skeptical.
Ah, but it does require people making a Linux distro to pay a licensing fee. That is precisely the point of this whole conversation. If you don't want to pay the fee, you must not use the name in advertising purposes (at least to be "legally safe") you can't even use the term "Linux" anywhere in any promotional literature, at least to infer that your "product" contains the Linux kernel. At most you can only use the term Linux to compare to other product, and that is only through fair-use provisions, not licensing requirments.
The trademark term "Linux(tm)" is indeed a scam from my viewpoint, precisely because it was taking a community commons concept and term (Linux) and turning it into a registered trademark that must be licensed.
Trademarks ought to be an adjective, and in this context I guess Linux is. It is the Linux(tm) brand kernel, as opposed to Mach and Win32 (or NT in the case of Windows 2000 & XP). It is indeed going to change the legal and community landscape in a subtle but major way. I do understand my trademark/patent/copyright law and the role of a brand.
In terms of brands, I like the old cattlemen's brands the best because it shows exactly what a brand is all about: They stick the "branding iron" in the fire and sear the "trademark" onto cattle so they can tell what cow belongs to whom. That is the role of a trademark, and anything else is just positioning in the legal community that is an abuse of the law. Realator should not be considered a trademark, for instance, because it is a noun, but has become such due to abuse of trademark law by real estate agents.
In the case of Linux, it was a "brand" that was used widely in the software development community for quite some time, and widely used among a great many people. Linux has also been transformed into a noun, in the case of a product like Red Hat(tm) Linux, where the trademark is Red Hat, not Linux. Similar arguments were used against Asprin and Elevator that became nouns and the word passed into common usage, and I would argue that Linux has done that and more. In essence, I am arguing that the trademark usage of the work Linux has expired from abuse in the past, and that what is happening right now is tantamount to legal extortion. Therefore a scam. It just takes somebody to suggest that the "emperor has no clothes" and take the idiots defending the Linux trademark to court. I hope that happens someday soon.
But an airline (often cited as a typical example) often does have a crew that size () will have only a very small ground crew of about 50-100 for each launch, and they don't anticipate being too much larger for the Falcon V launches which are supposed to be man-rated. Manned launches may be slightly larger, but not much more than about 200. And they do have a goal to trim that number down over time.
The Saturn V was built with an attitude of "built at whatever cost... we need to go now!" That attitude also carried over into the current Shuttle program, and has affected the economics of the whole thing, even though it was sold to congress as a cost-cutting project. Breaking free of the mindset at NASA has proved to be very difficult, even to the best administrators. Also, Presidential oversight has been lacking in part because NASA is by nature a very technical agency and trying to fix NASA requires somebody who is both very politically astute as well as technically brilliant. Usually those two qualities are not shared by the same person. I don't have them as I tend to piss people off, particularly over technical matters that I happen to know something about. I'm not even sure if you can mix engineering and politics effectively (at least in the larger realm of general politics, not politics within engineering of which there is plenty as well).
I'd like to add that the 25,000 ground crew personnel positions required to keep the shuttle operations going... rain or shine, lanuch or no launch, certainly add a huge portion of the cost to launch a single shuttle mission. If an airplace going to Europe from America would require 25,000 people to get it there and only flew once every six months, with safety reports and equipment tests that the paperwork alone would make a pile of debris in a landfill larger than the plane + "launch system" on each flight, those flights to Europe would cost about $20-$100 million each as well and would only be done as a congressional junket.
Most private initives are to try and cut the ground crew for launches down to a very manageable number, like 5-10, and to try and increase the number of launches to keep that ground crew busy. Assuming the rest of the cost of manufacturing is kept the same for private launches, that savings alone makes a huge difference. The CEV (and other designs at NASA) mainly try to keep that same 25,000 support personnel in their jobs.
As far as using the name "Linux", if you are going to have the Linux kernel in a distro you need to call it by what it really is: The Linux kernel. Anything less is not going to work, although there might be some circumlocation like "an Open Source operating system kernel that charges ungodly royalties to use their supposed registered trademark" when people are discussing a particular distro.
Perhaps RMS will finally get his way: Everybody will call the operating system GNU instead of Linux, which is just the kernel anyway. Crazy distros like "Cow-Breath Linux" are going to be a thing of the past. Oh, they will still happen, but the use of Linux as a name will slowly fade away until it is no longer used by the community, and will always be used as hate words instead.
"Oh, you are going to linux that name?"
"That product is going to turn out just like linux."
"What is going to be the next scam like linux?"
Mark my words... if this doesn't get resolved in a friendly manner and overturned/retracted, that is precisely what is going to happen.
Look, I do not have a Linux distribution, nor have I even contributed to the Linux kernel, nor have I made any substantial amounts of money (even for hire) off of Linux, although I have recommended it to several people over the years.
Apparently I may have been mistaken in that notion (of recommendation of Linux) and this is going to do nothing IMHO but fracture the FOSS community even more. If that is your objective, you have succeeded.
As far as $200/year... yes, that is going to keep people like myself from "trying the waters out" and doing things that might make a huge difference. Linus himself would never have started Linux under such a license with what he first released back ages ago... he wouldn't have been able to afford it as a young hacker/college student. And for myself, I'm an American, not somebody from Ethiopia, and I have some very dear friends that are from Ethiopia that such are remark is very offensive as well from their viewpoint. That this is common in the computer industry is besides the point.
As far as a certain person spending a 1/4 of a million dollars on some legal stuff... perhaps he should have sought community support for such legal costs through a non-profit foundation or some other legal structure to organize the effort to defend such a fight. Pure donations (especially for a mere $250,000 to defend a trademark?) would have been more than enough to cover these expenses, particularly over 10 years as you point out. And defend from what? Microsoft releasing a distribution called MS-Linux? Yes, there have been expenses, and perhaps the name Linux was being abused from time to time. But there is more than merely a name and a formal trademark.
I don't mind Linus trying to "get back" from the investment of time and effort he has put into his little project. What I am objecting to is the change in ground rules well after it has "matured" and common practice has long been established. Major brands like Red-Hat and others who are vested in using the Linux trademark have no choice but to pay the required fee, and apparently you are also assuming that everybody else can pay as well. Many people asked Linus and other FOSS "leaders" what it meant to have the name trademarked, and there were worries that precisely this sort of thing would happen. At the time everybody was "reassured" that nothing of the sort would happen, so "go about your business and keep contributing to the community."
I have made my own contributions in my own way, to the larger FOSS community, and plan to do more. I am glad that I haven't contributed to the kernel, and with this issue if it isn't resolved I seriously doubt that I care to do any contributions either. Or even encourage anybody I know to do so.
More to the point, Linux as an OS kernel is part of a volunteer effort from a great many people whose only "reward" was that they got a better kernel from contributing to the group than what they possibly could have come up with on their own. By charging for the trademark in this manner, it is a slap on the face of all of these volunteers and in effect telling them to go away, they aren't needed anymore now that commercial enterprises are around that can foot the bill. "Shut up and leave the computer OS software to us big guys and you little guys can play around in ignorance." Without these volunteers and others who contributed to the growth of Linux over the past many years, Linux as a trademark would have little if any value what so ever. It is from those labors that I am raising an objection, and noting that very few of the contributors to the Linux kernel are ever going to see even a single penny from these "royalty" payments, nor does it seem as though there is any effort to further the efforts of this community.
That is still BS from at least the general community viewpoint that the Linux name was trademarked to keep it out of the hands of would-be opportunists that would gouge the community. I guess the community faith here has been broken again, but by Linus himself? What is next, GNU being trademarked (it is) and similar fees for GNU projects?
Licensing fees like this only serve one purpose: To keep potential competition out of the marketplace and to "raise the bar" for any potential entrants. This is totally against anything the Free Software/Open Source community has ever stood for, and is taking from the community instead of giving back. That is why there is such resistance to this idea, and the open hostility. It is also a major example of what is wrong with the computer industry in general, where this sort of practice is commonly accepted as a normal activity.
OK, if I suspend reality long enough to believe one is nearby and as massive as you suggest, doing a gravity assist acceleration via super massive black hole, think of the other consequences:
Tidal forces alone would rip your head from your feet due to the incredible gravitational gradient from getting as close to the black hole as you suggest. And may the gods be kind to your soul if you are anywhere but precisely in the very center of whatever craft you are using for that slingshot. The remaining mucus that is left over from the remains of your body would pool in whatever location the gravity would be left at. And that is assuming that the spaceship itself is made out of unobtanium with a tensil strength on the hull sufficient to build a space elevator or better. Probably a lot stronger than that. And soldering joints on all electronics going to heck.
Debris around the black hole is the least of your worries.
Of course inertial dampners might be able to help you out if you can possibly invent something like them... but at that point you are likely to have FTL transportation technology available to you as well, in addition to your teleportation machine.
While Apollo 13 did do a partial orbit around the moon to return back to the Earth (setting an all-time aviation record for the furthest any human has ever been from the Earth), it was not a gravity assist acceleration that you seem to be indicating. The Galileo space probe was perhaps the most unique spacecraft, however, to use the gravity assist method for acceleration, including going by the Earth twice (after going around the sun completely first) to get extra momentum.
I was going to say the same thing. This is very old news... almost ancient (from my young mind's viewpoint). I had an astronomy prof. who even suggested this almost 15 years ago, and I had just assumed that everybody..... well, you just can't save the ignorant. It is also hard to keep up on all of the latest astronomy news, especially the /. editorial staff.
I'm sorry that I get a little rough on-line. Some of it may be sleep deprivation (from reading /. at ungodly hours of the night) and from a usually combatative on-line environment that /. usually gets.
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I agree that things can be done to improve the system... and that is why I'm involved in doing exactly that myself. I tend to hang out at Wikibooks instead of Wikipedia. This is a much smaller community, and one that has been overrun by vandals from Wikipedia that see it as an easy target. Some recent changes are going to make life a little harder on the vandals, but I don't care to discuss them in so public of a forum as
One thing I'm involved with right now is trying to tighten up the standards for Wikibooks, and your comments about citations apply doubly so for textbooks and educational materials to be taken seriously in an acedemic environment. One of the successful projects is a textbook for high school physics that apparently is going to be used in South Africa this fall (if it can be completed as far as a version 1.0 is conerned). There are a couple of "best of" that look promising, but almost nothing at this site is really up to publishing quality yet.
I've been spending so much time on organization issues and trying to clean up messes left behind by others that unfortunately I havn't been spending as much time writing content as I have wanted to do. And there are a couple of cool books I'm working on that may make a minor impact in this world. Hopefully I can get back to them soon.
One of the problems with articles about the humanities (history, antrhopolgy, sociology, linguistics, ect.) is that there isn't ONE TRUTH but rather a multitude of opinions and viewpoints. Wikipedia tries to push forward a Neutral Point of View (usually abbreviated NPOV in editor talk), and most often that resolves the issue.
You are correct that controvercial pages (like Israel or George W. Bush) are going to have people from very different viewpoints that are participating.
The voting process on Wikipedia does leave a little to be desired. When you have one loose cannon the voting process can be used to put that person into check, but when you have out right controversy (even over inane petty details that aren't necessarily right vs. left political philosophies) the resolution process does seem to grind to a halt and the stronger personalities start to "take over" the process. This results in the edit wars you are talking about.
In terms of the English-speaking countries dominating the English-language Wikipedia.... what do you expect? Of course they are going to be dominating where they speak it naturally. If you want to see cultural biases, try to read some of the Wikipedias in other languages. You will find that instead of a U.S. or British bias, that it will be more toward the dominant countries for that language instead.
The Chinese Wikipedia is particularly harsh as it is being dominated by politics in the P.R.C. So much so that it has been accused of being very close to an "official organ" of the communist government.
German and French Wikipedias also have some policies that more directly reflect their cultures. Writing content about the Nazi party that would be accepted as normal in the USA might be heavily edited in the German Wikipedia, and certainly casual use of the swastika is not permitted... they are particularly sensitive to the subject.
The Japanese culture has an interesting viewpoint toward copyright. By cultural custom and even Japanese law it is impossible to have public domain works. They don't seem to have too much of a problem with copyleft, but the idea of trying to hack apart and rework public domain content to the point it is no longer recognizable from its original form is frowned upon and considered unethical. This is also reflected in the Japanese Wikipedia and some of their unique policies that are different from the English-language based Wikipedia.
An ongoing discussion is wheither a language-based Wikipedia ought to conform to the copyright laws and standards of the dominating country or should it be more standardized across all Wikipedia projects. Considering the physical servers are located in Florida, a point can be made that only U.S. law applies to what can and can't be put on the servers, and that French law and customs don't apply. But if in the case of the French Wikipedia, most of the contributors are from France or Quebec. Should French law apply if the main authors are from France? It is different from U.S. law in some substantial details, so it can make a difference. Generally everybody just tries to muddle their way through it all and not get caught up in the ugly details.