Pepsi also made a distinctive bottle shape. While not as distinctive as the Coca-cola bottle, it still is a distinguishing characteristic if you happen to pick up the bottle. Essentially, the bottle is the logo or "brand" of the respective companies.
If somebody else, even a computer vending company of some sort like Dell or HP comes along and builds a store with a somewhat similar layout to sell their products, the question really becomes how much is too much to confuse customers into thinking it is the same product? If they aren't really confusing to potential customers that these are distinctively different computers made by different companies, I don't see how a trademark infringement could even be claimed.
Yet that is what Apple is trying to do here.
I think this is an abuse of trademark law where a store layout is just going a little too far in terms of having something which can be protected in this manner. The name of something, like your use of FreeDOS in your example above, is clearly something that distinguishes what it is that you are making as opposed to a similarly related product, MS-DOS. The names are different enough that somebody who downloads your software is clearly cognizant of the fact that it is different from the stuff that was made by Microsoft.
The origin of brands and trademarks comes from the old branding irons for cattle that early farmers used to tell their animals apart from that of other farmers. Some farmers treated their cows better, took more diligence in treating wounds, cleaning watering troughs, and doing other things that resulted in higher quality meat when it was sold. The brand mattered and was thus important for trade. Similarly a "trade mark" was applied by artisans to identify their artwork when used in trade... and the work of some artisans is considered more valuable for a variety of reasons. Claiming that you are somebody who you aren't is the real issue for trademarks, and why there are legal restrictions in place enforcing this issue.
This store layout should have been a patent grant. It was original and it is allowing Apple computer the ability to sell their products in a unique fashion that perhaps even deserved some legal protection. I'm just saying it is a real stretch to say that the store as a whole deserved a trademark or as you put it a "service mark" protection.
Which is why this issuance of a trademark is so utterly silly. A patent and a copyright have time limits in exchange for a monopoly.... you give something to the world in exchange for exclusive rights.
A trademark on the other hand is indefinitely perpetual. In most cases it is a name, and most correctly used as an adjective such as "Apple computers" or "Band-Aid adhesive bandages" as in "I'm going to buy an Apple-brand computer". Trademarking a logo is certainly in the same realm as it is something distinctive which sets that business apart from others in the same trade.
This still smells strongly like a patent though or at least a misapplication of trademarks. I understand that the point is about how the store has a very distinctive look where somebody walking into a store with a similar layout with similar furniture and materials might think they are actually in an Apple store when in fact they are selling something else, like a Mapple computer. Then again, IKEA tried to do the same thing with STØR and was successful on a legal front of defending that trademark.
I still think it is abuse of the concept though. A store layout might be patentable and perhaps even deserves limited protection if it proves to be successful in moving merchandise more efficiently than their competitors. It doesn't deserve to have perpetual protection though. That is why there is confusion here, particularly because the same organization which grants patents is granting this horrible abuse of trademarks.
The problem here is the presumption that these actions should be criminal. I disagree with that assumption which is the assumption that you are making here by saying that none of these counts are unreasonable. Furthermore, it is one real idiot of a computer security guy to possibly think that a single laptop logged into a "guest account" could possibly do as much damage as is claimed. If your security system is so screwed up that such an attack is of concern, I would say that the folks in charge of security at either JSTOR or MIT should be fired.
Aaron Schwartz didn't "hack" into the system other than to automate the formation of URLs for access of the JSTOR servers. Hell, he should have been given an award with thanks for exposing security vulnerabilities.
I prefer medium sized bombs that throw hunks of burning paper into the sky. It is quite entertaining and I've spent several thousands of dollars on the hobby. To each their own I guess. Launching stuff really high into the sky is another related hobby I enjoy too.
This wasn't "clearly illegal" and in fact was just a "terms of service" violation where most ordinary people doing the things that Swartz was doing would even think was perfectly legal or even expected for legitimate scholarship. Where he crossed the line was doing more of it than most people..... sort of like going to an all you can eat buffet and filling up a dozen plates with food that you can't possibly eat in one sitting.
Perhaps Swartz should have used some better judgement, and had something like his account terminated and perhaps be sent a bill for the "extra resources" he consumed (sort of like the restaurant example charging an extra fee for all of the wasted food), but it certainly didn't cross into the realm of criminal behavior as most people would define the term. Frankly I don't even understand why the Department of Justice was even involved in what was just an ordinary contract violation and should have been handled by a civil court judge at worst.... and a state judge at that. It shouldn't have even been a criminal matter in the first place.
I'm curious about what you say are successful? Has any new legislation actually been enacted? There are many petitions like the "Build the Death Star" petition that have been "successful" in terms of getting a response as in somebody at the White House actually sat down and typed up something, but in terms of getting things to happen like having Texas actually secede from the United States has not happened.
Petitions in general are pretty pointless and useless, and online petitions in particular are even more pointless in terms of getting something to happen. It is a good way to vent steam, and as was said it is a good way to find out who your political enemies might be as well. I agree with the GP post that in many ways the White House website is pretty much a honey pot to track down those people who might be political dissidents and cause problems in the future. Nixon had an "official enemies" list, why not Barack Obama?
That is equally difficult to prove even in patent infringement cases as to who had the idea first. Now that the USPTO has screwed even that up by moving to a "first to file" instead of a "first to invent" system, such things are going to happen even more. Even that doesn't stop simultaneous filings, other than perhaps looking strictly at the serial number of the application even if the difference is just a matter of a millisecond.
The point here in this particular case was that Apple Computer signed an NDA and openly admitted to viewing the "trade secret" and furthermore implementing the ideas they gleaned from this innovator. That puts it squarely into the realm of a violation of trade secrets and should have been the legal approach, or at least would have been the proper protection had the patent not been available. Indeed the patent sort of muddies up the water quite a bit because the patent acknowledges that the information about the patented idea was in the "public domain" by virtue of the patent application itself.
As can be seen, I hate patents in general and software patents in particular. I have come up with patentable software ideas in the past, and they have done both me and my employers quite well. I can come up with dozens of such ideas, so I don't have any skin off my nose if somebody else in the same situation comes up with the same idea. I just resent the fact that I can't use my idea without litigation afterward because they went through the effort to file the bloody patent.
Oregon Trail started out as a tiny project done by three college students who were doing teaching internships and wanted to make history become more interesting than dry facts. It was written in FORTRAN and soon after its conception was installed on a Control Data Cyber system computer being operated by the University of Minnesota for a consortium of schools throughout the state of Minnesota called MECC (before it became known with the same name as a computer software company). Version 1.0, as it were, really was this early version done on a teletype that had as its only sound effect the control-G character which triggered an actual physical bell on teletype machines.... by far the most common type of machine which was used to play this game.
This was the version I played in 4th grade and was my first experience with actual computers. That teletype terminal was connected to the University of Minnesota via a Bell 103 acoustical modem and a dedicated long-distance telephone line subsidized by the taxpayers of Minnesota.
There were other games that ran on that same system, including a very early MUD, a predecessor to IRC, and a game simply called COMBAT that was by far the best ship to ship space combat game I ever played for nearly a decade and in some ways even superior to SpaceWar in quality in terms of game mechanics (it could have up to about 20 players at the same time simultaneously).
Life did exist prior to microcomputers, including computer games.
Clippy is a clear example of what not to do for software, so I suppose that has a point.
And it also provided a route for Bill Gates to get laid (well.... his wife Melinda was one of the original developers for Microsoft Bob). I guess that counts for something even if the software itself wasn't all that impressive. Then again that turns the term "software" into a whole other context.
The Computer History Museum not only has a working version of the game, but even restore the Digital Equipment PDP-1 computer which ran the original version so many years ago. This game was so far ahead in its design that it is a shock to even think that most other games that followed for a decade are a step backward in quality and sophistication.
In other words, ordinary trade secret laws would have been sufficient to "stick it to the man" and to reign in Apple Computer instead of having to invoke a patent. This poor "inventor" was taken advantage of by the patent system. Just ask Nikola Tesla and Philo Farnsworth how well patents seem to help out small time inventors who make really amazing things.
I do feel for this guy, and he very well may have come up with some amazing ideas before others started to use them, and there should be some way to compensate innovators like this. The patent system simply isn't that compensation method though.
Source code for much of the early groundbreaking software is still available. Indeed it was the closing up of much of the software that came later which started the "Free Software" people like Richard Stallman to start the GNU project and the GPL license.
Apple successfully marketed Hypercard, thus changed the world. Your lawsuit reference here just shows how lame software patents really are and why they shouldn't exist.
Of any game that was ever made, I'd have to say SpaceWar! was the game that blew all others out of the water. It was contemporary with even the concepts of real-time programming and timeshare systems, and predated microcomputers by nearly a decade.
Arguably Doom was just SpaceWar with improved graphics and a better map. It makes hunt the Wumpus look incredibly lame.
The Oregon Trail was something that predated even Pong even though it came after SpaceWar. Still, that game was the granddaddy of all quest-type games, and I still remember as a kid learning how to type "BANG" and "POW" just to be able to hunt some meat. Reading the output of the game on yellow teletype paper seemed to give an experience which is hard to imagine today.
Disney is risk averse to directors who can successfully sue the movie studio and win monetary settlements for uncompensated royalties. Otherwise, I'd have to agree.
He could reboot "Episodes 1-3" and not do much damage. Then again I think a group of high school filmmakers could reboot those episodes and not do too much damage.
Of course the original trilogy was essentially a reboot of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai tale, merely told in space. If you ever read some of the early drafts of the script for the original Star Wars movie (*cough* A New Hope *cough*) the similarity was even more pronounced to the point that George Lucas should have paid royalties for copying so much of the script of that previous movie.
I'm not too worried about JJ Abrams actually showing some creativity and perhaps doing something original for a change. It might just show George Lucas as the hack that he really is. Of course Abrams could really ensure his fame among the fans by filming the execution of Jar Jar in the opening scene... as an afterthought.
Of course life could have originated on the Earth and been transported to Mars as well. Or it could have even originated somewhere else entirely around a completely different star (the panspermia theory). This is hardly even a new theory and variants of it go back to ancient Greek philosophers.
Why do you think the "obvious answer" is an abiotic origin to life here on the Earth? Perhaps so, but it isn't necessary and there are simply other possibilities too.
Mind you I'm not talking "directed panspermia" that presupposes some sort of greater intelligence being involved here, but merely how it takes just a single cell of living tissue to reproduce favorably and you get explosive variations in life with just that one thing given ideal growing conditions... such as did exist in the early days of the Earth. The possibility that life is much more pervasive in the Solar System as a whole and perhaps throughout the Milky Way Galaxy does offer some interesting possibilities and can influence the Drake Equation for the potential of complex life elsewhere.
Given even the relatively recent exchanges of material between Mars and the Earth, much less similar incidents in the past (including an asteroid impact that destroyed 99.9% of all species here on the Earth) I think it is very likely that the genuine origin of life, especially simple things like blue-green algae, may have even originated on Mars or at least it would be hard to declare where it happened. This only has to happen once every hundred million years or so to still be significant, and the K-T event (something capable of ejecting a piece of swamp and sending that to Mars) happened only 65 million years ago.
If MER or some future space probe discovers actual life on Mars, I'm willing to suggest that the DNA would even be very similar to what is found here on the Earth and through DNA analysis you may even be able to find a common ancestor between that life and stuff found here on the Earth. It certainly couldn't be ruled out.
All of that energy after pouring how many billion dollars into the project? It sounds real impressive when you are talking megajoules, but that figure is only 6 kilowatt-hours if you turned it into more familiar power units that ordinary people use every day.
I would also say that Polywell and Focus have produced some energy... and in terms of a dollar per dollar rate of return it is pretty much equivalent. Fusion energy research is really going nowhere fast regardless of what technology you are talking about, and seems to be hitting dead ends all of the time. That could be said about the "cold fusion" work of Pons and Fleishman, which seems to be a lousy neutron emitter at best (and the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor seems to do a much better job of accomplishing I might add).
I just see the Tokamak research as yet another dead end. Perhaps something could be rescued from all of the research that has been accomplished with the billions of dollars dumped down that rat hole. I'm not hoping for too much other than a bunch of PhDs to be generated by all of that money, and I think it suffers the same problem that almost all government funded research seems to face: There is no real desire to actually build something practical, and the funding is an end unto itself. If you think the other forms of fusion research are all confidence games, why are you so supportive of Tokamak research?
No, you need to get off my dad's lawn. He was programming computers before I was born with real he-man computers that had water-cooled vacuum tubes and physical patch cords that were in the CPU cabinet.
Controlled fusion power has not really been practical. There is certainly some program with project like ITER where a whole bunch of money is being poured into that kind of research (a total waste from my viewpoint, but some physics research may happen in spite of all of that money dumped down that rat hole).
Some other much more promising approaches include the Polywell and Focus Fusion concepts that seem to have some real theoretical potential, but none of these devices have been able to work out all of the engineering issues in terms of getting them to be producing usable energy of any kind. About the only real approach that might work and has been at least proven in terms of engineering is the original Project Orion concept. Unfortunately that uses thermonuclear warheads and is something only very large spacecraft would ever use. If you don't mind having nuclear weapons as a propulsion system, I suppose it could work.
I don't know much about the system you are suggesting here, which I think is in a similar shape to other nuclear fusion power devices of any kind. A nice theory and perhaps a different approach that could be useful. Nuclear rocket engines of any kind (fission or fusion) have the potential of a very high specific impulse (the amount of thrust they can produce given a certain amount of mass for fuel + engine) and in the long run I think most interplanetary spacecraft will be using nuclear engines of some sort or another. Chemical energy is just too inefficient to be practical. The raw physics for nuclear propulsion has been more or less worked out, but coming up with a practical design that actually works is where the real problem lies.
You are getting far too conspiratorial here. No, it wasn't Robert Bigelow who "engineered" the defeat of TransHab from NASA appropriation bills. It was mainly a bunch of members of congress that wanted to simply kill the International Space Station altogether and were trying one little piece at a time, where the TransHab was seen as a ripe target because it was so different from the other modules.
Yes, your speculation is completely misplaced. As you've pointed out, this is something that happened over a decade ago, and in fact this particular contract is the first time that NASA has even hinted that they might be interested in actually purchasing any equipment from Bigelow. If this was a more traditional scalping of the American taxpayer, it would be much more like the Liberty rocket that is essentially a rebranded Ares I and put forward explicitly to scrape out some money from NASA.
Bigelow Aerospace hasn't even really tried to go after the government space market at all, although they've been in a bit of a bind because they simply lack a reliable launcher that isn't based in Russia or Kazakhstan. One thing Robert Bigelow simply didn't even want to get into was the whole space launcher business... something that already has plenty of companies working to try and make cheaper transportation into orbit. If he could send astronauts into space tomorrow, he would already be launching these space stations completely without tax dollars of any kind. SpaceX says they will be able to send astronauts sometime in 2015... which is when the real fireworks is going to begin.
I just saw a brief comment on another site (pure speculation on this point though) that suggested this Bigelow module might be able to fly as a secondary payload on one of the SpaceX CRS flights and to put this into the "trunk" of the Dragon. If Bigelow could pull *that* off, it would be even more remarkable. A two for one special is the kind of thing that would prove commercial spaceflight really means to save costs.
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Pepsi also made a distinctive bottle shape. While not as distinctive as the Coca-cola bottle, it still is a distinguishing characteristic if you happen to pick up the bottle. Essentially, the bottle is the logo or "brand" of the respective companies.
If somebody else, even a computer vending company of some sort like Dell or HP comes along and builds a store with a somewhat similar layout to sell their products, the question really becomes how much is too much to confuse customers into thinking it is the same product? If they aren't really confusing to potential customers that these are distinctively different computers made by different companies, I don't see how a trademark infringement could even be claimed.
Yet that is what Apple is trying to do here.
I think this is an abuse of trademark law where a store layout is just going a little too far in terms of having something which can be protected in this manner. The name of something, like your use of FreeDOS in your example above, is clearly something that distinguishes what it is that you are making as opposed to a similarly related product, MS-DOS. The names are different enough that somebody who downloads your software is clearly cognizant of the fact that it is different from the stuff that was made by Microsoft.
The origin of brands and trademarks comes from the old branding irons for cattle that early farmers used to tell their animals apart from that of other farmers. Some farmers treated their cows better, took more diligence in treating wounds, cleaning watering troughs, and doing other things that resulted in higher quality meat when it was sold. The brand mattered and was thus important for trade. Similarly a "trade mark" was applied by artisans to identify their artwork when used in trade... and the work of some artisans is considered more valuable for a variety of reasons. Claiming that you are somebody who you aren't is the real issue for trademarks, and why there are legal restrictions in place enforcing this issue.
This store layout should have been a patent grant. It was original and it is allowing Apple computer the ability to sell their products in a unique fashion that perhaps even deserved some legal protection. I'm just saying it is a real stretch to say that the store as a whole deserved a trademark or as you put it a "service mark" protection.
Which is why this issuance of a trademark is so utterly silly. A patent and a copyright have time limits in exchange for a monopoly.... you give something to the world in exchange for exclusive rights.
A trademark on the other hand is indefinitely perpetual. In most cases it is a name, and most correctly used as an adjective such as "Apple computers" or "Band-Aid adhesive bandages" as in "I'm going to buy an Apple-brand computer". Trademarking a logo is certainly in the same realm as it is something distinctive which sets that business apart from others in the same trade.
This still smells strongly like a patent though or at least a misapplication of trademarks. I understand that the point is about how the store has a very distinctive look where somebody walking into a store with a similar layout with similar furniture and materials might think they are actually in an Apple store when in fact they are selling something else, like a Mapple computer. Then again, IKEA tried to do the same thing with STØR and was successful on a legal front of defending that trademark.
I still think it is abuse of the concept though. A store layout might be patentable and perhaps even deserves limited protection if it proves to be successful in moving merchandise more efficiently than their competitors. It doesn't deserve to have perpetual protection though. That is why there is confusion here, particularly because the same organization which grants patents is granting this horrible abuse of trademarks.
The problem here is the presumption that these actions should be criminal. I disagree with that assumption which is the assumption that you are making here by saying that none of these counts are unreasonable. Furthermore, it is one real idiot of a computer security guy to possibly think that a single laptop logged into a "guest account" could possibly do as much damage as is claimed. If your security system is so screwed up that such an attack is of concern, I would say that the folks in charge of security at either JSTOR or MIT should be fired.
Aaron Schwartz didn't "hack" into the system other than to automate the formation of URLs for access of the JSTOR servers. Hell, he should have been given an award with thanks for exposing security vulnerabilities.
I prefer medium sized bombs that throw hunks of burning paper into the sky. It is quite entertaining and I've spent several thousands of dollars on the hobby. To each their own I guess. Launching stuff really high into the sky is another related hobby I enjoy too.
This wasn't "clearly illegal" and in fact was just a "terms of service" violation where most ordinary people doing the things that Swartz was doing would even think was perfectly legal or even expected for legitimate scholarship. Where he crossed the line was doing more of it than most people..... sort of like going to an all you can eat buffet and filling up a dozen plates with food that you can't possibly eat in one sitting.
Perhaps Swartz should have used some better judgement, and had something like his account terminated and perhaps be sent a bill for the "extra resources" he consumed (sort of like the restaurant example charging an extra fee for all of the wasted food), but it certainly didn't cross into the realm of criminal behavior as most people would define the term. Frankly I don't even understand why the Department of Justice was even involved in what was just an ordinary contract violation and should have been handled by a civil court judge at worst.... and a state judge at that. It shouldn't have even been a criminal matter in the first place.
I'm curious about what you say are successful? Has any new legislation actually been enacted? There are many petitions like the "Build the Death Star" petition that have been "successful" in terms of getting a response as in somebody at the White House actually sat down and typed up something, but in terms of getting things to happen like having Texas actually secede from the United States has not happened.
Petitions in general are pretty pointless and useless, and online petitions in particular are even more pointless in terms of getting something to happen. It is a good way to vent steam, and as was said it is a good way to find out who your political enemies might be as well. I agree with the GP post that in many ways the White House website is pretty much a honey pot to track down those people who might be political dissidents and cause problems in the future. Nixon had an "official enemies" list, why not Barack Obama?
That is equally difficult to prove even in patent infringement cases as to who had the idea first. Now that the USPTO has screwed even that up by moving to a "first to file" instead of a "first to invent" system, such things are going to happen even more. Even that doesn't stop simultaneous filings, other than perhaps looking strictly at the serial number of the application even if the difference is just a matter of a millisecond.
The point here in this particular case was that Apple Computer signed an NDA and openly admitted to viewing the "trade secret" and furthermore implementing the ideas they gleaned from this innovator. That puts it squarely into the realm of a violation of trade secrets and should have been the legal approach, or at least would have been the proper protection had the patent not been available. Indeed the patent sort of muddies up the water quite a bit because the patent acknowledges that the information about the patented idea was in the "public domain" by virtue of the patent application itself.
As can be seen, I hate patents in general and software patents in particular. I have come up with patentable software ideas in the past, and they have done both me and my employers quite well. I can come up with dozens of such ideas, so I don't have any skin off my nose if somebody else in the same situation comes up with the same idea. I just resent the fact that I can't use my idea without litigation afterward because they went through the effort to file the bloody patent.
Oregon Trail started out as a tiny project done by three college students who were doing teaching internships and wanted to make history become more interesting than dry facts. It was written in FORTRAN and soon after its conception was installed on a Control Data Cyber system computer being operated by the University of Minnesota for a consortium of schools throughout the state of Minnesota called MECC (before it became known with the same name as a computer software company). Version 1.0, as it were, really was this early version done on a teletype that had as its only sound effect the control-G character which triggered an actual physical bell on teletype machines.... by far the most common type of machine which was used to play this game.
This was the version I played in 4th grade and was my first experience with actual computers. That teletype terminal was connected to the University of Minnesota via a Bell 103 acoustical modem and a dedicated long-distance telephone line subsidized by the taxpayers of Minnesota.
There were other games that ran on that same system, including a very early MUD, a predecessor to IRC, and a game simply called COMBAT that was by far the best ship to ship space combat game I ever played for nearly a decade and in some ways even superior to SpaceWar in quality in terms of game mechanics (it could have up to about 20 players at the same time simultaneously).
Life did exist prior to microcomputers, including computer games.
Clippy is a clear example of what not to do for software, so I suppose that has a point.
And it also provided a route for Bill Gates to get laid (well.... his wife Melinda was one of the original developers for Microsoft Bob). I guess that counts for something even if the software itself wasn't all that impressive. Then again that turns the term "software" into a whole other context.
The Computer History Museum not only has a working version of the game, but even restore the Digital Equipment PDP-1 computer which ran the original version so many years ago. This game was so far ahead in its design that it is a shock to even think that most other games that followed for a decade are a step backward in quality and sophistication.
In other words, ordinary trade secret laws would have been sufficient to "stick it to the man" and to reign in Apple Computer instead of having to invoke a patent. This poor "inventor" was taken advantage of by the patent system. Just ask Nikola Tesla and Philo Farnsworth how well patents seem to help out small time inventors who make really amazing things.
I do feel for this guy, and he very well may have come up with some amazing ideas before others started to use them, and there should be some way to compensate innovators like this. The patent system simply isn't that compensation method though.
Source code for much of the early groundbreaking software is still available. Indeed it was the closing up of much of the software that came later which started the "Free Software" people like Richard Stallman to start the GNU project and the GPL license.
Dartmouth BASIC (all capital letters, as it is an acronym) is arguably much more influential than Wumpus, but both do deserve some kudos.
Apple successfully marketed Hypercard, thus changed the world. Your lawsuit reference here just shows how lame software patents really are and why they shouldn't exist.
Of any game that was ever made, I'd have to say SpaceWar! was the game that blew all others out of the water. It was contemporary with even the concepts of real-time programming and timeshare systems, and predated microcomputers by nearly a decade.
Arguably Doom was just SpaceWar with improved graphics and a better map. It makes hunt the Wumpus look incredibly lame.
The Oregon Trail was something that predated even Pong even though it came after SpaceWar. Still, that game was the granddaddy of all quest-type games, and I still remember as a kid learning how to type "BANG" and "POW" just to be able to hunt some meat. Reading the output of the game on yellow teletype paper seemed to give an experience which is hard to imagine today.
Patrick Stewart v. James Earl Jones would be one wicked match up. Still..... who would be evil and who would be good?
Disney is risk averse to directors who can successfully sue the movie studio and win monetary settlements for uncompensated royalties. Otherwise, I'd have to agree.
He could reboot "Episodes 1-3" and not do much damage. Then again I think a group of high school filmmakers could reboot those episodes and not do too much damage.
Of course the original trilogy was essentially a reboot of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai tale, merely told in space. If you ever read some of the early drafts of the script for the original Star Wars movie (*cough* A New Hope *cough*) the similarity was even more pronounced to the point that George Lucas should have paid royalties for copying so much of the script of that previous movie.
I'm not too worried about JJ Abrams actually showing some creativity and perhaps doing something original for a change. It might just show George Lucas as the hack that he really is. Of course Abrams could really ensure his fame among the fans by filming the execution of Jar Jar in the opening scene... as an afterthought.
Of course life could have originated on the Earth and been transported to Mars as well. Or it could have even originated somewhere else entirely around a completely different star (the panspermia theory). This is hardly even a new theory and variants of it go back to ancient Greek philosophers.
Why do you think the "obvious answer" is an abiotic origin to life here on the Earth? Perhaps so, but it isn't necessary and there are simply other possibilities too.
Mind you I'm not talking "directed panspermia" that presupposes some sort of greater intelligence being involved here, but merely how it takes just a single cell of living tissue to reproduce favorably and you get explosive variations in life with just that one thing given ideal growing conditions... such as did exist in the early days of the Earth. The possibility that life is much more pervasive in the Solar System as a whole and perhaps throughout the Milky Way Galaxy does offer some interesting possibilities and can influence the Drake Equation for the potential of complex life elsewhere.
Given even the relatively recent exchanges of material between Mars and the Earth, much less similar incidents in the past (including an asteroid impact that destroyed 99.9% of all species here on the Earth) I think it is very likely that the genuine origin of life, especially simple things like blue-green algae, may have even originated on Mars or at least it would be hard to declare where it happened. This only has to happen once every hundred million years or so to still be significant, and the K-T event (something capable of ejecting a piece of swamp and sending that to Mars) happened only 65 million years ago.
If MER or some future space probe discovers actual life on Mars, I'm willing to suggest that the DNA would even be very similar to what is found here on the Earth and through DNA analysis you may even be able to find a common ancestor between that life and stuff found here on the Earth. It certainly couldn't be ruled out.
All of that energy after pouring how many billion dollars into the project? It sounds real impressive when you are talking megajoules, but that figure is only 6 kilowatt-hours if you turned it into more familiar power units that ordinary people use every day.
I would also say that Polywell and Focus have produced some energy... and in terms of a dollar per dollar rate of return it is pretty much equivalent. Fusion energy research is really going nowhere fast regardless of what technology you are talking about, and seems to be hitting dead ends all of the time. That could be said about the "cold fusion" work of Pons and Fleishman, which seems to be a lousy neutron emitter at best (and the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor seems to do a much better job of accomplishing I might add).
I just see the Tokamak research as yet another dead end. Perhaps something could be rescued from all of the research that has been accomplished with the billions of dollars dumped down that rat hole. I'm not hoping for too much other than a bunch of PhDs to be generated by all of that money, and I think it suffers the same problem that almost all government funded research seems to face: There is no real desire to actually build something practical, and the funding is an end unto itself. If you think the other forms of fusion research are all confidence games, why are you so supportive of Tokamak research?
No, you need to get off my dad's lawn. He was programming computers before I was born with real he-man computers that had water-cooled vacuum tubes and physical patch cords that were in the CPU cabinet.
Controlled fusion power has not really been practical. There is certainly some program with project like ITER where a whole bunch of money is being poured into that kind of research (a total waste from my viewpoint, but some physics research may happen in spite of all of that money dumped down that rat hole).
Some other much more promising approaches include the Polywell and Focus Fusion concepts that seem to have some real theoretical potential, but none of these devices have been able to work out all of the engineering issues in terms of getting them to be producing usable energy of any kind. About the only real approach that might work and has been at least proven in terms of engineering is the original Project Orion concept. Unfortunately that uses thermonuclear warheads and is something only very large spacecraft would ever use. If you don't mind having nuclear weapons as a propulsion system, I suppose it could work.
I don't know much about the system you are suggesting here, which I think is in a similar shape to other nuclear fusion power devices of any kind. A nice theory and perhaps a different approach that could be useful. Nuclear rocket engines of any kind (fission or fusion) have the potential of a very high specific impulse (the amount of thrust they can produce given a certain amount of mass for fuel + engine) and in the long run I think most interplanetary spacecraft will be using nuclear engines of some sort or another. Chemical energy is just too inefficient to be practical. The raw physics for nuclear propulsion has been more or less worked out, but coming up with a practical design that actually works is where the real problem lies.
You are getting far too conspiratorial here. No, it wasn't Robert Bigelow who "engineered" the defeat of TransHab from NASA appropriation bills. It was mainly a bunch of members of congress that wanted to simply kill the International Space Station altogether and were trying one little piece at a time, where the TransHab was seen as a ripe target because it was so different from the other modules.
Yes, your speculation is completely misplaced. As you've pointed out, this is something that happened over a decade ago, and in fact this particular contract is the first time that NASA has even hinted that they might be interested in actually purchasing any equipment from Bigelow. If this was a more traditional scalping of the American taxpayer, it would be much more like the Liberty rocket that is essentially a rebranded Ares I and put forward explicitly to scrape out some money from NASA.
Bigelow Aerospace hasn't even really tried to go after the government space market at all, although they've been in a bit of a bind because they simply lack a reliable launcher that isn't based in Russia or Kazakhstan. One thing Robert Bigelow simply didn't even want to get into was the whole space launcher business... something that already has plenty of companies working to try and make cheaper transportation into orbit. If he could send astronauts into space tomorrow, he would already be launching these space stations completely without tax dollars of any kind. SpaceX says they will be able to send astronauts sometime in 2015... which is when the real fireworks is going to begin.
I just saw a brief comment on another site (pure speculation on this point though) that suggested this Bigelow module might be able to fly as a secondary payload on one of the SpaceX CRS flights and to put this into the "trunk" of the Dragon. If Bigelow could pull *that* off, it would be even more remarkable. A two for one special is the kind of thing that would prove commercial spaceflight really means to save costs.