There is a hard-funded level for the X-Prize (about $5 million approximately), but the remainder of the prize was funded with an insurance policy (on condition that somebody actually meets the X-Prize conditions). This is something that is done even with TV game shows like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire".
They are seeking sponsors to extend the premium and hence the deadline for a few more months or years, but with a couple of teams being very close to winning it the current attitude is "why bother?"
The big task ahead for the X-Prize committee is trying to determine what is going to be next.
Extend the prize for orbital flight? Set up a "NASCAR" like spaceship race? Space Station development?
Hypersonic jets did try to come into their own commercially, but conventional sub-sonic jets (like a Boeing 747 or a DC-10) have pretty much been "good enough" compared to the huge expenses of running a plane like the Concorde. Not to mention that environmental issues and other legal BS that is holding such planes from being developed. About the only routes that it was legal to fly the Concorde was between London, New York, and Paris. Liability issues is what finally killed the Concorde.
In regards to consumer-owned nuclear power devices, the biggest problem is that wide spread effecient use of nuclear fission devices require breeder reactors, not to mention mass distribution of very powerful materials that would allow any 15 year old the opportunity to make their own nuclear bomb. Kids are constantly making their own Nitro-glycerin as it is, what makes you think they won't be making their own personal nukes if they have access to the materials? This is a clear case where the risks outweigh the rewards.
As far as Pan-Am making flights to the moon, they did get something like 100,000 reservations from the promo they did with Kuberick's 2001: Space Oddesy, several of whom would have gladly put money on the table for the flight if they had the ship to go there. What more does a company want?
Life will go on for luddites, but I for one want to get to space, or at least see that my kids have the opportunity to go themselves.
The really impressive feat to me with being able to reach this altitude (100 km) is that once you can achieve it, real engineers can continue to refine the concept through incremental adjustments to eventually become a true orbital vehicle. After the initial rush of getting to orbit, the next big push will be to see what kind of range they can get.
From the articles, they are currently pushing for about a 35 mile range from launch site to landing site. I can see strong economic viability in trying to push further for an express service going from Los Angeles to London in 1 hour, or how about London to Sydney in 1 - 1/2 hours.
Engineering works better as a discipline when you can achieve goals in smaller steps, rather than pushing for one big goal at once. One of the reasons rocket science is so difficult is that in order to put something in orbit the leap from your Estes class "A" Mosquito rocket to a Delta 4 is quite a bit more than even a soapbox derby car to a Corvette. Even NASA had to go through several hundred rockets well before Alan Shepard got his first ride.
BTW, all that Alan Shepard got to do anyway was ride a sub-orbital flight for 15 minutes on a flight that would have barely qualified for the X-Prize itself. (He got to an altitude of 116 miles, distance of 300 miles)
The point here is that the X-Prize can certainly ignite the spark necessary to develop manned Low-Earth Orbit activities, and as the classic statement goes (I believe coined by Robert A. Heinlin) "Low Earth Orbit is half-way to the rest of the Solar System" Once people are up there, going on to other places in the Solar System is just more incremental steps.
The number one problem with the paper ballots that you are proposing here is that American elections are getting quite complex, even for the voter.
At the last general election I was at there were over 30 different offices that were being voted on, together with 3 tax referendums and 5 changes to the state constitution. The full text of one of these proposals was over 40 pages of legal fine print. The offices ranged from a US congressional seat, school board officers, county coucil, state representative and senator, city council, a half dozen judges, and a conservation district seat. And this was an "off-year" election when the US Presidency wasn't even up for grabs, or the state governor's seat.
While using paper ballots could reflect this mess in an organized mannor, trying to count these votes effectively is not a trivial task, and even good honest election judges who are trying can make many mistakes, even counting votes for the wrong office.
The token idea here wouldn't work because voters would have dozens of tokens that they would need for each office, not to mention the literally hundreds of boxes needed for all of the candidates and questions.
The tendancy is for even more offices to be decided by voters, and the referendum issues are also becoming more common. It is not unusual for the local animal control officer to be an elected office, not to mention the chief law-enforcement officer (here he is called the sheriff). On really hot topic, most politicians would rather that they be dealt with directly by voters, so the politician can simply point to the referendum and say "That is how you, the voters, wanted this issue decided."
My experience is that the voters usually get it right, but you need to be very well informed going into an election if you want to exercise your franchise properly.
It is this complexity that is driving the voting machines and trying to automate the counting process, not the drive to get these results out faster to the press.
First, there are organizations like the ECMA that publish freely their specification. I can also think of several others, including Microsoft, that publish information without charging royalties for internet distribution. In the case of ISO, I think they see this as a revenue source.
Personally, I think that standards can and ought to be in the public domain. By trying to limit or restrict a standard, you are encouraging other competing "standards" to be developed. Image if you had to pay a royalty for using a gram, meter, or liter? I think pounds, feet, and gallons would become very popular if that occured, even in Europe.
On the other hand, it appears as though ISO is trying to charge royalties on their copyrighted works. This is fair in and of itself, because they wrote the original document and it is in fact copyrighted. That means that people who publish these ISO standards on alternate or mirrored web sites are violating copyright law. As a private organization that can copyright anything they produce, they have every right to prevent or control how that text can be copied. This is the very definition of copyright.
That doesn't stop me from thinking they should never have been copyrighted in the first place. Standards need to be available for everybody to access and learn about, and the companies that sponsor and develop those standards also gain by having the standards availble for their products. Indeed, it is financially in the interest for any for-profit company to get involved, and involved early in the development of a standard. If you are the first company to successfully implement a standard you can often turn that into a near monopoly of the market that has been standarized, or at least get a major portion of that market. Also, competing companies that want to stay compatable with your products (following the standard) must not only comply with the written standard, but must also test against your products, which also help to define the standard. Since you wrote the standard, you don't have that cost.
Any other justification to charge for standards publications is just legal BS beyond the mere cost to support the servers. ISO gets plenty of money from its membership dues, and that should cover the cost of its support staff. I don't object to some donations to cover the server, or even charge for the documents to be given to you, but ISO has nothing in terms of document volume compared to the Gutenberg Project And that is donated server space.
I hate to open this can of worms, but you totally have the wrong spin on this subject.
While I will grant you that Unisys may have helped pay some very small part of the salaries of some of the originators of the LZW algorithm, you are stretching the truth quite a bit here. All that can be said is that at some point Unisys had the foresight to try to patent the algorithm and the USPTO was stupid enough to actually award it (not necessarily the fault of Unisys, but that is another story). From what I understand, IBM also patented the same idea, and there was also considerable prior art, not to mention the very shaky legal grounds that algorithm patents still stand on. Read up on that some time if you get a chance.
BTW, Compuserv did not originally license the "technology". The algorithm was published in a respected academic journal for Computer Science (I can't remember which one) which covered several other computing algorithms, of which the LZW compression algorithm was merely one of many articles. It was common for programmers to beg, borrow, or steal useful algorithms from each other (IMHO the sign of a good programmer anyway). We are not talking the copying of actual source code, but the the concept and idea, like the concept of a bubble sort or a quick sort.
The a couple of programmers at Compuserve saw the article, and liked the idea because they wanted to improve the ability to send graphic images to their users (or rather, even allow the capability). Remember, this was done in the days of the BBS systems when it was still common for 1200 baud modems. Of course, I remember when 1200 baud was considered a high-speed connnection. The GIF file format was in use well before the the world wide web. Several other data compression methods could have been used, but when the GIF standard was created it appeared as though the LZW algorithm was in the public domain.
The journal article didn't have any mention of any licensure requirements. Besides, it wasn't really practice (at the time) for programmers to seek licensure of an algorithm. In addition, at the time the GIF standard was created there was no simple way to search patents for violations. You litterally had to hire a law clerk to manually open patent abstracts and read each one. On paper. Sometimes you could find classified indexes to help with the patent search, but algorithm patents were so new at the time that even that wasn't commonly done because I doubt it had a classification code.
Also, you are forgetting the state of the art for graphic file formats prior to GIF. There were litterally hundreds of image file formats. Some compressed, some with different methods to store the image (usually a vector drawing format). Many were only monochrome images only. Every image processing application usually created their own propriatary format that was usually poorly documented (at best) and totally incompatable with other formats. Good conversions of data from one format to another often resulted in the loss of information, similar to converting a JPEG file to GIF.
From this mess Compuserve came in and offered the Graphic Image Format (GIF) for their customers, and in a philosophy that even Richard Stallman would approve, Compuserve offered the full published details of the format, to be freely distributed and copied without royalty (meaning the actual specification document...it was merely presumed that file formats themselves were freely distributable), and programmers were encouraged to develop software using the format. I believe it was something similar to the BSD license, but it later became free of attribution but still suggested. Keep in mind that Compuserve was at the time the 800 lb. gorilla in the computer industry, and as I said standardization of graphic images was just beginning to happen. Compuserve was treated as a hero, and due to the royalty-free nature of the format it was widely adopted. I can't remember a single graphic manipulation program that didn't support the GIF format pri
First thing: Although it would seem like a "voluntary act" to reassign copyright, the problem is that when the only game in town is to assign copyright to the major labels, it is the only thing that a typical artist can do. Admittedly there are now other approaches, but it still is an issue to bring up.
Also, when I buy a CD, I have made no other promise other than to obey state and federal laws. Period. Otherwise all I am buying is a hunk of plastic that may have some value to me beyond the junk CD-ROM I got from AOL.
That said, I am constantly letting people know that I can't stand large-scale copyright piracy. My father-in-law does some contracting in China and occasionally hits the Beijing street markets for software, movies, and music. He brought Star Wars: The Phantom Menance on VCD about a year before it came out retail in the USA. He got several other games, and even gave me a few as Christmas presents. I basically tossed the discs straight into the garbage can and told him I would not accept pirated discs... I mean it. My own financial welfare is based on people recognizing the effort that going into copyrighted works.
I could say a few things about current cpu and computer design philosophies, but I think your statment is showing just what is going on here.
You are correct that typical current CPU designs do tend to throttle up and consume more power when they are doing calculations, as opposed to earlier designs where the CPU always ran full out. Not being a chip designer, I can't give you all the details and technical terms, but many current designs have a "low power mode" that they move into while in idle mode where the clock also slows down or other power saving ideas. This is much more important for laptop computers (where battery lifetime averages are more important...keep in mind that laptops also bring in more $$$ for the chip founderies)
Also, you mentioned that you had some hard drive problems with the DES client? Again, because the software is regularly accessing the hard drive the drive is getting much more use and access than tyipcal in a office or home user setting. Cheap consumer rated drives are like this, although better quality multi-media or server rated hard drives won't give you nearly so much of a problem in situations like this. You do need to know your hardware.
I'll also say that the box design for your computer may also have some flaws. Typically, the box for a desktop computer is not really designed for air circulation: Instead, it is designed to look like a cool piece of furnature and be able to hold all of the cool stuff that you put into it. While there are a few companies that actually _ENGINEER_ the design of a box to cool the components properly, typically it is more along the realm of an interior decorator or a design engineer who is more concerned with appearance and manufacturers cost to produce the boxes.
I had to deal with these issues myself when I was working on some PCs that were put into some rather harsh operating conditions (running outdoors in an Arizona desert, or 30 ft. from the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii, or even 80 ft in the air on a billboard in Toronto... all of these running 24/7)
That said, I would disagree with you that the difference really is that much more on a typical home PC running with 100% clock cycles as opposed to one with a typical duty cycle running games or office software. The total number of watts consumed on a desktop PC when in "power conservation mode" is at most 30 less than when running at 100%. I would argue that it may even be considerably less.
Jupiter (in the story) was ignited with Von Neumann machines that artifically increased the core density of the planet. The entire planet was covered with the 1 x 4 x 9 oblisks. Mr. Clarke knew it would take much more than a small hunk of metal to do something like that.
I did check out the links prior to posting them on the page. As of the time I posted originally the site was up and running successfully, so yeah, I think it may have been hammered through a Slashdot effect. I certainly wasn't anticipating that would happen based on posting that, when I responded was moderated -1 Flamebait, even though I thought it was funny.
Also, the PPP did seem to have some very unique political opinions, which is why I included them in the list. If I am responsible for doubling their membership, that's fine with me.
I would have to concur. There is no possible way that, assuming you detonate a 1 Gigaton (Naquada-enhanced warhead...aka Stargate SG-1) nuclear warhead intentionally in the compressed Hydrogen atmosphere of Jupiter, could you cause a sustained fusion reaction to occur. Let's assume for the moment that you are also going to use a strategy developed during the Cold War of Stair-stepping the warheads in unison to further enhance the effect by making a ring of gas that would be compressed by a ring of these 1 GTon weapons. Also assume that these weapons are built to withstand pressures equal to that of the bottom of the Marianas Trench (one of the deepest spots of any ocean in the world). That way the explosion takes place deep in the interior of Jupiter where Hydrogen is naturally compressed.
A very small amount of the environmental hydrogen might possibly also get fused with the Tritium (the usual Hydrogen isotope used for thermonuclear weapons) in the nuclear explosion, but I think much more would go into the reaction that was installed with the original warhead. Imported all of the way from Earth. I doubt that even an explosion like this of (since I'm going totally off the wall here anyway) say 60-100 of these warheads going off simultaneously would even be detected on Earth with the Palomar telescope. Keep in mind that Jupiter is a very big place. The Giant Red Spot is larger than the entire Earth.
The article in question discusses how the RTG is going to be causing an explosion. I think that importing a sphere of Liquid Oxygen and having THAT explode is going to have a much larger impact on a potential fusion reaction...and provide much more energy.
What is going to happen with the RTG and its radioactive metals is that it will disintigrate upon hitting the atmosphere, and without an ablative heat shield (like with manned spacecraft...let's not get into Shuttle tiles here) it is simply going to completely disintigrate into a blob of molten metal, and depending on the reentry speed probabally break up into several hundred "rain drops" of metal spread out in a cross-sectional area about the size of Manhattan Island. Yeah, sure, the metal will be radioactive, but who cares? Comet Shoemaker-Levy did much more damage (and again, was more likly to cause a "nuclear fireball" than this stuipid piece of metal).
The RTG is a concern when at the launch pad, because theoretically a mis-launch could spread the fresh radioactive material all over Miami (or pick your favorite big city nearby/on the flight path from the Kennedy Space Center...assuming the worst software glitch and terrible flight control operators). I don't think even this would be that much of a concern, and certainly couldn't be any worse than that downwinders in St. George, Utah who were downwind from real nuclear blasts. They had problems but it wasn't a long-term problem, and people did live and have kids afterward. More than likely the RTG would stay together as a unit (even with an explosion of the Shuttle).
The Expansionist Party (feeling that Geo. W. Bush is a pansy and not being agressive enough in the expansion of the USA throughout the world)
Honestly, it would be good to have hackers...and I mean real good hackers, not script kiddies, change the results of a large election to a party like one of the above just to show the real danger to having machines like this wide open.
While I don't normally advocate the breaking of laws (and I love white hat hacking), something dramatic does need to happen to wake some ordinary people up. Of course, this isn't really all that different from the 100,000 dead people who voted for JFK in 1960, but who is counting.
I was using Windows XP, and got some sort of automatic "security update" patch added to my system. It ended up messing with a portion of the OS that ended up shutting down a couple of key applications I was using. I am currently doing consulting from home, (unfortunately Windows is required) and these applications were a necessary part of what I was doing, not to mention the annoyance factor either.
I have since reformatted by computer and installed Windows 2000, because it doesn't go messing with your head and changing to OS environment (never a good thing to do when you got a critical deadline then suddenly the project you are working on dies for an unknown reason).
Yeah, I don't trust Microsoft to make the decision to patch my system for me.
I just hope that I can dump MS operating systems in the not too distant future.
As an American that has lived in Brazil, I would have to agree that Brazilians do have a strong distrust of the American government but love American culture and people.
There were many times people would come up to me, seeing that I was an American, and try to strike up a conversation and learn about who I was and were I came from. American music groups and movies are heard and seen throughout Brazil, (in addition to many local groups and productions that are outstanding) and a very common second language to learn in the public schools is English. I ended up meeting several High School English teachers, several of whom wanted to practice their English skills with me (all while I was trying to practice and learn Portuguese).
I will agree that the U.S. government policies toward Latin America in general are simply terrible and show a very strong colonial attitude (as in Latin American countries are treated as though they are colonies of the USA...I do know better). There is also a very strong tendancy of US foriegn and trade policy being set up to compete with Pacific Rim countries, Europe, and the Middle East, and Latin America in general gets screwed over because of the overly broad policies set up due to its relations with other world powers.
For Brazil in particluar, historically it has been a very faithful ally of the USA, and was the only Latin American country to send soldiers into battle during WWII (they had a couple of major engagements in northern Italy against the Third Reich...well, major for Brazil, and would have been headline international news if it weren't for other battles elsewhere at the same time). The Brazilian military is still quite friendly with the US military, but that fact politically in Brazil is more of a liability than an asset right now.
One particular issue I remember back during the Reagan Administration was in regards to shoe import tarriffs. There were a bunch of shoe manufacturers in New England in the 1980s that were having a really hard time competing against international manufactuers, especially because making shoes requires quite a bit manual labor to produce each shoe. Rather than admitting that paying $20/hour for unionized labor (and everything else that brings up...just don't think I'm anti-union however) and considering they are compeating against countries that have laborers that earning less than $10 per day, the shoe manufactures tried to substantially increase the import tarriffs to something like 300% tax on imported goods.
At that time about half of the shoes sold in America were made in Brazil. What actually happended was that no only did the price of the imported shoes go up (the desired affect), but the price of the domestic shoes also went up. Demand for shoe purchases dropped almost overnight, and huge numbers of shoe factories in Brazil shut down for more than a decade, sometimes permanently. Of course these shoe workers were pissed at US policy. And this was something that, to be honest, most US citizens didn't really care about anyway, and would prefer the cheaper shoes as well, even if they did come from Brazil. BTW, those American shoe companies that "needed" that tarriff protection: they closed up shop anyway, or moved production to some place like Malaysia or Singapore.
Another incident that I had while living in Brazil: I had lived in Brazil for almost two years and had over time aquired a pretty good suntan (seasonally too, because summer is between December and March), as well as some more local clothing. I was walking in downtown Sao Paulo with a native-born Brazilian and mistaken for a local myself. A Texan with a traditional 30-gallon cowboy hat, 150 lbs. overweight, wearing blue jeans (Levi's), a bolo tie, and a huge 10 lbs. belt buckle with the words "Don't mess with Texas", came up to me and said something that I considered rather insulting in English. Then he said something like "Why can't y'all learn how to speak a real language". I can't remember exactly what he asked, but even tho
If you are not a lawyer....well, you certainly have the brains to be one. If not, thank goodness, we need people with brains like that in other areas of our economy and world who actually do something productive for a living.
From my own interpretation of USC 17 106 (IANAL, but I am a registered voter and US citizen who does know how to read legal code) I would have to totally agree with you.
At best, all Caldera can do is say that the "poison pill" restriction of the GPL has kicked in, because some portions of Linux aren't legal to distribute. They (Caldera) own the copyright and never consented to its inclusion in Linux under any license.
I do think that a resonable judge (they do exist BTW) would probabally order that any source code that legally belongs to SCO should be removed from Linux on the basis of the copyright laws you mentioned above. Damages could be levied, but at the same time it would be abundantly clear that most duplication of Linux was unintentional, with very stong reasons to believe all Linux duplications (the right to copy... hense copyright) that occured were totally legal.
The paper trail for inclusion of a patch to Linux is very well documented (they don't call it open source for nothing) and not a trivial thing to accomplish, especially for the kernel (which is what is being disputed).
At worst the person (or people) who added copyrighted code to the kernel would be personally liable for damages if they don't actually own the copyright to the code. If that happens I hope they get nailed...it can do nothing but help the Free Software/Open Source movement by letting people know what will happen if you "cheat" and don't create the software yourself. I have no doubt that some parts of the Linux kernel do have some potential copyright disputes.
Nothing in USC 17 106 can possibly implicate an individual user unless they also made copies of the Linux kernel for friends or installed in to multiple machines (more likely).
I also think that a judge would be very jaundiced with the fact that SCO has taken no steps have this software removed through non-legal channels like getting Linus Torvalds to remove portions from the kernel that are in dispute. Good-faith efforts like this should have been tried first if there really were a problem. This fact, more than any other, makes me think that SCO/Caldera is totally full of it.
I don't think that merely one class action lawsuit needs to be done. I see four seperate lawsuits covering four differnet classes of people:
1) All Linux users. This is the group that apparently is being targeted by SCO, and needs to be addressed. A summary judgement in this case could probabally be obtained to stop these frivilous lawsuits, with all the legal meanings that implies. Any linux users who have recieved specific mailings or e-mail messages from SCO may also be able to collect actual damages.
2) Linux distributors. This is what Red Hat is doing, but it does affect other distros as well. Anybody who has ditributed Linux, is distributing it, or even is preparing to distribute Linux can sue SCO for lost profits due to FUD and unsubstantiated accusations that were publically stated by SCO. A class action suit would only bring this to focus that legitimate businesses are currently losing money because of these rantings and ravings. Because of the fact that the number of commercial distros is comparatively small, individual lawsuits may be more prevalent.
3) Kernel contributors. From when the first $1 came into SCO for "licensing" the Linux kernel, the GPL has become violated. This has been beaten to death on Slashdot, but I think it is time that the kernel developers come together and demand their share of that cash that SCO is collecting. Regardless of what SCO is claming, they can't seriously claim 100% ownership over software that clearly they didn't write. Remember again, SCO is still distributing Linux, so they are violating your claims. BTW, I have a commercially pressed edition of Caldera Linux on CD-ROM for anybody wanting to go for statutory damages here.
As a side note here: How much of the Linux Kernel has been formally submitted to the U.S. Library of Congress for copyright registration? If it hasn't happened, this should be done ASAP, regardless of other issues and their outcomes. This is a cheap $50 well spent. Similar registrations around the world should also be done.
4) Gnu/Linux developers. This is a broader lawsuit than strictly kernel developers, but again, if it is being distributed by SCO/Caldera for a paid license, that must be paid in order to copy or distribute "Linux", every software package being distributed by SCO could be a party to this lawsuit for actual and statutory damages.
You are correct that corporations are regulated by seperate rules and standards than other people, but a corporate death penalty can still happen, especially when that group is doing illegal activity.
If a company is doing blatently illegal activity, for example smuggling drugs or running a brothel (where it is not legal), you had better believe that it will be taken over by the government and disbanded. The 14th Ammendment does not protect the right to consipiracy to commit crime. If the ACLU did anything other than simply express their opinions (like participating and organizing in civil disobedience protests themselves rather than defend the people guilty of civil disobedience), it would no longer exist.
IMHO, corporate CEOs and (more importantly) the board of directors should be held directly liable for corporate criminal activity...certainly much more than is the case right now. The board of directors for most companies tend to rubber stamp whatever the CEO and top executive staff want to do (with some notable exceptions), and often don't even want to know much about the general operations of the companies they are supposed to govern. This is the human element of corporations that unfortunately is where the breakdown is happening.
Every once in a while you can find companies that have been shut down, but when it comes to publically traded stock corporations (like SCO, Microsoft or IBM) it tends to be a very strong exception, particularly because of the rules and red tape necessary to even be publically listed on a stock exchange. This is normally something that a criminal group is not likely to go and do (go public with stock) just to do a quick run and leave to a non-extraditable country 12 hours before the FBI (or Interpol) come crashing through the font doors.
In the case of SCO, they are accused of manipulating the price of their stock, which is a part of the rules of public companies (that supposedly they are breaking). If they were manufacturing nuclear weapons for sale to al Queida, you wouldn't even see a hesitation to shut the place down.
I would have to say that your argument about the SUVs going to McDonalds is a really good example of how Americans try to circumvent the law to their own advantage.
In the 1970s and earlier in America it would have been driving the Station Wagon with the kids to the local McDonalds instead. The problem here was that environmental and fuel economy laws were enacted that forced the auto industry to try and improve fuel effency by governmental decree. The tranditional 4 door with swing back hatch Station Wagon was classified as a passenger automobile, and had to go through the much tougher restrictions and higher standards.
Eventually, through these regulations, the Station Wagon was sent into obsolescense, partly because the auto makers couldn't meet the legal requirements for fuel economy if they kept making them.
These legal restrictions didn't apply to trucks, which had different standards to allow for commercial transportation needs. If you look at the vehicle title for an SUV, you will see that it is classified as a truck, just like a flower delivery van. The SUV is essentially an end-run around a silly law, which also has unintended consequences. Some people really do need a bigger vehicle than a 2-door coup with a 0.5 m^3 trunk storage.
This reminds me about another silly law (that has since been repealed) that only allowed quartz halogen lights on garbage trucks. A company was trying to sell them to consumers a few years ago, and you had to sign an agreement with the company that at some point in the future you would convert your vehicle into a garbage truck. They even had a picture of a Cadallac with a garbage compactor on the back to prove it "could" be done.
My main experience of living somewhere other than the United States is living in South America, where they have a tradition of governments changing every generation or so. And I don't mean a new party going into power, I mean somebody trashing whatever constitution was in effect and writing a new one, and throwing out all of the old laws, releasing the prisoners only to lock up the murderers and rapists in a few weeks (if they can catch them), and total civil instability.
This has lead to a near total distrust of the government and has some very subtle effects on everyday life as well.
One really good example was a classic eight-sided "Stop" sign. When I was in Brazil, I saw these in many places, but people hardly ever actually stopped in front of the sign. When I asked a local resident what the purpose of them was for, they said that it was a marker for where an accident occured a few years earlier. Or at least that was the punchline of a joke regarding those signs.
If you tried to run through a Stop sign in the United States, one of two things would happen: 1) A small town cop would throw the book at you and you would have to deal with a bunch of grief trying to get out of the ticket (at least by paying the fine...don't you even think about trying to bribe the officer) or 2) You would get side swipped by a car going across the intersection in the other direction. Even while living in Brazil I never understood how they avoided this second problem, but the drivers there always seemed to avoid the problems.
I will say that cultural differences with the United States vs. other countries, while subtle, are significant and tough to deal with for the unprepared. I am not proud of the lawsuit happy nature of America, but this is something that unfortunately is here to stay. I considered going to law school myself as a career path, but I felt there were too many lawyers in America as it was and didn't want to add to the problem.
I would have to agree, the basic philosophy of the GPL is not going to be tested in the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit. The whole thing is going to go down to license issues other than the GPL (for example, IBM's AIX and its own additions to that codebase) and a number of patent issues.
What is going to start to raise the GPL issues is when those buying the SCO license start to discover that there are hundreds of people they also have to pay, since the GPL has been violated they have to obtain a seperate license from each and every copyright holder. In some cases, this is going to be hard to even track down, and this is where court cases can end up taking decades to resolve. Yes, decades. This is a Pandora's Box of legal worms that SCO doesn't even know what is going on, and the affected companies will have to deal will long after SCO goes belly up.
This should also be a huge wakeup call for project maintainers for GPL'd projects, to absolutely make sure that copyright for any submitted sections of code is totally cleared. I realize that this is not quite as easy as it would appear, but it is something that must be done. The free software/open source software community must come up with industry standards to remove source code that has conflicting copyright concerns.
For his part, Linus Torvald had plenty of reason to believe that IBM had cleared their portions of the kernel for copyright violations, and that is perhaps the #1 reason why he isn't directly named as a defendant. Other project maintainers might not be so lucky.
The last war that even comes close to what you are suggesting in recent history was WWII, and just about every convention and rule of war was broken, including targeted deleberate genocide of specific races. Nuclear weapons were even used.
In all honesty, even if nuclear weapons were used in another war, sure the casulties would be as high as WWII (possibly higher), but I think you would still see a major portion of the population survive...even have people move back into the areas where the bombs were detonated.
Are Hiroshima and Nagasaki still nuclear deserts and wilderness areas right now? There are a couple of million people living in the area of those attacks right now. Sure, a few buildings were left as reminders of what damage the nukes caused, but the cities have been largely rebuilt. People are even living in Chernobyl right now, even though in the long-run that disaster has consequences that are still difficult to clean up from.
With the exception of the Black Plague, European population always grew during times of war. The only thing that has caused the population of Europe to start dropping is properity, and social attitudes against bearing and raising children.
I bet if you look at the corporate charters of both Red Hat as well as SCO/Caldera (and I'd emphasis SCO here) you'd find it was chartered in Deleware, hence how the Deleware courts have juristiction in this matter.
Corporate charters (for the most part) are done on a state level and regulated by the state legislatures and courts. There are a few federally chartered corporations, but these are usually special cases like the Federal Reserve Banks, American Red Cross, or the Boy Scouts of America (three organization I know have federal corporate charters)
Compare this to ship registration, where ships are registered with various countries and subject to their laws, but many shipping companies prefer to be registered with Liberia.... because they know that they won't be boarded by the Liberian Navy too often when they are loading goods in Hong Kong or Singapore.
I'm sure that Europe has a similar situation right now with corporate charters, although I'm not sure myself what EU country is the current hotspot for corporate registration. Deleware has been doing this since the mid-19th Century, and the body of corporate law (including legal precedence) is so large that it is very hard to not find some kind of law or previous court case that is favorable to your case. As a side-effect to this, the judges in Deleware are also quite familiar with corporate law, which also helps in cases like this.
Check this out, according to Yahoo, Wall street dropped SCO stock $2 per share almost coinciding with this announcement. Obviously Wall Street is paying attention on this one right now.
Of course, the PC industry was based on an already successful commercial computer industry, who had already been refining the concepts of computer science and electrical engineering. The PC industry simply introduced the concept of low-cost personal computers and mass-produced consumer devices.
The analogies are very strong, especially considering how the existing Aerospace industries are totally falling flat on this idea. I am very surprised that companies like Boeing or Airbus aren't at least letting their engineers have access to their shops after hours to try a stunt like this and submit their own entry for practically pocket change, kinda like how IBM let their engineers play a bit with Linux for next to no bottom-line cost for years...with a huge ROI.
Once you hit the 15,000 for $100,000, the question then becomes how many would pay $10,000 if they could get the price per trip down?
Heck, I might be encouraged to get a home equity loan in 10 years just for an opportunity to do that myself (or help finance one of my kids for that opportunity).
The study was only talking about some real hard numbers that could be given to investors and point out the very real profit potential of commercial space transportation systems, even considering that the need to send a 747-style spacecraft to Mars will still be a century away.
You know, I think this is a good point, and something to consider when you think of open source vs. propritary systems. You will be able to keep loading the old stuff as long as the data still exists somewhere.
I have a box of Apple ][ software however, and if the old beige box ever dies on me, I doubt I will ever get much off of that data, even if I can read the floppies with 100% error free success. Mainly due to propritary issues with the OS (although some pretty decent emulators are available).
Networks are making it easier to preserve data now, and as long as you have a computer that **_CAN_** read the data and is on the network, you can also transfer that data from one computer to the next. This allows an iMac to read those Hollarth punch cards (at least indirectly).
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There is a hard-funded level for the X-Prize (about $5 million approximately), but the remainder of the prize was funded with an insurance policy (on condition that somebody actually meets the X-Prize conditions). This is something that is done even with TV game shows like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire".
They are seeking sponsors to extend the premium and hence the deadline for a few more months or years, but with a couple of teams being very close to winning it the current attitude is "why bother?"
The big task ahead for the X-Prize committee is trying to determine what is going to be next.
Extend the prize for orbital flight? Set up a "NASCAR" like spaceship race? Space Station development?
Hypersonic jets did try to come into their own commercially, but conventional sub-sonic jets (like a Boeing 747 or a DC-10) have pretty much been "good enough" compared to the huge expenses of running a plane like the Concorde. Not to mention that environmental issues and other legal BS that is holding such planes from being developed. About the only routes that it was legal to fly the Concorde was between London, New York, and Paris. Liability issues is what finally killed the Concorde.
In regards to consumer-owned nuclear power devices, the biggest problem is that wide spread effecient use of nuclear fission devices require breeder reactors, not to mention mass distribution of very powerful materials that would allow any 15 year old the opportunity to make their own nuclear bomb. Kids are constantly making their own Nitro-glycerin as it is, what makes you think they won't be making their own personal nukes if they have access to the materials? This is a clear case where the risks outweigh the rewards.
As far as Pan-Am making flights to the moon, they did get something like 100,000 reservations from the promo they did with Kuberick's 2001: Space Oddesy, several of whom would have gladly put money on the table for the flight if they had the ship to go there. What more does a company want?
Life will go on for luddites, but I for one want to get to space, or at least see that my kids have the opportunity to go themselves.
The really impressive feat to me with being able to reach this altitude (100 km) is that once you can achieve it, real engineers can continue to refine the concept through incremental adjustments to eventually become a true orbital vehicle. After the initial rush of getting to orbit, the next big push will be to see what kind of range they can get.
From the articles, they are currently pushing for about a 35 mile range from launch site to landing site. I can see strong economic viability in trying to push further for an express service going from Los Angeles to London in 1 hour, or how about London to Sydney in 1 - 1/2 hours.
Engineering works better as a discipline when you can achieve goals in smaller steps, rather than pushing for one big goal at once. One of the reasons rocket science is so difficult is that in order to put something in orbit the leap from your Estes class "A" Mosquito rocket to a Delta 4 is quite a bit more than even a soapbox derby car to a Corvette. Even NASA had to go through several hundred rockets well before Alan Shepard got his first ride.
BTW, all that Alan Shepard got to do anyway was ride a sub-orbital flight for 15 minutes on a flight that would have barely qualified for the X-Prize itself. (He got to an altitude of 116 miles, distance of 300 miles)
The point here is that the X-Prize can certainly ignite the spark necessary to develop manned Low-Earth Orbit activities, and as the classic statement goes (I believe coined by Robert A. Heinlin) "Low Earth Orbit is half-way to the rest of the Solar System" Once people are up there, going on to other places in the Solar System is just more incremental steps.
The number one problem with the paper ballots that you are proposing here is that American elections are getting quite complex, even for the voter.
At the last general election I was at there were over 30 different offices that were being voted on, together with 3 tax referendums and 5 changes to the state constitution. The full text of one of these proposals was over 40 pages of legal fine print. The offices ranged from a US congressional seat, school board officers, county coucil, state representative and senator, city council, a half dozen judges, and a conservation district seat. And this was an "off-year" election when the US Presidency wasn't even up for grabs, or the state governor's seat.
While using paper ballots could reflect this mess in an organized mannor, trying to count these votes effectively is not a trivial task, and even good honest election judges who are trying can make many mistakes, even counting votes for the wrong office.
The token idea here wouldn't work because voters would have dozens of tokens that they would need for each office, not to mention the literally hundreds of boxes needed for all of the candidates and questions.
The tendancy is for even more offices to be decided by voters, and the referendum issues are also becoming more common. It is not unusual for the local animal control officer to be an elected office, not to mention the chief law-enforcement officer (here he is called the sheriff). On really hot topic, most politicians would rather that they be dealt with directly by voters, so the politician can simply point to the referendum and say "That is how you, the voters, wanted this issue decided."
My experience is that the voters usually get it right, but you need to be very well informed going into an election if you want to exercise your franchise properly.
It is this complexity that is driving the voting machines and trying to automate the counting process, not the drive to get these results out faster to the press.
There are a couple of problems here.
First, there are organizations like the ECMA that publish freely their specification. I can also think of several others, including Microsoft, that publish information without charging royalties for internet distribution. In the case of ISO, I think they see this as a revenue source.
Personally, I think that standards can and ought to be in the public domain. By trying to limit or restrict a standard, you are encouraging other competing "standards" to be developed. Image if you had to pay a royalty for using a gram, meter, or liter? I think pounds, feet, and gallons would become very popular if that occured, even in Europe.
On the other hand, it appears as though ISO is trying to charge royalties on their copyrighted works. This is fair in and of itself, because they wrote the original document and it is in fact copyrighted. That means that people who publish these ISO standards on alternate or mirrored web sites are violating copyright law. As a private organization that can copyright anything they produce, they have every right to prevent or control how that text can be copied. This is the very definition of copyright.
That doesn't stop me from thinking they should never have been copyrighted in the first place. Standards need to be available for everybody to access and learn about, and the companies that sponsor and develop those standards also gain by having the standards availble for their products. Indeed, it is financially in the interest for any for-profit company to get involved, and involved early in the development of a standard. If you are the first company to successfully implement a standard you can often turn that into a near monopoly of the market that has been standarized, or at least get a major portion of that market. Also, competing companies that want to stay compatable with your products (following the standard) must not only comply with the written standard, but must also test against your products, which also help to define the standard. Since you wrote the standard, you don't have that cost.
Any other justification to charge for standards publications is just legal BS beyond the mere cost to support the servers. ISO gets plenty of money from its membership dues, and that should cover the cost of its support staff. I don't object to some donations to cover the server, or even charge for the documents to be given to you, but ISO has nothing in terms of document volume compared to the Gutenberg Project And that is donated server space.
I hate to open this can of worms, but you totally have the wrong spin on this subject.
While I will grant you that Unisys may have helped pay some very small part of the salaries of some of the originators of the LZW algorithm, you are stretching the truth quite a bit here. All that can be said is that at some point Unisys had the foresight to try to patent the algorithm and the USPTO was stupid enough to actually award it (not necessarily the fault of Unisys, but that is another story). From what I understand, IBM also patented the same idea, and there was also considerable prior art, not to mention the very shaky legal grounds that algorithm patents still stand on. Read up on that some time if you get a chance.
BTW, Compuserv did not originally license the "technology". The algorithm was published in a respected academic journal for Computer Science (I can't remember which one) which covered several other computing algorithms, of which the LZW compression algorithm was merely one of many articles. It was common for programmers to beg, borrow, or steal useful algorithms from each other (IMHO the sign of a good programmer anyway). We are not talking the copying of actual source code, but the the concept and idea, like the concept of a bubble sort or a quick sort.
The a couple of programmers at Compuserve saw the article, and liked the idea because they wanted to improve the ability to send graphic images to their users (or rather, even allow the capability). Remember, this was done in the days of the BBS systems when it was still common for 1200 baud modems. Of course, I remember when 1200 baud was considered a high-speed connnection. The GIF file format was in use well before the the world wide web. Several other data compression methods could have been used, but when the GIF standard was created it appeared as though the LZW algorithm was in the public domain.
The journal article didn't have any mention of any licensure requirements. Besides, it wasn't really practice (at the time) for programmers to seek licensure of an algorithm. In addition, at the time the GIF standard was created there was no simple way to search patents for violations. You litterally had to hire a law clerk to manually open patent abstracts and read each one. On paper. Sometimes you could find classified indexes to help with the patent search, but algorithm patents were so new at the time that even that wasn't commonly done because I doubt it had a classification code.
Also, you are forgetting the state of the art for graphic file formats prior to GIF. There were litterally hundreds of image file formats. Some compressed, some with different methods to store the image (usually a vector drawing format). Many were only monochrome images only. Every image processing application usually created their own propriatary format that was usually poorly documented (at best) and totally incompatable with other formats. Good conversions of data from one format to another often resulted in the loss of information, similar to converting a JPEG file to GIF.
From this mess Compuserve came in and offered the Graphic Image Format (GIF) for their customers, and in a philosophy that even Richard Stallman would approve, Compuserve offered the full published details of the format, to be freely distributed and copied without royalty (meaning the actual specification document...it was merely presumed that file formats themselves were freely distributable), and programmers were encouraged to develop software using the format. I believe it was something similar to the BSD license, but it later became free of attribution but still suggested. Keep in mind that Compuserve was at the time the 800 lb. gorilla in the computer industry, and as I said standardization of graphic images was just beginning to happen. Compuserve was treated as a hero, and due to the royalty-free nature of the format it was widely adopted. I can't remember a single graphic manipulation program that didn't support the GIF format pri
First thing: Although it would seem like a "voluntary act" to reassign copyright, the problem is that when the only game in town is to assign copyright to the major labels, it is the only thing that a typical artist can do. Admittedly there are now other approaches, but it still is an issue to bring up.
Also, when I buy a CD, I have made no other promise other than to obey state and federal laws. Period. Otherwise all I am buying is a hunk of plastic that may have some value to me beyond the junk CD-ROM I got from AOL.
That said, I am constantly letting people know that I can't stand large-scale copyright piracy. My father-in-law does some contracting in China and occasionally hits the Beijing street markets for software, movies, and music. He brought Star Wars: The Phantom Menance on VCD about a year before it came out retail in the USA. He got several other games, and even gave me a few as Christmas presents. I basically tossed the discs straight into the garbage can and told him I would not accept pirated discs... I mean it. My own financial welfare is based on people recognizing the effort that going into copyrighted works.
I could say a few things about current cpu and computer design philosophies, but I think your statment is showing just what is going on here.
You are correct that typical current CPU designs do tend to throttle up and consume more power when they are doing calculations, as opposed to earlier designs where the CPU always ran full out. Not being a chip designer, I can't give you all the details and technical terms, but many current designs have a "low power mode" that they move into while in idle mode where the clock also slows down or other power saving ideas. This is much more important for laptop computers (where battery lifetime averages are more important...keep in mind that laptops also bring in more $$$ for the chip founderies)
Also, you mentioned that you had some hard drive problems with the DES client? Again, because the software is regularly accessing the hard drive the drive is getting much more use and access than tyipcal in a office or home user setting. Cheap consumer rated drives are like this, although better quality multi-media or server rated hard drives won't give you nearly so much of a problem in situations like this. You do need to know your hardware.
I'll also say that the box design for your computer may also have some flaws. Typically, the box for a desktop computer is not really designed for air circulation: Instead, it is designed to look like a cool piece of furnature and be able to hold all of the cool stuff that you put into it. While there are a few companies that actually _ENGINEER_ the design of a box to cool the components properly, typically it is more along the realm of an interior decorator or a design engineer who is more concerned with appearance and manufacturers cost to produce the boxes.
I had to deal with these issues myself when I was working on some PCs that were put into some rather harsh operating conditions (running outdoors in an Arizona desert, or 30 ft. from the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii, or even 80 ft in the air on a billboard in Toronto... all of these running 24/7)
That said, I would disagree with you that the difference really is that much more on a typical home PC running with 100% clock cycles as opposed to one with a typical duty cycle running games or office software. The total number of watts consumed on a desktop PC when in "power conservation mode" is at most 30 less than when running at 100%. I would argue that it may even be considerably less.
I think this was just a pure Slashdot effect. The registration computer was overloaded with all of the folks from here that suddenly just joined.
I just got on and retried my registration, and it seems to be working just fine now.
Yeah.... please read 2010 again.
Jupiter (in the story) was ignited with Von Neumann machines that artifically increased the core density of the planet. The entire planet was covered with the 1 x 4 x 9 oblisks. Mr. Clarke knew it would take much more than a small hunk of metal to do something like that.
I did check out the links prior to posting them on the page. As of the time I posted originally the site was up and running successfully, so yeah, I think it may have been hammered through a Slashdot effect. I certainly wasn't anticipating that would happen based on posting that, when I responded was moderated -1 Flamebait, even though I thought it was funny.
Also, the PPP did seem to have some very unique political opinions, which is why I included them in the list. If I am responsible for doubling their membership, that's fine with me.
I would have to concur. There is no possible way that, assuming you detonate a 1 Gigaton (Naquada-enhanced warhead...aka Stargate SG-1) nuclear warhead intentionally in the compressed Hydrogen atmosphere of Jupiter, could you cause a sustained fusion reaction to occur. Let's assume for the moment that you are also going to use a strategy developed during the Cold War of Stair-stepping the warheads in unison to further enhance the effect by making a ring of gas that would be compressed by a ring of these 1 GTon weapons. Also assume that these weapons are built to withstand pressures equal to that of the bottom of the Marianas Trench (one of the deepest spots of any ocean in the world). That way the explosion takes place deep in the interior of Jupiter where Hydrogen is naturally compressed.
A very small amount of the environmental hydrogen might possibly also get fused with the Tritium (the usual Hydrogen isotope used for thermonuclear weapons) in the nuclear explosion, but I think much more would go into the reaction that was installed with the original warhead. Imported all of the way from Earth. I doubt that even an explosion like this of (since I'm going totally off the wall here anyway) say 60-100 of these warheads going off simultaneously would even be detected on Earth with the Palomar telescope. Keep in mind that Jupiter is a very big place. The Giant Red Spot is larger than the entire Earth.
The article in question discusses how the RTG is going to be causing an explosion. I think that importing a sphere of Liquid Oxygen and having THAT explode is going to have a much larger impact on a potential fusion reaction...and provide much more energy.
What is going to happen with the RTG and its radioactive metals is that it will disintigrate upon hitting the atmosphere, and without an ablative heat shield (like with manned spacecraft...let's not get into Shuttle tiles here) it is simply going to completely disintigrate into a blob of molten metal, and depending on the reentry speed probabally break up into several hundred "rain drops" of metal spread out in a cross-sectional area about the size of Manhattan Island. Yeah, sure, the metal will be radioactive, but who cares? Comet Shoemaker-Levy did much more damage (and again, was more likly to cause a "nuclear fireball" than this stuipid piece of metal).
The RTG is a concern when at the launch pad, because theoretically a mis-launch could spread the fresh radioactive material all over Miami (or pick your favorite big city nearby/on the flight path from the Kennedy Space Center...assuming the worst software glitch and terrible flight control operators). I don't think even this would be that much of a concern, and certainly couldn't be any worse than that downwinders in St. George, Utah who were downwind from real nuclear blasts. They had problems but it wasn't a long-term problem, and people did live and have kids afterward. More than likely the RTG would stay together as a unit (even with an explosion of the Shuttle).
Honestly, it would be good to have hackers...and I mean real good hackers, not script kiddies, change the results of a large election to a party like one of the above just to show the real danger to having machines like this wide open.
While I don't normally advocate the breaking of laws (and I love white hat hacking), something dramatic does need to happen to wake some ordinary people up. Of course, this isn't really all that different from the 100,000 dead people who voted for JFK in 1960, but who is counting.
I was using Windows XP, and got some sort of automatic "security update" patch added to my system. It ended up messing with a portion of the OS that ended up shutting down a couple of key applications I was using. I am currently doing consulting from home, (unfortunately Windows is required) and these applications were a necessary part of what I was doing, not to mention the annoyance factor either.
I have since reformatted by computer and installed Windows 2000, because it doesn't go messing with your head and changing to OS environment (never a good thing to do when you got a critical deadline then suddenly the project you are working on dies for an unknown reason).
Yeah, I don't trust Microsoft to make the decision to patch my system for me.
I just hope that I can dump MS operating systems in the not too distant future.
As an American that has lived in Brazil, I would have to agree that Brazilians do have a strong distrust of the American government but love American culture and people.
There were many times people would come up to me, seeing that I was an American, and try to strike up a conversation and learn about who I was and were I came from. American music groups and movies are heard and seen throughout Brazil, (in addition to many local groups and productions that are outstanding) and a very common second language to learn in the public schools is English. I ended up meeting several High School English teachers, several of whom wanted to practice their English skills with me (all while I was trying to practice and learn Portuguese).
I will agree that the U.S. government policies toward Latin America in general are simply terrible and show a very strong colonial attitude (as in Latin American countries are treated as though they are colonies of the USA...I do know better). There is also a very strong tendancy of US foriegn and trade policy being set up to compete with Pacific Rim countries, Europe, and the Middle East, and Latin America in general gets screwed over because of the overly broad policies set up due to its relations with other world powers.
For Brazil in particluar, historically it has been a very faithful ally of the USA, and was the only Latin American country to send soldiers into battle during WWII (they had a couple of major engagements in northern Italy against the Third Reich...well, major for Brazil, and would have been headline international news if it weren't for other battles elsewhere at the same time). The Brazilian military is still quite friendly with the US military, but that fact politically in Brazil is more of a liability than an asset right now.
One particular issue I remember back during the Reagan Administration was in regards to shoe import tarriffs. There were a bunch of shoe manufacturers in New England in the 1980s that were having a really hard time competing against international manufactuers, especially because making shoes requires quite a bit manual labor to produce each shoe. Rather than admitting that paying $20/hour for unionized labor (and everything else that brings up...just don't think I'm anti-union however) and considering they are compeating against countries that have laborers that earning less than $10 per day, the shoe manufactures tried to substantially increase the import tarriffs to something like 300% tax on imported goods.
At that time about half of the shoes sold in America were made in Brazil. What actually happended was that no only did the price of the imported shoes go up (the desired affect), but the price of the domestic shoes also went up. Demand for shoe purchases dropped almost overnight, and huge numbers of shoe factories in Brazil shut down for more than a decade, sometimes permanently. Of course these shoe workers were pissed at US policy. And this was something that, to be honest, most US citizens didn't really care about anyway, and would prefer the cheaper shoes as well, even if they did come from Brazil. BTW, those American shoe companies that "needed" that tarriff protection: they closed up shop anyway, or moved production to some place like Malaysia or Singapore.
Another incident that I had while living in Brazil: I had lived in Brazil for almost two years and had over time aquired a pretty good suntan (seasonally too, because summer is between December and March), as well as some more local clothing. I was walking in downtown Sao Paulo with a native-born Brazilian and mistaken for a local myself. A Texan with a traditional 30-gallon cowboy hat, 150 lbs. overweight, wearing blue jeans (Levi's), a bolo tie, and a huge 10 lbs. belt buckle with the words "Don't mess with Texas", came up to me and said something that I considered rather insulting in English. Then he said something like "Why can't y'all learn how to speak a real language". I can't remember exactly what he asked, but even tho
If you are not a lawyer....well, you certainly have the brains to be one. If not, thank goodness, we need people with brains like that in other areas of our economy and world who actually do something productive for a living.
From my own interpretation of USC 17 106 (IANAL, but I am a registered voter and US citizen who does know how to read legal code) I would have to totally agree with you.
At best, all Caldera can do is say that the "poison pill" restriction of the GPL has kicked in, because some portions of Linux aren't legal to distribute. They (Caldera) own the copyright and never consented to its inclusion in Linux under any license.
I do think that a resonable judge (they do exist BTW) would probabally order that any source code that legally belongs to SCO should be removed from Linux on the basis of the copyright laws you mentioned above. Damages could be levied, but at the same time it would be abundantly clear that most duplication of Linux was unintentional, with very stong reasons to believe all Linux duplications (the right to copy... hense copyright) that occured were totally legal.
The paper trail for inclusion of a patch to Linux is very well documented (they don't call it open source for nothing) and not a trivial thing to accomplish, especially for the kernel (which is what is being disputed).
At worst the person (or people) who added copyrighted code to the kernel would be personally liable for damages if they don't actually own the copyright to the code. If that happens I hope they get nailed...it can do nothing but help the Free Software/Open Source movement by letting people know what will happen if you "cheat" and don't create the software yourself. I have no doubt that some parts of the Linux kernel do have some potential copyright disputes.
Nothing in USC 17 106 can possibly implicate an individual user unless they also made copies of the Linux kernel for friends or installed in to multiple machines (more likely).
I also think that a judge would be very jaundiced with the fact that SCO has taken no steps have this software removed through non-legal channels like getting Linus Torvalds to remove portions from the kernel that are in dispute. Good-faith efforts like this should have been tried first if there really were a problem. This fact, more than any other, makes me think that SCO/Caldera is totally full of it.
I don't think that merely one class action lawsuit needs to be done. I see four seperate lawsuits covering four differnet classes of people:
1) All Linux users. This is the group that apparently is being targeted by SCO, and needs to be addressed. A summary judgement in this case could probabally be obtained to stop these frivilous lawsuits, with all the legal meanings that implies. Any linux users who have recieved specific mailings or e-mail messages from SCO may also be able to collect actual damages.
2) Linux distributors. This is what Red Hat is doing, but it does affect other distros as well. Anybody who has ditributed Linux, is distributing it, or even is preparing to distribute Linux can sue SCO for lost profits due to FUD and unsubstantiated accusations that were publically stated by SCO. A class action suit would only bring this to focus that legitimate businesses are currently losing money because of these rantings and ravings. Because of the fact that the number of commercial distros is comparatively small, individual lawsuits may be more prevalent.
3) Kernel contributors. From when the first $1 came into SCO for "licensing" the Linux kernel, the GPL has become violated. This has been beaten to death on Slashdot, but I think it is time that the kernel developers come together and demand their share of that cash that SCO is collecting. Regardless of what SCO is claming, they can't seriously claim 100% ownership over software that clearly they didn't write. Remember again, SCO is still distributing Linux, so they are violating your claims. BTW, I have a commercially pressed edition of Caldera Linux on CD-ROM for anybody wanting to go for statutory damages here.
As a side note here: How much of the Linux Kernel has been formally submitted to the U.S. Library of Congress for copyright registration? If it hasn't happened, this should be done ASAP, regardless of other issues and their outcomes. This is a cheap $50 well spent. Similar registrations around the world should also be done.
4) Gnu/Linux developers. This is a broader lawsuit than strictly kernel developers, but again, if it is being distributed by SCO/Caldera for a paid license, that must be paid in order to copy or distribute "Linux", every software package being distributed by SCO could be a party to this lawsuit for actual and statutory damages.
The right of assembly doesn't apply here.
You are correct that corporations are regulated by seperate rules and standards than other people, but a corporate death penalty can still happen, especially when that group is doing illegal activity.
If a company is doing blatently illegal activity, for example smuggling drugs or running a brothel (where it is not legal), you had better believe that it will be taken over by the government and disbanded. The 14th Ammendment does not protect the right to consipiracy to commit crime. If the ACLU did anything other than simply express their opinions (like participating and organizing in civil disobedience protests themselves rather than defend the people guilty of civil disobedience), it would no longer exist.
IMHO, corporate CEOs and (more importantly) the board of directors should be held directly liable for corporate criminal activity...certainly much more than is the case right now. The board of directors for most companies tend to rubber stamp whatever the CEO and top executive staff want to do (with some notable exceptions), and often don't even want to know much about the general operations of the companies they are supposed to govern. This is the human element of corporations that unfortunately is where the breakdown is happening.
Every once in a while you can find companies that have been shut down, but when it comes to publically traded stock corporations (like SCO, Microsoft or IBM) it tends to be a very strong exception, particularly because of the rules and red tape necessary to even be publically listed on a stock exchange. This is normally something that a criminal group is not likely to go and do (go public with stock) just to do a quick run and leave to a non-extraditable country 12 hours before the FBI (or Interpol) come crashing through the font doors.
In the case of SCO, they are accused of manipulating the price of their stock, which is a part of the rules of public companies (that supposedly they are breaking). If they were manufacturing nuclear weapons for sale to al Queida, you wouldn't even see a hesitation to shut the place down.
I would have to say that your argument about the SUVs going to McDonalds is a really good example of how Americans try to circumvent the law to their own advantage.
In the 1970s and earlier in America it would have been driving the Station Wagon with the kids to the local McDonalds instead. The problem here was that environmental and fuel economy laws were enacted that forced the auto industry to try and improve fuel effency by governmental decree. The tranditional 4 door with swing back hatch Station Wagon was classified as a passenger automobile, and had to go through the much tougher restrictions and higher standards.
Eventually, through these regulations, the Station Wagon was sent into obsolescense, partly because the auto makers couldn't meet the legal requirements for fuel economy if they kept making them.
These legal restrictions didn't apply to trucks, which had different standards to allow for commercial transportation needs. If you look at the vehicle title for an SUV, you will see that it is classified as a truck, just like a flower delivery van. The SUV is essentially an end-run around a silly law, which also has unintended consequences. Some people really do need a bigger vehicle than a 2-door coup with a 0.5 m^3 trunk storage.
This reminds me about another silly law (that has since been repealed) that only allowed quartz halogen lights on garbage trucks. A company was trying to sell them to consumers a few years ago, and you had to sign an agreement with the company that at some point in the future you would convert your vehicle into a garbage truck. They even had a picture of a Cadallac with a garbage compactor on the back to prove it "could" be done.
My main experience of living somewhere other than the United States is living in South America, where they have a tradition of governments changing every generation or so. And I don't mean a new party going into power, I mean somebody trashing whatever constitution was in effect and writing a new one, and throwing out all of the old laws, releasing the prisoners only to lock up the murderers and rapists in a few weeks (if they can catch them), and total civil instability.
This has lead to a near total distrust of the government and has some very subtle effects on everyday life as well.
One really good example was a classic eight-sided "Stop" sign. When I was in Brazil, I saw these in many places, but people hardly ever actually stopped in front of the sign. When I asked a local resident what the purpose of them was for, they said that it was a marker for where an accident occured a few years earlier. Or at least that was the punchline of a joke regarding those signs.
If you tried to run through a Stop sign in the United States, one of two things would happen: 1) A small town cop would throw the book at you and you would have to deal with a bunch of grief trying to get out of the ticket (at least by paying the fine...don't you even think about trying to bribe the officer) or 2) You would get side swipped by a car going across the intersection in the other direction. Even while living in Brazil I never understood how they avoided this second problem, but the drivers there always seemed to avoid the problems.
I will say that cultural differences with the United States vs. other countries, while subtle, are significant and tough to deal with for the unprepared. I am not proud of the lawsuit happy nature of America, but this is something that unfortunately is here to stay. I considered going to law school myself as a career path, but I felt there were too many lawyers in America as it was and didn't want to add to the problem.
I would have to agree, the basic philosophy of the GPL is not going to be tested in the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit. The whole thing is going to go down to license issues other than the GPL (for example, IBM's AIX and its own additions to that codebase) and a number of patent issues.
What is going to start to raise the GPL issues is when those buying the SCO license start to discover that there are hundreds of people they also have to pay, since the GPL has been violated they have to obtain a seperate license from each and every copyright holder. In some cases, this is going to be hard to even track down, and this is where court cases can end up taking decades to resolve. Yes, decades. This is a Pandora's Box of legal worms that SCO doesn't even know what is going on, and the affected companies will have to deal will long after SCO goes belly up.
This should also be a huge wakeup call for project maintainers for GPL'd projects, to absolutely make sure that copyright for any submitted sections of code is totally cleared. I realize that this is not quite as easy as it would appear, but it is something that must be done. The free software/open source software community must come up with industry standards to remove source code that has conflicting copyright concerns.
For his part, Linus Torvald had plenty of reason to believe that IBM had cleared their portions of the kernel for copyright violations, and that is perhaps the #1 reason why he isn't directly named as a defendant. Other project maintainers might not be so lucky.
The last war that even comes close to what you are suggesting in recent history was WWII, and just about every convention and rule of war was broken, including targeted deleberate genocide of specific races. Nuclear weapons were even used.
In all honesty, even if nuclear weapons were used in another war, sure the casulties would be as high as WWII (possibly higher), but I think you would still see a major portion of the population survive...even have people move back into the areas where the bombs were detonated.
Are Hiroshima and Nagasaki still nuclear deserts and wilderness areas right now? There are a couple of million people living in the area of those attacks right now. Sure, a few buildings were left as reminders of what damage the nukes caused, but the cities have been largely rebuilt. People are even living in Chernobyl right now, even though in the long-run that disaster has consequences that are still difficult to clean up from.
With the exception of the Black Plague, European population always grew during times of war. The only thing that has caused the population of Europe to start dropping is properity, and social attitudes against bearing and raising children.
I bet if you look at the corporate charters of both Red Hat as well as SCO/Caldera (and I'd emphasis SCO here) you'd find it was chartered in Deleware, hence how the Deleware courts have juristiction in this matter.
Corporate charters (for the most part) are done on a state level and regulated by the state legislatures and courts. There are a few federally chartered corporations, but these are usually special cases like the Federal Reserve Banks, American Red Cross, or the Boy Scouts of America (three organization I know have federal corporate charters)
Compare this to ship registration, where ships are registered with various countries and subject to their laws, but many shipping companies prefer to be registered with Liberia.... because they know that they won't be boarded by the Liberian Navy too often when they are loading goods in Hong Kong or Singapore.
I'm sure that Europe has a similar situation right now with corporate charters, although I'm not sure myself what EU country is the current hotspot for corporate registration. Deleware has been doing this since the mid-19th Century, and the body of corporate law (including legal precedence) is so large that it is very hard to not find some kind of law or previous court case that is favorable to your case. As a side-effect to this, the judges in Deleware are also quite familiar with corporate law, which also helps in cases like this.
Check this out, according to Yahoo, Wall street dropped SCO stock $2 per share almost coinciding with this announcement. Obviously Wall Street is paying attention on this one right now.
Now if only the SEC could get involved.
Of course, the PC industry was based on an already successful commercial computer industry, who had already been refining the concepts of computer science and electrical engineering. The PC industry simply introduced the concept of low-cost personal computers and mass-produced consumer devices.
The analogies are very strong, especially considering how the existing Aerospace industries are totally falling flat on this idea. I am very surprised that companies like Boeing or Airbus aren't at least letting their engineers have access to their shops after hours to try a stunt like this and submit their own entry for practically pocket change, kinda like how IBM let their engineers play a bit with Linux for next to no bottom-line cost for years...with a huge ROI.
Once you hit the 15,000 for $100,000, the question then becomes how many would pay $10,000 if they could get the price per trip down?
Heck, I might be encouraged to get a home equity loan in 10 years just for an opportunity to do that myself (or help finance one of my kids for that opportunity).
The study was only talking about some real hard numbers that could be given to investors and point out the very real profit potential of commercial space transportation systems, even considering that the need to send a 747-style spacecraft to Mars will still be a century away.
You know, I think this is a good point, and something to consider when you think of open source vs. propritary systems. You will be able to keep loading the old stuff as long as the data still exists somewhere.
I have a box of Apple ][ software however, and if the old beige box ever dies on me, I doubt I will ever get much off of that data, even if I can read the floppies with 100% error free success. Mainly due to propritary issues with the OS (although some pretty decent emulators are available).
Networks are making it easier to preserve data now, and as long as you have a computer that **_CAN_** read the data and is on the network, you can also transfer that data from one computer to the next. This allows an iMac to read those Hollarth punch cards (at least indirectly).