I bet they wouldn't care at all, although they should. If this got thrown into the SEC complaint mailbox as spam, it would be ignored. The first time this complaint came in would be all that would be reviewed.
If you wrote a similar considerate letter expressing your concerns (particularly if you were a stock holder of SCO... one share would be sufficient although having more does mean a little bit more) it would carry quite a bit more weight.
I don't think you need to get all legal, but a formal complaint can't hurt. Just keep it original and based on your own perspective of the situation.
If you want to stage a strike, it is critically important for the labor union to get popular support from the community itself for the strike as well. When merchants, ordinary citizens, school teachers, and others in the community (including the police) feel that the labor union has somehow been wronged as well, the strike is much more likely to succeed.
If the labor union is perceived as a bunch of money grubbing lazy idiots, or worse a bunch of radical communist thugs bend on public mayhem, violence, and distruction, the strike is likely to end in a very ugly manner and usually not too good for the labor union.
The point here is that a labor union can do some other things to point out how much of an impact their membership has in the community, and a simple $2 bill "demonstration" certainly is a good way to do this.
The only real theory I can come up with is that under the principle that the output of copyrighted software can also be placed a claim of copyright on that output. (i.e. you make some software that renders a cool image... and you maintain copyright as the author of that software.)
From this principle, an added clause to the GPL would then force people using output of GPL'd software to "release" or "distribute" any software used when even the output of that software alone is the stuff being distributed publicly.
I think this is splitting hairs and pushing for something that is not really needed. It also has a huge potential of backfiring and harming the GPL.
The HTML that google serves up would not be affected, as data created, or used by GPL programs is not covered by the GPL (or any automatic licence).
I think you need to look a little bit deeper into copyright law.
The HTML that is generated by computer software is subject to the copyright of the authors of that software. There does reach a point of absurdity, but there have been common law cases where the output of a compiler was copyrighted by compiler author (subject to fees and royalties if it were distributed). Macromedia is one company that has done this over the years with some of its products.
The fact is that most software companies (even Microsoft and IBM... usually not companies willing to "give stuff away") don't bother to enforce this copyright issue with things like compilers and word processors... although it should be something to give you pause to think about.
Where should the line be drawn from the output of software? Should the content of a video game be copyrighted? (i.e. if you record it on a VCR and distribute it, does ID software own the content of the video game on the video tape? game snapshots?) What about financial services forecasts? Operating System vendors? (the data passes through their software) BIOS vendors?
In short, it can be a huge minefield to determine just who exactly owns a given hunk of text or an image, especially if it passed through a computer on its journey to become something "fixed in a tangable medium".
This gets very muddy when you talk about operating system services, and thing like COM or CORBA objects. If the operating system (or those object servers) are GPL'd, does the software using GPL'd libraries need to also be GPL'd? Can propritary software be written with GPL'd libraries?
I agree that this line is very fuzzy. The LGPL does cover this to some extent for a typical library package meant explicitly for propritary software usage, but what about a library package that is only GPL'd?
I think this situation would make the GPL lose in court if this was the only reason why you are forcing a copyright lawsuit. As long as you distribute the library source code, with any changes that you've done to the library, you will (probabaly) be in the clear. I dare somebody to force the GPL to be tested in this case. I think the library author would lose in this situation. I also know of no reasonable way to force software using GPL'd libraries to become GPL'd software (which is the intent of Richard Stallman here anyway... but silly).
I think this is more of a case of/. getting the situation wrong in the description.
Read the article.
The money situation is from companies like MySQL AB or Sleepycat that seem to misinterpret the GPL in ways that attempt to force people to pony up some money on seemingly minor violations of the GPL, or even their interpretation of the GPL.
This freedom 0 is safe and sound, even with the changes suggested by Eben Moglen. I reccomend against these changes, but it is still not forcing payment for using the software. It is merely forcing the publication of changes even if they are not distributed under certain circumstances, or face a copyright violation lawsuit (with potential legal blackmail on the side).
If the Free Software Foundation screws this up, it will be the end of the GPL.
While you have suggested that the FSF controls the wording of the GPL, there are a lot of factors that go into deciding on a license. I happen to like the GPL for much of the free-time software that I release myself, and that is because I've read every clause in the GPL and feel that it fits what I would like, unlike the BSD license or several other FOSS licenses.
For example, the Gnu Free Document License has a few very weird quirks, and because of those quirks there is some reluctance to releasing documentation under that license, despite the "seal of approval" from the FSF. That is why for right now Wikinews is in the public domain, because of the short commings of the GFDL. To do a scholarly quote of a GFDL'd document in a for-profit publication (like a newspaper), you have to include the entire text of the GFDL somewhere in the publication (not tiny either). It just makes it difficult to work with except for republishing books (technical manuals, etc.) that are released under the GFDL where printing out the license would be trivial compared to the content being published.
In this case being discussed, copyright falls into a real grey area because technically the output of a piece of copyrighted software (like a compiler or word processor.... really!) is under copyright of the company or individual that wrote software being used. In this case, they would be using the GPL to suggest that if the output of that software is the result of the use of GPL'd software, and that output is distributed through public channels, then the copyright is voided and you don't have the right to copy any of data unless you've complied with the terms of the GPL. Essentially, these companies (like Amazon or Google) would not be able to post web content without explicit premission of the software authors of the software they are using (like the Apache software team or MySQL AB).
The philosophical problem being discussed is what should happen when somebody (Amazon) uses GPL'd software, makes substantial modifications for their own internal use (they have a team of software engineers and an economic reason to make the changes... to improve their websites in this case), and then refuse to "give back" to the community those changes that have proven useful. With v. 2 this is not required.
If v. 3 of the GPL were to require this updated software to be given back to the community (by forcing people who distribute content generated by GPL'd software to also offer the source code of the software used to make the content), Eben Moglen feels that would be a good thing.
IMHO (IANAL, but I do know copyright law as much as most of them) I think this would be an Achiles heel for the GPL if it were added. This legal theory (output of software is copyrighted by software copyright owner) is not explicit in the copyright law, but more of something that is through common law practice. It makes more sense when you are thinking of a video game (where the screenshots of Doom3 are under copyright of ID Software) or a weather forecasting engine, but just where do you draw the line? This could get ugly if pushed into courts, and have a huge impact not only on the GPL itself, but on software publishers in general, or even most ordinary computer users.
By ugly I mean it would make SCO vs. IBM seem like a sandlot game, as there would be no real clear resolution of the situation, and new legal doctrine that would have to be developed regardless of which way a judge would decide the issue.
If I were Richard Stallman (and I'm not), I would leave things well enough alone and be grateful that the GPL has started a revolution in thinking. Sleepycat software should be happy that many people are using their software, and that not only is their software being used, but used in high profile situations that they can brag about. Quit trying to squeeze every last ounce of money from ev
However, they've just never been very popular for some reason. I don't know why, two dollar bills were always popular in Canada and now with the damn $2 coins it's easy to get a pound of pocket change. However it just never caught on in the US.
The #1 problem U.S. merchants have with $2 bills (and $1 coins... its the same problem) is that the "standard" cash register doesn't have a slot to hold the currency or coin denominations.
Quarters were relatively rare prior to the 1960's, but during a Christmas shopping season in the mid 1960's the U.S. Mint ran out of half dollars and most merchants switched to quarters instead. By habit this has stuck around and now quarter dollars are the "typical" change item handed out by cashiers.
If you are in the USA and pay with a $2 bill or a $1 coin, look where the (clueful) cashiers put the money: It usually goes to the back of the drawer or underneath with the checks. The same with large denominations (like $100 bills, etc.)
If the U.S. Federal government was serious about pushing $2 bills or the $1 coins, they would also make a law forcing merchants to get larger cash drawers with slots for those denominations. As it is, few merchants really care, and the cash register companies aren't going to even offer them unless you pay a premium price for the "expanded" trays.
Actually, this is a commonly used practice in many ways.
I know of a local labor union that had all of its members cash their paychecks with $2 bills, and encouraged its members to make purchases using them as a way to let the local retailers know how significant the local union membership was to the community.
It was a relatively benign way to show the strength of its membership without having to do more silly things like go on strike or hold a protest, and it also garnered quite a bit of positive PR for both the union involved and the companies that they worked for. And more importantly, it put the merchants themselves quite solidly as supporters of the union, and some efforts that were being done politically to help keep the industry going (they were steelworkers).
Yes, but one would think a 160-bit key would be good enough for most things. I doubt data corruption wouldn't get caught using this.
We are not talking about casual on-line display of information, but of long-term storage issues. A P2P system is going to come across all of the bugs of any computer system (even down to CPU bugs that only affect 1 per quadrillion operations) when dealing with storing data even for periods of time like 10-30 years on such a network.
The best "hard" data to look at is with the Seti@Home project, where huge volumes of data have been exchanged between various clients and the central science server. This project has also been going on now for close to five years, so lifetime statistics can also be derived from this data.
The point I'm making here is that the Seti@Home team has discovered several anomolies with a statistically small number of packets. When they get the same data set come back with differnt results from different clients, some "alarms" go off to try and find what might be the problem. In a few cases it is some people trying to "spoof" the system to send in false data to inflate their "workunit" counts. In a few cases, however, it appears to be purely random data fluctuations that have come from either network traffic breakdowns (the data got transfered in error despite passing the error correction tests), or the CPU itself malfunctioned (verified by having the same exact application package being run on roughly identical machines and operating system platforms... sometimes from the same machine running the same data twice).
Error correction methods are good, but not foolproof. In order to do a good P2P data storage system, I am suggesting that there may be a need to significantly improve error rates beyond what is typically done with normal internet traffic, and that you can't ignore the memory systems for internal storage of the data either. It is just the nature of what is needed for long term data storage, which is not what was intended with most computers and dataprocessing equipment.
While I usually dismiss people who talk about the "Good ol' days" as being idiots (they usually are), this situation is very true and a very sad and recent development.
I don't consider myself to be that ancient (although I did learn to do programming on Apple ]['s... so it has been a little while)
When I was a Boy Scout I went on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters area of Northern Minnesota, that also is on the border between Minnesota and western Ontario. A "sister" park run by the provincial government is just to the north of the BWCA, and the group I was with made it all of the way up to the international border.
Waiting for us there was an absolutely gorgous waterfall (this was a 3-day trip by canoe to get there in the first place... no roads what so ever), and a little shack with a Canadian Mountie standing guard to keep idiot Americans on their side of the border (like myself). No U.S. Border Patrol agents in sight at all, or even park rangers. We chatted a bit with the Mountie, in some ways jealous because he actually got paid to run around in that gorgous wilderness, went about a mile into Canada mainly to say "yup, we made it into Canada", then turned around and went back into U.S. waters. To go further required a permit that we didn't have, otherwise I think we would have kept going at least for a couple of days. No comment about even seeing passports or even driver's licenses. Just the permit to run the canoes and camp equipment in the provincial park.
Anyway, the experience you had was very similar to what I remember of the international border, and it is too bad that the experience has gone downhill. I wish that crossing an international border between the U.S. and Canada were like crossing city limits in Los Angeles County (only affecting where the taxes go and otherwise nobody even knowing that they exist). I also know too many Canadian ex-pats living here in the USA, and have cousins in Alberta to make too much of a complaint about Canada. My ancestry goes north and south of the border for many generations back. I hope in the future that sort of attitude can be restored to cross to Canada without a passport.
While all of these are good reasons to establish independent space colonies, here is the #1 reason for landing on a planetary body:
Natural Resources!
Simply put, you need to have "stuff" in order to build anything, and planets like Mars and the Moon have lots of that stuff.
A neat advantage that Mars also offers is that you can start a human civilazation with comparatively fewer resources to start with, as they can draw from the local environment in a much easier fashion than you can by simply sitting in "empty" space, such as LEO. The ISS is a prime example of this, where all of the resources have to be brought up from the Earth in order to sustain human life up there... subject to budget cuts, mismanagement at HQ, and changes of priorities.
That said, you can still obtain some resource from asteroids, but that means you have to run out to them and set up camps on those asteroids to carve up the resources for the space stations you are talking about, or simply start building the settlements themselves right there. You still got planetary settlement then, regardless of where you ship the metal & minerals afterward.
In short, I don't see a way that you can avoid settlements on the Moon or Mars in the next 500-1000 years, and any manufactured worlds (like an O'Neil colony) would have to at least have a symbiotic relationship with miners living on dirt with gravity.
BTW, when you are dealing with agriculture in space, there are a lot of unknowns that will go into the picture. To suggest that there will be no pests or weeds is showing signs of ignorance as to how food is actually grown, as you need a very complex relationship between microorganisms, insects, and multiple species of plants in order to grow healthy crops. Even most farmers take this for granted as they push dirt around, but it is still something that they use to their advantage even here on the Earth. I've had to pull too much sweet corn out of soybean fields to think that weeds are merely noxious plants that God somehow put in there to "torment mankind". This is going to be an issue, however, for any agriculture that takes place off of the Earth.
Also RE: mobile territories--- This is going to be much harder than you think. If you want to have a space colony that can be moved around, it has to be built substantially different from something that is simply built in place to stay there. For a practical current application to compare against, look up or examine the building practices for mobile homes ("manufactured homes" in the current lexicon) vs. on-site constructed homes. Mobile homes have to have steel beams in certain places in order to keep the thing together as it travels down a freeway at 70 mph, and other construction considerations that must be done that keep certain floorplans from being done. Yes, there are some very creative architects that do seeming wonders with manufactured homes, but you can still look at the outside of a house and tell the difference. What make a manufactured home cheap is the economies of scale when they are mass-produced, and not having to haul as much labor on-site. This will not be an option in space for centuries if not for over 1000 years.
If you already have a solid and well established colony on bodies like Mars or the Moon (self-sustaining even), then you will be able to talk about manufactured worlds. Until then, you will have to lift everything from the Earth, which is prohibitively expensive for any very large project, or something that has not risen to the level of being of national importance, Robert Bigelow not withstanding.
You realize that you are considering the speed of light to be a "soft" issue (as opposed to the "hard" limits from energy concerns). What makes you think that the speed of light is any less "hard" than the other concerns?
I think that FTL communication is a virtual impossibility, and some very fundimental physics reasoning must be developed to make it happen.
I only comment about FTL communication because the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted a patent for FTL communication. The examiner must have flunked out of college to have approved the concept, but for the next 10-15 years such a process is patented, even if a physical impossibility. Someone (perhaps with a perpetual motion machine) must think this is possible to accomplish.
I think you miss the real issue here. We are not talking simple attitude control, but maintaining contact with the Earth, which from the viewpoint of a spacecraft that is 9 billion miles away is a point of light.
The problem is mainly that once the contact is lost, it will be impossible to send a strong enough signal through the low-gain antenna that Voyager would be able to respond to. Sure, the sun sensor and star tracker may be working, but if the antenna is not pointed in the correct direction it simply won't be able to recieve a signal from the Earth.
This is the point of why the funding must continue. In order to maintain that orientation, regular attitude corrections must be sent to reorient the antenna to make sure that it is still pointing to the Earth. The only way to fix this would be to send a powerful transmitter to Voyager and "tip" it back to the Earth. If you are doing that, you don't need Voyager, and it would cost significantly more than the $4 million per year to accomplish that task.
And yes, this is currently a problem, but the updates to correct this issue are regularly sent to the Voyager probes... which is precisely why they must have the number of staff members as listed to keep this mission alive. The money is what is spent on people who have to do astrogation and know how to pilot a spacecraft through the outer solar system. Those are skills that are not easily learned, and not nearly so simple as driving a car down the freeway.
There was a time not long ago they feared that this contact had been lost accidently... and it would have been the nail in the coffin to kill the program. Fortunately, they were able to regain control of the spacecraft, but with a forced suspension of the program it would be a likelyhood to almost certainty that this contact would be lost for good.
This is a hard core analogy to try and explain to congress critters just why it is not only short sighted, but incredibly foolish to cut the funding to the Voyager program.
One of the major complaints about the Indian Ocean Tsuami last Christmas holiday was that the technology and even the money was available to set up a warning system throughout the Indian Ocean that would give people living throughout the region as much as several hours advance notice before the Tsuami actually struck.... potentially saving the lives of thousands of people if it had been in place.
Both Voyager space craft are just like weather bouys in the ocean collecting data, but in this case they are in deep space collecting weather data.
The concept of space weather is a relatively new concept, however this is so mainstream that It has become a seperate bureau independent of NASA. Knowledge of space weather has significant economic impact on modern society, where utility grids have to prepare for increased surges in power systems, telecommunications systems need to know when to shut down telecomm sattelites, and perhaps most critical: Manned spacecraft need to have (if possible) advanced warning to know when to get into shielded areas to avoid the effects of a major solar storm. This is a storm of charged particles, and can be predicted using somewhat similar techniques as have already been developed for forecasting rain and snow storms here on the Earth.
By turning off Voyager, it is the equivalent to turning off an ocean bouy in the Pacific ocean, because the million or so dollars needed to service that bouy can't be found. What happens when you record the Tsumai wave the next day and wipes everything out, but it went unmonitored because you shut down the radio recievers that were recieving the bouy data?
Although unlikely, major magnetic storms can also come from extra-solar sources, and the Voyager probes would be in a unique position to be able to record these disturbances well before it would be a problem here on the Earth, giving us several months or even up to a year to prepare for the effects of such a cosmic event. That by itself could justify IMHO the reason to keep Voyager going for the next 10 years alone.
Also, by having the data collected by the Voyager and Pioneer space probes to continue, it will give us additional data points to understand space weather in general as we move out into the rest of the solar system. Right now there are a bunch of questions regarding how dangerous it will be to launch manned spacecraft from the Earth to Mars or even asteroids, and knowing just what the environment is like in space is critical to assess the risks and protection needed to carry out missions like these. This is a very rich source of data that is simply irreplaceable at any price for the next century.
If you want to get a glimpse of what Voyager would see of the solar system, check these photos out
These were taken in 1990, but it is IMHO one of the "cool" images ever taken by the Voyager project, and an example of real images that could be taken by Voyager even now.
If you want to see what actual science (including what will be lost when the Voyager program gets shut down) check out the mission page here
In fact, what voyager is able to provide really amounts right now to a weather bouy that is sitting in a known position and when triangulated with other outer solar system space probes are giving us a very rich picture of the environment within the solar system. This is going to be critical information when manned spaceflight starts to go beyond LEO or even just to the moon.
Think of it as having weather data points for ancient China (about 1 AD or even 1000 BC) and being able to use those weather observations to help with climate models currently being worked on.
As with weather forecasting, although individual data points are by themselves meaningless, when combined with similar data points and other data collected over time it becomes something as a whole that is almost priceless.
According to the project page, "the cosmic ray detector, magnetometer, plasma wave detector and low-energy charged particle detector all still operational." For much more than $4 million per year similar missions have been launched. This is very real science, and something that can be incredibly useful, such as knowledge of a galactic shock wave front going through the solar system, with a warning of weeks or even months before the main burst of charged particles will wipe out the telecom sattelites that our society depends on.
The problem is that if the budget isn't maintain, it won't get time on DSN, and once attitude toward the Earth is lost, it will be almost impossible to reaquire. Only when interstellar pleasure spacecraft (think Virgin Galactic to Alpha Centauri) is commonplace will we again be able to recontact Voyager.
The neat thing about Voyager is that it is in a unique place in the solar system to do things that it will take decades or more to put something similar up there... even with the few working instruments that are left or anything worth looking at. In this case it can be doing real science on a very genuine frontier for just pennies on the dollar compared to what any future science mission would have to come up with to accomplish the same task. If we say goodbye, then it will kill even the possiblity of future generations from knowing what may be out there. A future congress simply cannot put the funding back.
Also, a DSN engineer who tries to send updates to Voyager would likely get fired immediately for trying to pull such a stunt. Not to mention that unless you have stuied the systems closely it is likely that you would screw things up... especially when working on a ad hoc basis rather than trying to work it out with people who are working full-time trying to know and understand these systems.
Part of the problem is that you would have to build up a mirror to the NASA Deep Space Network. This is a series of "radio telescopes" dedicated to recieving and processing the information data flow coming from the various probes throughout the solar system. This is not a minor investment, but rather a huge application of dedicated resources that involved quite a bit of real estates (these telescopes are not tiny by a long-shot), and would require a significant team of volunteers just to paint/maintain the physical reciever aspects of these telescopes, not to mention the amplifiers and other equipment needed to get something like this going.
In short, it is more than a group of homebrew amatures with a spare $10,000 sitting in their pocket burning a hole not doing anything.
Once the data is collected, however, I think there would be a virtual army of volunteers who would be willing to do the decoding, monitoring, and remote procedure encoding necessary to getting these old probes working.
The other thing that you must concern yourself about is the raw political issues as well. NASA not only wants to control the current crop of probes (even the Hubble), and as a bureacracy hate having other people getting in their hair, but having an alternate to the Deep Space Network would in theory allow people to start messing with even the upcoming probes that havn't been launched yet. (Is that Natalie Portman swimming on Titan?)
The AMSAT model is for a simple sattlite that is in LEO position, and the electronics were entirely designed and maintained by amature radio operators. Even the system maintainence procedures are carried out by the group that launched them. As a result, it infrastructure is already there to deal with those satellites. Going for the Voyager probes is a much bigger task and it would be easier for a private group to build their own deep space probes instead.
I would advocate for something just like that anyway, rather than trying to take over an older NASA program. Still, I hate to see Voyager get killed simply because of congressional budget cuts and inept NASA bureaucracy.
If we are going to get CPU speeds to Terahertz or Petahertz frequencies, I will have to agree that the physical restraints of the speed of light are going to be a very major factor with CPU designs. Also, I don't know of any physical device manufactuer who is even remotely claiming even a 1% efficiency for storage and manipulation of a bit. (That would be a huge marketing ploy if it ever were achieved.) Physical devices, even optical systems, are far less efficient than that. There is no way that they are > 100,000 times more energy efficient than conductor/semi-conductor systems if simply because it would have been done already if the savings were that substantial.
I remember a speech by Adm. Grace Hooper where she was holding in her hands what she called microseconds, nanoseconds, and picoseconds. Basically a loop of wire that in the respective lengths of times it would take for an ideal signal to travel down that much wire. A good talk, and she was willing to give away quite a few nanoseconds, much less picoseconds. It really gets the concept of distances in small times to a perspective that your mind can grasp real easily.
Still, even assuming that we can overcome some of the issues with FTL communication at some point in the future, Planck's constant is going to be lurking in the background ready to bite even if we are using individual quarks for gate switching.
It is neat to see just what "hard" limits you can put on Moore's Law based on other hard physical constants from "hard science". It is also telling that electronic component manufacturers are having to get creative (such as the optical technologies being discussed in the article under discussion) in order to push systems beyond what appears to be hard limits to current manufacturing technologies.
Something beyond a photomask on lithographed semi-conductors must be done to get another 1000x increase in CPU speeds. Manufacturers are already using X-rays to get the fine details that are needed for the device manufacturing. If the frequencies get much higher, it will move into the gamma-ray section of the EM band.
While I will agree there are other factors that affect a CPU, this formula does provide a bottom reference value to demonstrate that increased CPU frequency... regarless of effeciency... will always consume more energy.
There are other fundimental constants in information theory that demonstrate a quantum effect for a single bit of data being manipulated... regardless of the effeciency of the device that is being used. There are fundimental information theory limits to how little energy can be consumed to flip that bit, and the formula of E=hf is a good place to start and try to figure out just how much energy must be used to change a one to a zero and back. The emmission and absorbtion of photons will increase entropy, and will eventually lead to a loss via emmision into the IR band. This generates heat.
While an optic fibre is quite efficient, it will still have problems in massed quantities found in a CPU. And if the CPU clock frequency is increased to the degree claimed (100,000 times), I think the statement of the grandparent post, "A Pentium would be like a refrigerator to this CPU" is a very true statement. An optical system isn't that much better than copper or gold wires.
I'm not suggesting that Europe is devoid of many cultures. I'm merely suggesting that Europeans on a "holliday tour" of America are going to get a very different view of what is America than what ordinary Americans know to be true.
I would suggest you spend some time in the Pennsylvania Dutch region (they speak German to a very large degree there), or visit an Indian reservation (if you can get away from the Casinos).
BTW, the GOP is quite a bit different from one state to another as well, as is the Democratic Party and other political interests. Yes, there tends to be broad generalizations that will apply from Texas and California, but you would be surprised at how many differences there are as well.
And no, you don't pay your bills the same way all over the country. With a common currency, there is not the same problems that you found in the past with Europe (with the Euro that will change). Still, there are different utilities and regional stores that vary quite a bit from one end of the country to another.
I was also pointing out in my post that there certainly is a homogenizing force with popular media (notably television and radio, but also many magazines and some newspapers, not to mention American cinema) that tends to smooth over the differences from one region to another, together with the nation-wide or even international mega-chain stores and brands. Indeed, that you can order a Big Mac in Rio de Janeiro or Berlin and have it taste almost the same shows that this is not just an American issue either (and a source of some anti-American sentiment).
As the EU becomes much more firmly established, this will also become more and more of an issue in Europe, where the cultures of the various countries in Europe will blend together even more and become more alike. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as this is needed in order to create new ties beteen countries (or states as it were), and with your uncle living in Germany when you live in France and a brother working in Poland, it will be quite unlikely that those countries are ever going to go to war against each other again in the near future. That is also a very good thing. This is precisely the situation that most Americans find themselves in, with family being found almost all across North America... and has been that way for several generations.
BTW, each state does have its own seperate government and governing system. That most U.S. states mimic the federal government organization (actually... mimic Virginia and Massachusetts) is besides the point. When you get into details, however, there are some big differences between states, even though the ignorant tend to ignore them. Somebody arrested in one state, for instance, must go through formal extradition arrangements to be transfered to another state, and there are treaties between American states as well. The nice thing is that there are (usually) no border patrol agents on state boundaries.
Keep in mind that UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII, and all of the code points of ASCII have been maintained in UTF-8... in otherwords, it goes to show how useful some standards have become.
I don't see anything surpassing Unicode anyway unless the Unicode Consortium decides to get an idiot committee in charge that starts to really push on the intellectual property front. There isn't a competing format at the moment, and even for open source programmers all of the relevant information (encoding algorithms, meanings of datapoints, even technical manuals) are all available freely and free-as-in-beer with few exceptions.
If the Unicode Consortium decides to become stupid, this will change, but even at that point it will likely produce only a fork in the development of Unicode data code points. Data using the current Unicode data points will be relatively safe.
This is nothing like the EBDIC vs. ASCII issues in the past (which had very different code points).
This is so wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.
Glass, while you can technically call it a "fluid", is just as stable as just about any other fixed mineral that you can come up with, including granite or even sheets of metal.
The problem with glass is that it breaks rather than bends... again a problem with many other kinds of rocks.
So while over millions of years you might have glass "ooze" over each other, there are many other issues that make glass a poor archival medium well before that becomes an issue, including fagility of the stuff, having it scratched up (even if on a diamond substrate), or acids used for the etching process coming in contact with the glass. Water will eventually erode just about anything, and can do some incredible damage to glass in particular.
There are several problems with P2P data storage techniques:
1) The data over time becomes corrupted. This can be from ordinary memory copy errors (a stray cosmic ray turns a 1 into a 0 or the other way around), or when you send a packet over the network somehow the checksum works out even with corrupted data (it does happen quite often... especially over many generations of data). It happens, so get used to it, and over thousands of years it will be a huge issue. I've found that bit rot over even 10-15 years is incredibly huge for most magnetic media, and optical media, while slightly better than magnetic media, still has some serious problems over time. Electronic memory (RAM) is even worse.
2) P2P data stores are based on popularity. Data that is frequently requested will always be available. The problem is with the data that may only have occasional usefulness, but when it is needed it is very valuable. This is BTW a problem of the ages as well, as even dead-tree librarians also struggle with this same issue, where you have to discard genuine garbage from time to time, and have to decide if it truly is garbage or something that has long term value. The difference with a dead-tree library and a P2P system is that this cycle is 5 to 10 years for a dead tree library but only on the order of days or hours for a P2P repository, and stuff gets discarded much more quickly.
3) Trusted sources of data are hard to identify. This is an issue even larger for P2P systems. The point of a decentralized P2P system is that taking down any one node won't kill the network or even lose the data (hopefully). The problem here is that with all nodes being (supposedly) equal you can't tell real data from forged and/or modified data (avenues for censorship of all kinds and forms). Just because you have 10 copies from 10 sources that says one piece of data is a certain way doesn't mean that the one lone server that says differently is wrong. What is the criteria to show which data packet should be ignored? Again this is a dead-tree library issue as well, but there you have publisher reputations and "original manuscripts" to compare against that are not available in a P2P environment.
While a neat idea, there is quite a bit more work to be done addressing these and other problems with P2P networks. There are valid uses for the technology, and some of these issues are being dealt with in various degrees, but you can't ignore the fundimental problems with the technology and information storage issues in general.
What about all of those different cultures? I can imagine there are a lot of different cultures in America (I've never been) but there is no way that you'll experience as much culture travelling all around America as you would visiting a few places in Europe or Asia, for example.
I take it you aren't that familiar with North America then.
There are just as many diverse, perhaps more diverse cultures in America than you can find in Europe. You can go from Hollywood to Las Vegas to a Polygamous Mormon settlement to a Navajo Reservation in less than a day's drive. And that is not to mention places like Chinatown (in many larger cities... San Francisco's is a little bigger... where many residents speak only Chinese with just a little English on the side), going off to Arcadia in Louisiana, and for the truly adventersome, running off to Quebec (and avoid speaking English unless you want to be considered a stupid tourist).
Yes, I will admit that there is a bulldozing of American cultures with big corporations like Wal-mart, McDonalds, Home Depot, Pizza Hut, Coca-Cola, Disney, etc. that make a more homogenous cultural context for many Americans. That said, to experience the cultural diversity you need to get away from the strip malls... especially business districts built in the last 50 years or so. The cultural diversity is there... just harder to find.
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I bet they wouldn't care at all, although they should. If this got thrown into the SEC complaint mailbox as spam, it would be ignored. The first time this complaint came in would be all that would be reviewed.
If you wrote a similar considerate letter expressing your concerns (particularly if you were a stock holder of SCO... one share would be sufficient although having more does mean a little bit more) it would carry quite a bit more weight.
I don't think you need to get all legal, but a formal complaint can't hurt. Just keep it original and based on your own perspective of the situation.
If you want to stage a strike, it is critically important for the labor union to get popular support from the community itself for the strike as well. When merchants, ordinary citizens, school teachers, and others in the community (including the police) feel that the labor union has somehow been wronged as well, the strike is much more likely to succeed.
If the labor union is perceived as a bunch of money grubbing lazy idiots, or worse a bunch of radical communist thugs bend on public mayhem, violence, and distruction, the strike is likely to end in a very ugly manner and usually not too good for the labor union.
The point here is that a labor union can do some other things to point out how much of an impact their membership has in the community, and a simple $2 bill "demonstration" certainly is a good way to do this.
The only real theory I can come up with is that under the principle that the output of copyrighted software can also be placed a claim of copyright on that output. (i.e. you make some software that renders a cool image... and you maintain copyright as the author of that software.)
From this principle, an added clause to the GPL would then force people using output of GPL'd software to "release" or "distribute" any software used when even the output of that software alone is the stuff being distributed publicly.
I think this is splitting hairs and pushing for something that is not really needed. It also has a huge potential of backfiring and harming the GPL.
I think you need to look a little bit deeper into copyright law.
The HTML that is generated by computer software is subject to the copyright of the authors of that software. There does reach a point of absurdity, but there have been common law cases where the output of a compiler was copyrighted by compiler author (subject to fees and royalties if it were distributed). Macromedia is one company that has done this over the years with some of its products.
The fact is that most software companies (even Microsoft and IBM... usually not companies willing to "give stuff away") don't bother to enforce this copyright issue with things like compilers and word processors... although it should be something to give you pause to think about.
Where should the line be drawn from the output of software? Should the content of a video game be copyrighted? (i.e. if you record it on a VCR and distribute it, does ID software own the content of the video game on the video tape? game snapshots?) What about financial services forecasts? Operating System vendors? (the data passes through their software) BIOS vendors?
In short, it can be a huge minefield to determine just who exactly owns a given hunk of text or an image, especially if it passed through a computer on its journey to become something "fixed in a tangable medium".
This gets very muddy when you talk about operating system services, and thing like COM or CORBA objects. If the operating system (or those object servers) are GPL'd, does the software using GPL'd libraries need to also be GPL'd? Can propritary software be written with GPL'd libraries?
I agree that this line is very fuzzy. The LGPL does cover this to some extent for a typical library package meant explicitly for propritary software usage, but what about a library package that is only GPL'd?
I think this situation would make the GPL lose in court if this was the only reason why you are forcing a copyright lawsuit. As long as you distribute the library source code, with any changes that you've done to the library, you will (probabaly) be in the clear. I dare somebody to force the GPL to be tested in this case. I think the library author would lose in this situation. I also know of no reasonable way to force software using GPL'd libraries to become GPL'd software (which is the intent of Richard Stallman here anyway... but silly).
I think this is more of a case of /. getting the situation wrong in the description.
Read the article.
The money situation is from companies like MySQL AB or Sleepycat that seem to misinterpret the GPL in ways that attempt to force people to pony up some money on seemingly minor violations of the GPL, or even their interpretation of the GPL.
This freedom 0 is safe and sound, even with the changes suggested by Eben Moglen. I reccomend against these changes, but it is still not forcing payment for using the software. It is merely forcing the publication of changes even if they are not distributed under certain circumstances, or face a copyright violation lawsuit (with potential legal blackmail on the side).
You said it exactly, if not clearly:
If the Free Software Foundation screws this up, it will be the end of the GPL.
While you have suggested that the FSF controls the wording of the GPL, there are a lot of factors that go into deciding on a license. I happen to like the GPL for much of the free-time software that I release myself, and that is because I've read every clause in the GPL and feel that it fits what I would like, unlike the BSD license or several other FOSS licenses.
For example, the Gnu Free Document License has a few very weird quirks, and because of those quirks there is some reluctance to releasing documentation under that license, despite the "seal of approval" from the FSF. That is why for right now Wikinews is in the public domain, because of the short commings of the GFDL. To do a scholarly quote of a GFDL'd document in a for-profit publication (like a newspaper), you have to include the entire text of the GFDL somewhere in the publication (not tiny either). It just makes it difficult to work with except for republishing books (technical manuals, etc.) that are released under the GFDL where printing out the license would be trivial compared to the content being published.
In this case being discussed, copyright falls into a real grey area because technically the output of a piece of copyrighted software (like a compiler or word processor.... really!) is under copyright of the company or individual that wrote software being used. In this case, they would be using the GPL to suggest that if the output of that software is the result of the use of GPL'd software, and that output is distributed through public channels, then the copyright is voided and you don't have the right to copy any of data unless you've complied with the terms of the GPL. Essentially, these companies (like Amazon or Google) would not be able to post web content without explicit premission of the software authors of the software they are using (like the Apache software team or MySQL AB).
The philosophical problem being discussed is what should happen when somebody (Amazon) uses GPL'd software, makes substantial modifications for their own internal use (they have a team of software engineers and an economic reason to make the changes... to improve their websites in this case), and then refuse to "give back" to the community those changes that have proven useful. With v. 2 this is not required.
If v. 3 of the GPL were to require this updated software to be given back to the community (by forcing people who distribute content generated by GPL'd software to also offer the source code of the software used to make the content), Eben Moglen feels that would be a good thing.
IMHO (IANAL, but I do know copyright law as much as most of them) I think this would be an Achiles heel for the GPL if it were added. This legal theory (output of software is copyrighted by software copyright owner) is not explicit in the copyright law, but more of something that is through common law practice. It makes more sense when you are thinking of a video game (where the screenshots of Doom3 are under copyright of ID Software) or a weather forecasting engine, but just where do you draw the line? This could get ugly if pushed into courts, and have a huge impact not only on the GPL itself, but on software publishers in general, or even most ordinary computer users.
By ugly I mean it would make SCO vs. IBM seem like a sandlot game, as there would be no real clear resolution of the situation, and new legal doctrine that would have to be developed regardless of which way a judge would decide the issue.
If I were Richard Stallman (and I'm not), I would leave things well enough alone and be grateful that the GPL has started a revolution in thinking. Sleepycat software should be happy that many people are using their software, and that not only is their software being used, but used in high profile situations that they can brag about. Quit trying to squeeze every last ounce of money from ev
The #1 problem U.S. merchants have with $2 bills (and $1 coins... its the same problem) is that the "standard" cash register doesn't have a slot to hold the currency or coin denominations.
Quarters were relatively rare prior to the 1960's, but during a Christmas shopping season in the mid 1960's the U.S. Mint ran out of half dollars and most merchants switched to quarters instead. By habit this has stuck around and now quarter dollars are the "typical" change item handed out by cashiers.
If you are in the USA and pay with a $2 bill or a $1 coin, look where the (clueful) cashiers put the money: It usually goes to the back of the drawer or underneath with the checks. The same with large denominations (like $100 bills, etc.)
If the U.S. Federal government was serious about pushing $2 bills or the $1 coins, they would also make a law forcing merchants to get larger cash drawers with slots for those denominations. As it is, few merchants really care, and the cash register companies aren't going to even offer them unless you pay a premium price for the "expanded" trays.
Actually, this is a commonly used practice in many ways.
I know of a local labor union that had all of its members cash their paychecks with $2 bills, and encouraged its members to make purchases using them as a way to let the local retailers know how significant the local union membership was to the community.
It was a relatively benign way to show the strength of its membership without having to do more silly things like go on strike or hold a protest, and it also garnered quite a bit of positive PR for both the union involved and the companies that they worked for. And more importantly, it put the merchants themselves quite solidly as supporters of the union, and some efforts that were being done politically to help keep the industry going (they were steelworkers).
We are not talking about casual on-line display of information, but of long-term storage issues. A P2P system is going to come across all of the bugs of any computer system (even down to CPU bugs that only affect 1 per quadrillion operations) when dealing with storing data even for periods of time like 10-30 years on such a network.
The best "hard" data to look at is with the Seti@Home project, where huge volumes of data have been exchanged between various clients and the central science server. This project has also been going on now for close to five years, so lifetime statistics can also be derived from this data.
The point I'm making here is that the Seti@Home team has discovered several anomolies with a statistically small number of packets. When they get the same data set come back with differnt results from different clients, some "alarms" go off to try and find what might be the problem. In a few cases it is some people trying to "spoof" the system to send in false data to inflate their "workunit" counts. In a few cases, however, it appears to be purely random data fluctuations that have come from either network traffic breakdowns (the data got transfered in error despite passing the error correction tests), or the CPU itself malfunctioned (verified by having the same exact application package being run on roughly identical machines and operating system platforms... sometimes from the same machine running the same data twice).
Error correction methods are good, but not foolproof. In order to do a good P2P data storage system, I am suggesting that there may be a need to significantly improve error rates beyond what is typically done with normal internet traffic, and that you can't ignore the memory systems for internal storage of the data either. It is just the nature of what is needed for long term data storage, which is not what was intended with most computers and dataprocessing equipment.
While I usually dismiss people who talk about the "Good ol' days" as being idiots (they usually are), this situation is very true and a very sad and recent development.
I don't consider myself to be that ancient (although I did learn to do programming on Apple ]['s... so it has been a little while)
When I was a Boy Scout I went on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters area of Northern Minnesota, that also is on the border between Minnesota and western Ontario. A "sister" park run by the provincial government is just to the north of the BWCA, and the group I was with made it all of the way up to the international border.
Waiting for us there was an absolutely gorgous waterfall (this was a 3-day trip by canoe to get there in the first place... no roads what so ever), and a little shack with a Canadian Mountie standing guard to keep idiot Americans on their side of the border (like myself). No U.S. Border Patrol agents in sight at all, or even park rangers. We chatted a bit with the Mountie, in some ways jealous because he actually got paid to run around in that gorgous wilderness, went about a mile into Canada mainly to say "yup, we made it into Canada", then turned around and went back into U.S. waters. To go further required a permit that we didn't have, otherwise I think we would have kept going at least for a couple of days. No comment about even seeing passports or even driver's licenses. Just the permit to run the canoes and camp equipment in the provincial park.
Anyway, the experience you had was very similar to what I remember of the international border, and it is too bad that the experience has gone downhill. I wish that crossing an international border between the U.S. and Canada were like crossing city limits in Los Angeles County (only affecting where the taxes go and otherwise nobody even knowing that they exist). I also know too many Canadian ex-pats living here in the USA, and have cousins in Alberta to make too much of a complaint about Canada. My ancestry goes north and south of the border for many generations back. I hope in the future that sort of attitude can be restored to cross to Canada without a passport.
While all of these are good reasons to establish independent space colonies, here is the #1 reason for landing on a planetary body:
Natural Resources!
Simply put, you need to have "stuff" in order to build anything, and planets like Mars and the Moon have lots of that stuff.
A neat advantage that Mars also offers is that you can start a human civilazation with comparatively fewer resources to start with, as they can draw from the local environment in a much easier fashion than you can by simply sitting in "empty" space, such as LEO. The ISS is a prime example of this, where all of the resources have to be brought up from the Earth in order to sustain human life up there... subject to budget cuts, mismanagement at HQ, and changes of priorities.
That said, you can still obtain some resource from asteroids, but that means you have to run out to them and set up camps on those asteroids to carve up the resources for the space stations you are talking about, or simply start building the settlements themselves right there. You still got planetary settlement then, regardless of where you ship the metal & minerals afterward.
In short, I don't see a way that you can avoid settlements on the Moon or Mars in the next 500-1000 years, and any manufactured worlds (like an O'Neil colony) would have to at least have a symbiotic relationship with miners living on dirt with gravity.
BTW, when you are dealing with agriculture in space, there are a lot of unknowns that will go into the picture. To suggest that there will be no pests or weeds is showing signs of ignorance as to how food is actually grown, as you need a very complex relationship between microorganisms, insects, and multiple species of plants in order to grow healthy crops. Even most farmers take this for granted as they push dirt around, but it is still something that they use to their advantage even here on the Earth. I've had to pull too much sweet corn out of soybean fields to think that weeds are merely noxious plants that God somehow put in there to "torment mankind". This is going to be an issue, however, for any agriculture that takes place off of the Earth.
Also RE: mobile territories--- This is going to be much harder than you think. If you want to have a space colony that can be moved around, it has to be built substantially different from something that is simply built in place to stay there. For a practical current application to compare against, look up or examine the building practices for mobile homes ("manufactured homes" in the current lexicon) vs. on-site constructed homes. Mobile homes have to have steel beams in certain places in order to keep the thing together as it travels down a freeway at 70 mph, and other construction considerations that must be done that keep certain floorplans from being done. Yes, there are some very creative architects that do seeming wonders with manufactured homes, but you can still look at the outside of a house and tell the difference. What make a manufactured home cheap is the economies of scale when they are mass-produced, and not having to haul as much labor on-site. This will not be an option in space for centuries if not for over 1000 years.
If you already have a solid and well established colony on bodies like Mars or the Moon (self-sustaining even), then you will be able to talk about manufactured worlds. Until then, you will have to lift everything from the Earth, which is prohibitively expensive for any very large project, or something that has not risen to the level of being of national importance, Robert Bigelow not withstanding.
I think that FTL communication is a virtual impossibility, and some very fundimental physics reasoning must be developed to make it happen.
I only comment about FTL communication because the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted a patent for FTL communication. The examiner must have flunked out of college to have approved the concept, but for the next 10-15 years such a process is patented, even if a physical impossibility. Someone (perhaps with a perpetual motion machine) must think this is possible to accomplish.
I think you miss the real issue here. We are not talking simple attitude control, but maintaining contact with the Earth, which from the viewpoint of a spacecraft that is 9 billion miles away is a point of light.
The problem is mainly that once the contact is lost, it will be impossible to send a strong enough signal through the low-gain antenna that Voyager would be able to respond to. Sure, the sun sensor and star tracker may be working, but if the antenna is not pointed in the correct direction it simply won't be able to recieve a signal from the Earth.
This is the point of why the funding must continue. In order to maintain that orientation, regular attitude corrections must be sent to reorient the antenna to make sure that it is still pointing to the Earth. The only way to fix this would be to send a powerful transmitter to Voyager and "tip" it back to the Earth. If you are doing that, you don't need Voyager, and it would cost significantly more than the $4 million per year to accomplish that task.
And yes, this is currently a problem, but the updates to correct this issue are regularly sent to the Voyager probes... which is precisely why they must have the number of staff members as listed to keep this mission alive. The money is what is spent on people who have to do astrogation and know how to pilot a spacecraft through the outer solar system. Those are skills that are not easily learned, and not nearly so simple as driving a car down the freeway.
There was a time not long ago they feared that this contact had been lost accidently... and it would have been the nail in the coffin to kill the program. Fortunately, they were able to regain control of the spacecraft, but with a forced suspension of the program it would be a likelyhood to almost certainty that this contact would be lost for good.
This is a hard core analogy to try and explain to congress critters just why it is not only short sighted, but incredibly foolish to cut the funding to the Voyager program.
One of the major complaints about the Indian Ocean Tsuami last Christmas holiday was that the technology and even the money was available to set up a warning system throughout the Indian Ocean that would give people living throughout the region as much as several hours advance notice before the Tsuami actually struck.... potentially saving the lives of thousands of people if it had been in place.
Both Voyager space craft are just like weather bouys in the ocean collecting data, but in this case they are in deep space collecting weather data.
The concept of space weather is a relatively new concept, however this is so mainstream that It has become a seperate bureau independent of NASA. Knowledge of space weather has significant economic impact on modern society, where utility grids have to prepare for increased surges in power systems, telecommunications systems need to know when to shut down telecomm sattelites, and perhaps most critical: Manned spacecraft need to have (if possible) advanced warning to know when to get into shielded areas to avoid the effects of a major solar storm. This is a storm of charged particles, and can be predicted using somewhat similar techniques as have already been developed for forecasting rain and snow storms here on the Earth.
By turning off Voyager, it is the equivalent to turning off an ocean bouy in the Pacific ocean, because the million or so dollars needed to service that bouy can't be found. What happens when you record the Tsumai wave the next day and wipes everything out, but it went unmonitored because you shut down the radio recievers that were recieving the bouy data?
Although unlikely, major magnetic storms can also come from extra-solar sources, and the Voyager probes would be in a unique position to be able to record these disturbances well before it would be a problem here on the Earth, giving us several months or even up to a year to prepare for the effects of such a cosmic event. That by itself could justify IMHO the reason to keep Voyager going for the next 10 years alone.
Also, by having the data collected by the Voyager and Pioneer space probes to continue, it will give us additional data points to understand space weather in general as we move out into the rest of the solar system. Right now there are a bunch of questions regarding how dangerous it will be to launch manned spacecraft from the Earth to Mars or even asteroids, and knowing just what the environment is like in space is critical to assess the risks and protection needed to carry out missions like these. This is a very rich source of data that is simply irreplaceable at any price for the next century.
If you want to get a glimpse of what Voyager would see of the solar system, check these photos out
These were taken in 1990, but it is IMHO one of the "cool" images ever taken by the Voyager project, and an example of real images that could be taken by Voyager even now.
If you want to see what actual science (including what will be lost when the Voyager program gets shut down) check out the mission page here
In fact, what voyager is able to provide really amounts right now to a weather bouy that is sitting in a known position and when triangulated with other outer solar system space probes are giving us a very rich picture of the environment within the solar system. This is going to be critical information when manned spaceflight starts to go beyond LEO or even just to the moon.
Think of it as having weather data points for ancient China (about 1 AD or even 1000 BC) and being able to use those weather observations to help with climate models currently being worked on.
As with weather forecasting, although individual data points are by themselves meaningless, when combined with similar data points and other data collected over time it becomes something as a whole that is almost priceless.
According to the project page, "the cosmic ray detector, magnetometer, plasma wave detector and low-energy charged particle detector all still operational." For much more than $4 million per year similar missions have been launched. This is very real science, and something that can be incredibly useful, such as knowledge of a galactic shock wave front going through the solar system, with a warning of weeks or even months before the main burst of charged particles will wipe out the telecom sattelites that our society depends on.
The problem is that if the budget isn't maintain, it won't get time on DSN, and once attitude toward the Earth is lost, it will be almost impossible to reaquire. Only when interstellar pleasure spacecraft (think Virgin Galactic to Alpha Centauri) is commonplace will we again be able to recontact Voyager.
The neat thing about Voyager is that it is in a unique place in the solar system to do things that it will take decades or more to put something similar up there... even with the few working instruments that are left or anything worth looking at. In this case it can be doing real science on a very genuine frontier for just pennies on the dollar compared to what any future science mission would have to come up with to accomplish the same task. If we say goodbye, then it will kill even the possiblity of future generations from knowing what may be out there. A future congress simply cannot put the funding back.
Also, a DSN engineer who tries to send updates to Voyager would likely get fired immediately for trying to pull such a stunt. Not to mention that unless you have stuied the systems closely it is likely that you would screw things up... especially when working on a ad hoc basis rather than trying to work it out with people who are working full-time trying to know and understand these systems.
Part of the problem is that you would have to build up a mirror to the NASA Deep Space Network. This is a series of "radio telescopes" dedicated to recieving and processing the information data flow coming from the various probes throughout the solar system. This is not a minor investment, but rather a huge application of dedicated resources that involved quite a bit of real estates (these telescopes are not tiny by a long-shot), and would require a significant team of volunteers just to paint/maintain the physical reciever aspects of these telescopes, not to mention the amplifiers and other equipment needed to get something like this going.
In short, it is more than a group of homebrew amatures with a spare $10,000 sitting in their pocket burning a hole not doing anything.
Once the data is collected, however, I think there would be a virtual army of volunteers who would be willing to do the decoding, monitoring, and remote procedure encoding necessary to getting these old probes working.
The other thing that you must concern yourself about is the raw political issues as well. NASA not only wants to control the current crop of probes (even the Hubble), and as a bureacracy hate having other people getting in their hair, but having an alternate to the Deep Space Network would in theory allow people to start messing with even the upcoming probes that havn't been launched yet. (Is that Natalie Portman swimming on Titan?)
The AMSAT model is for a simple sattlite that is in LEO position, and the electronics were entirely designed and maintained by amature radio operators. Even the system maintainence procedures are carried out by the group that launched them. As a result, it infrastructure is already there to deal with those satellites. Going for the Voyager probes is a much bigger task and it would be easier for a private group to build their own deep space probes instead.
I would advocate for something just like that anyway, rather than trying to take over an older NASA program. Still, I hate to see Voyager get killed simply because of congressional budget cuts and inept NASA bureaucracy.
If we are going to get CPU speeds to Terahertz or Petahertz frequencies, I will have to agree that the physical restraints of the speed of light are going to be a very major factor with CPU designs. Also, I don't know of any physical device manufactuer who is even remotely claiming even a 1% efficiency for storage and manipulation of a bit. (That would be a huge marketing ploy if it ever were achieved.) Physical devices, even optical systems, are far less efficient than that. There is no way that they are > 100,000 times more energy efficient than conductor/semi-conductor systems if simply because it would have been done already if the savings were that substantial.
I remember a speech by Adm. Grace Hooper where she was holding in her hands what she called microseconds, nanoseconds, and picoseconds. Basically a loop of wire that in the respective lengths of times it would take for an ideal signal to travel down that much wire. A good talk, and she was willing to give away quite a few nanoseconds, much less picoseconds. It really gets the concept of distances in small times to a perspective that your mind can grasp real easily.
Still, even assuming that we can overcome some of the issues with FTL communication at some point in the future, Planck's constant is going to be lurking in the background ready to bite even if we are using individual quarks for gate switching.
It is neat to see just what "hard" limits you can put on Moore's Law based on other hard physical constants from "hard science". It is also telling that electronic component manufacturers are having to get creative (such as the optical technologies being discussed in the article under discussion) in order to push systems beyond what appears to be hard limits to current manufacturing technologies.
Something beyond a photomask on lithographed semi-conductors must be done to get another 1000x increase in CPU speeds. Manufacturers are already using X-rays to get the fine details that are needed for the device manufacturing. If the frequencies get much higher, it will move into the gamma-ray section of the EM band.
While I will agree there are other factors that affect a CPU, this formula does provide a bottom reference value to demonstrate that increased CPU frequency... regarless of effeciency... will always consume more energy.
There are other fundimental constants in information theory that demonstrate a quantum effect for a single bit of data being manipulated... regardless of the effeciency of the device that is being used. There are fundimental information theory limits to how little energy can be consumed to flip that bit, and the formula of E=hf is a good place to start and try to figure out just how much energy must be used to change a one to a zero and back. The emmission and absorbtion of photons will increase entropy, and will eventually lead to a loss via emmision into the IR band. This generates heat.
While an optic fibre is quite efficient, it will still have problems in massed quantities found in a CPU. And if the CPU clock frequency is increased to the degree claimed (100,000 times), I think the statement of the grandparent post, "A Pentium would be like a refrigerator to this CPU" is a very true statement. An optical system isn't that much better than copper or gold wires.
I'm not suggesting that Europe is devoid of many cultures. I'm merely suggesting that Europeans on a "holliday tour" of America are going to get a very different view of what is America than what ordinary Americans know to be true.
I would suggest you spend some time in the Pennsylvania Dutch region (they speak German to a very large degree there), or visit an Indian reservation (if you can get away from the Casinos).
BTW, the GOP is quite a bit different from one state to another as well, as is the Democratic Party and other political interests. Yes, there tends to be broad generalizations that will apply from Texas and California, but you would be surprised at how many differences there are as well.
And no, you don't pay your bills the same way all over the country. With a common currency, there is not the same problems that you found in the past with Europe (with the Euro that will change). Still, there are different utilities and regional stores that vary quite a bit from one end of the country to another.
I was also pointing out in my post that there certainly is a homogenizing force with popular media (notably television and radio, but also many magazines and some newspapers, not to mention American cinema) that tends to smooth over the differences from one region to another, together with the nation-wide or even international mega-chain stores and brands. Indeed, that you can order a Big Mac in Rio de Janeiro or Berlin and have it taste almost the same shows that this is not just an American issue either (and a source of some anti-American sentiment).
As the EU becomes much more firmly established, this will also become more and more of an issue in Europe, where the cultures of the various countries in Europe will blend together even more and become more alike. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as this is needed in order to create new ties beteen countries (or states as it were), and with your uncle living in Germany when you live in France and a brother working in Poland, it will be quite unlikely that those countries are ever going to go to war against each other again in the near future. That is also a very good thing. This is precisely the situation that most Americans find themselves in, with family being found almost all across North America... and has been that way for several generations.
BTW, each state does have its own seperate government and governing system. That most U.S. states mimic the federal government organization (actually... mimic Virginia and Massachusetts) is besides the point. When you get into details, however, there are some big differences between states, even though the ignorant tend to ignore them. Somebody arrested in one state, for instance, must go through formal extradition arrangements to be transfered to another state, and there are treaties between American states as well. The nice thing is that there are (usually) no border patrol agents on state boundaries.
Keep in mind that UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII, and all of the code points of ASCII have been maintained in UTF-8... in otherwords, it goes to show how useful some standards have become.
I don't see anything surpassing Unicode anyway unless the Unicode Consortium decides to get an idiot committee in charge that starts to really push on the intellectual property front. There isn't a competing format at the moment, and even for open source programmers all of the relevant information (encoding algorithms, meanings of datapoints, even technical manuals) are all available freely and free-as-in-beer with few exceptions.
If the Unicode Consortium decides to become stupid, this will change, but even at that point it will likely produce only a fork in the development of Unicode data code points. Data using the current Unicode data points will be relatively safe.
This is nothing like the EBDIC vs. ASCII issues in the past (which had very different code points).
This is so wrong on so many levels that I don't know where to begin.
Glass, while you can technically call it a "fluid", is just as stable as just about any other fixed mineral that you can come up with, including granite or even sheets of metal.
The problem with glass is that it breaks rather than bends... again a problem with many other kinds of rocks.
So while over millions of years you might have glass "ooze" over each other, there are many other issues that make glass a poor archival medium well before that becomes an issue, including fagility of the stuff, having it scratched up (even if on a diamond substrate), or acids used for the etching process coming in contact with the glass. Water will eventually erode just about anything, and can do some incredible damage to glass in particular.
There are several problems with P2P data storage techniques:
1) The data over time becomes corrupted. This can be from ordinary memory copy errors (a stray cosmic ray turns a 1 into a 0 or the other way around), or when you send a packet over the network somehow the checksum works out even with corrupted data (it does happen quite often... especially over many generations of data). It happens, so get used to it, and over thousands of years it will be a huge issue. I've found that bit rot over even 10-15 years is incredibly huge for most magnetic media, and optical media, while slightly better than magnetic media, still has some serious problems over time. Electronic memory (RAM) is even worse.
2) P2P data stores are based on popularity. Data that is frequently requested will always be available. The problem is with the data that may only have occasional usefulness, but when it is needed it is very valuable. This is BTW a problem of the ages as well, as even dead-tree librarians also struggle with this same issue, where you have to discard genuine garbage from time to time, and have to decide if it truly is garbage or something that has long term value. The difference with a dead-tree library and a P2P system is that this cycle is 5 to 10 years for a dead tree library but only on the order of days or hours for a P2P repository, and stuff gets discarded much more quickly.
3) Trusted sources of data are hard to identify. This is an issue even larger for P2P systems. The point of a decentralized P2P system is that taking down any one node won't kill the network or even lose the data (hopefully). The problem here is that with all nodes being (supposedly) equal you can't tell real data from forged and/or modified data (avenues for censorship of all kinds and forms). Just because you have 10 copies from 10 sources that says one piece of data is a certain way doesn't mean that the one lone server that says differently is wrong. What is the criteria to show which data packet should be ignored? Again this is a dead-tree library issue as well, but there you have publisher reputations and "original manuscripts" to compare against that are not available in a P2P environment.
While a neat idea, there is quite a bit more work to be done addressing these and other problems with P2P networks. There are valid uses for the technology, and some of these issues are being dealt with in various degrees, but you can't ignore the fundimental problems with the technology and information storage issues in general.
I take it you aren't that familiar with North America then.
There are just as many diverse, perhaps more diverse cultures in America than you can find in Europe. You can go from Hollywood to Las Vegas to a Polygamous Mormon settlement to a Navajo Reservation in less than a day's drive. And that is not to mention places like Chinatown (in many larger cities... San Francisco's is a little bigger... where many residents speak only Chinese with just a little English on the side), going off to Arcadia in Louisiana, and for the truly adventersome, running off to Quebec (and avoid speaking English unless you want to be considered a stupid tourist).
Yes, I will admit that there is a bulldozing of American cultures with big corporations like Wal-mart, McDonalds, Home Depot, Pizza Hut, Coca-Cola, Disney, etc. that make a more homogenous cultural context for many Americans. That said, to experience the cultural diversity you need to get away from the strip malls... especially business districts built in the last 50 years or so. The cultural diversity is there... just harder to find.