Adding insult to injury, the reason why the Columbia was destroyed upon re-entry is in part because the Environmental Protection Agency got into a feud with NASA over the foam being used for the cryogenic tank connectors. The original foam being used would have broken up and was much, much lighter where it wouldn't have caused any problem like what caused damage to the leading edge tiles that ultimately caused the problems for the Columbia. The problem was that the original foam had chlorofluorocarbon compounds that were perceived as "hazardous to the environment". I don't know how many lives were spared by the switch to the new foam due to slightly reduced skin cancer rates worldwide, but I know of at least seven astronauts who are dead because of that change. I sure hope that EPA bureaucrat feels nice warm fuzzies over all of the lives he saved because of that move.
On top of that, there were engineers who spotted the problems on the Columbia (or at least thought they were serious problems enough to kick the issue to upper management) within 24 hours of the launch. The Columbia was in orbit for over two weeks where engineers knew it was going to be destroyed upon re-entry yet NASA management dismissed the issue and didn't even bother to tell the astronauts on board that there might even be a problem or even try to find out if it could be a problem. The general attitude was that there was no rescue plan therefore the astronauts were as good as dead anyway... so they didn't even bother trying.
If the Challenger disaster showed "go fever" and general disregard for engineering recommendations, what happened with the Columbia was an unmitigated management failure so severe it should have brought about the end of the agency altogether.
In the press conference after the launch abort, SpaceX said this was essentially a similar failure to one they had on the initial Falcon 9 flight.
The #1 difference between this flight and the previous flight is that the launch window was so tight that they need to wait a couple of days to get the same launch opportunity again rather than doing a quick recycle and trying a minor fix like they did with the initial Falcon 9 launch. If all SpaceX had to do was to get this vehicle into orbit, it likely would already be there right now instead of being delayed by a couple more days.
BTW, this same situation also happened several times with the Space Shuttle, and you are correct that this is pretty par for the course of any space launch. Rocket science is hard stuff and very unforgiving if you try to apply public relations and political correctness into the Rocket Equation. I guess the next launch opportunity is going to be Tuesday, as the engineers involved want to inspect the #5 rocket engine and find out what went wrong. They are going to be very busy over the next couple of days, likely pulling substantial overtime hours as well.
On the other hand, COTS was seen as a back-up plan just in case Constellation didn't work out... which it really didn't. It was a sort of bastard step child and not really something that NASA treated seriously, even though I'll admit that the idea did start under the Bush administration.
The first NASA administrator to say that NASA needs to get out of the Earth to LEO transportation business was Charles Bolden, in testimony before the Spaceflight subcommittee of the House Transportation Committee (the actual names of those committees are longer, but that is what those respective committees and subcommittees really cover). Michael Griffin never stated anything like that at all, and in fact still seems resistant to the idea that private companies could ever take over this kind of a job from NASA even now that he is merely an aeronautical engineering professor instead of a government bureaucrat (well... perhaps still in government service but a different kind of service).
I'm not really impressed with Obama himself here, but NASA leadership under Charles Bolden and Lori Garver seems to be in pretty good hands from what I can see. Yes, there are some problems including what seems like a very abrasive personally that Lori Garver has, particularly towards members of Congress that rubs some of them the wrong way and Bolden trying to help Obama implement some of the social agenda stuff that has turned off some people to what NASA is doing (like the whole involvement of Arabs in the American space program).
Regardless, I'm glad that COTS was proposed and even considered at all under the Bush administration, and it seemed to have at the time flown under the radar for most members of congress until it became obvious that Constellation needed to be cut leaving COTS providers as the only real launch alternative. SLS is really an attempt to bring back at least the Ares V without calling that vehicle the Ares V.
The real reason why private commercial spaceflight hasn't advanced very far, IMHO, is that it has historically required relatively huge up-front capital costs, and because anything beyond communications satellites has been too expensive and too unprofitable for companies to pursue. A secondary reason, I suspect, is that the US was never very motivated to pursuing inexpensive spaceflight - efficiency was less important than "winning the space race" and the perceived military and technological advantage this implied. Russia, on the other hand, was relatively poor and their national development in the first half of the 20th century couldn't have been more different from America's.
The reason why private commercial spaceflight didn't take hold in the 1980's was explicitly because of a combination of regulations like ITAR and some bureaucrats at NASA which cut the legs out of commercial spaceflight by advertising unrealistic launch prices on the Space Shuttle. In order to sell the Space Shuttle to Congress, NASA made unbelievable promises about its cost, and insisted that the Shuttle could perform all of the launch tasks needed for American spaceflight... including everything for the military and any other group in America including commercial groups.
There were other commercial companies engaged in commercial spaceflight in the 1970's and 1980's. Look up the Conestoga rocket. The reason why it didn't continue to be developed was explicit interference by the U.S. government which killed the whole industry. Jim Benson also tried in vain to build commercial vehicles, and was thwarted by NASA at almost every move to the point he ended up dying of old age before he could finally get one of his rockets into space.
It wasn't a lack of capital, or at least that wasn't the major factor involved. Capital could be found and indeed there were investors in the 1980's willing to invest literally billions of dollars on private commercial spaceflight. Some of that money did end up being used on the Space Shuttle where there were even private commercial astronauts that went up on the Space Shuttle to perform explicitly commercial activities on the Space Shuttle and several kinds of commercial activities on the Shuttle.... stuff that should have happened on private vehicles and not something run by a government agency and even contrary to the legal charter given to NASA when the agency was set up.
I'll also point out that only a small fraction of the promised payloads that were supposed to fly on the Space Shuttle actually made the trip, particularly after the loss of the Challenger when NASA finally said that private commercial payloads couldn't fly on the Space Shuttle any more as well as ending the private commercial astronaut program. The astronauts who did fly were employees of companies doing stuff in space rather than being "space tourists", but there were a couple private astronauts that did go up before the Challenger disaster. Space tourists on the Space Shuttle was seriously considered, including placing a passenger module in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle that would hold another dozen people and other fanciful thinking about how it could have been used. The ultimate nail in the coffin for using the Space Shuttle for commercial purposes is that the actual cost to fly the thing ended up being even more expensive than flying the Saturn family of rockets when the costs were honestly evaluated and that the goal of using the Shuttle to drive down costs never happened at all.
The problem here was simply lousy commercial space policy that included a "giggle factor" where many bureaucrats lacked the vision that anything like what is happening today could even be done at all. I'm glad that there are entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, John Carmack, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow who are willing to put their money where their mouth is and simply dare to go into space in spite of what the government is telling them that they can't do.
This concern is vastly premature. Even before the advent of SpaceX, the US was the leader in commercial spaceflight with the only truly privately owned launch services in the world. That remains the case. The commercial services in Europe, Russia, China, and India all have substantial government ownership.
Sure, it's not hard to see a future where a short-sighted US has regulated this industry out of existence (we didn't need that future anyway!), but it hasn't happened yet.
This isn't true. Before SpaceX stepped up, commercial spaceflight had all but been acquiesced to the ESA and Roskosmos, with China filling in the gap. Boeing, ATK, and Lockheed-Martin for the past decade have been flying mainly government contracted payloads with very few commercial flights, and certainly weren't involved with launches of the communications satellite constellations like Iridium and a couple others which were proposed awhile back.
What is currently known as commercial spaceflight is a relatively recent resurgence in America, and is happening in spite of ITAR and other really messy regulations where satellite manufacturers in other countries are specifically avoiding American launchers explicitly because of ITAR and the rather strange regulatory environment that exists in America.
The difference at the moment seems to be an entrepreneurial spirit coming mainly from internet pioneers, some very real results that have happened from space prize competitions like the X-Prize and Lunar Landing Challenge (both of which spurred on several companies to develop spaceflight technologies), and the fact that NASA has completely left the commercial spaceflight market altogether. When NASA was claiming that the Space Shuttle would do commercial payloads for about $3k/kg (that was the price they were claiming in the 1980's), they completely cut the legs out from other commercial spaceflight endeavors like the Conestoga rocket or the Otrag rocket as well as other commercial projects in the works at the time.
That it has taken nearly 30 years to get American commercial spaceflight back to the state it was in the 1980s shows how a lousy government policy towards commercial spaceflight can destroy the industry. I can't imagine what should have happened over these past 30 years, but I do know that many of the same kinds of people who killed commercial spaceflight 30 years ago are still in the United States Congress and desire to set commercial endeavors in space at least for America back another 30 years. If that happens again, it will be other countries that take the lead, just as killing American commerical spaceflight efforts in the past provided an opening for the ESA to pounce upon contracts that should have gone to American launchers.
It is also about privatizing spaceflight as well.... explicitly one of the things NASA is by law supposed to be doing as it is a part of NASA's charter.
The telling thing to see if this move towards privatized launches makes any difference is if NASA and the U.S. federal government will constitute a majority of SpaceX's launch manifest in the future or if the market for private commercial ventures into space will begin to take over the manifest making the government launch market something more of a niche sideline thing or if that will be the main event.
Government purchases of intercontinental air freight is even now a significant market for commercial airliners, but by far and away most of the revenue for commercial airlines comes from private businesses and individuals. You don't see Airbus or Boeing building airplanes explicitly for government markets with the exception of military aircraft.... and those are so specialized that they would never be used for civilian purposes.
NASA has been using private contractors for launch services for nearly 20 years (from the Reagan administration when the concept first started) in the form of launch services from the United Launch Alliance. There shouldn't be anything different with SpaceX other than it being yet another contractor for NASA spaceflight needs. Federal government contracts may even continue to get a higher priority in terms of having a NASA flight bump a flight being done by Planetary Resources, but the hope is that flights by groups like Planetary Resources will be the more typical kind of flight, and that new opportunities can be found for people doing stuff in space. Private commercial spaceflight is already happening and is a multi-billion dollar industry in terms of annual revenue. If that can grow so the annual budgets of these private companies is either collectively or even individually larger than NASA's budget, commercial spaceflight will have finally arrived and this move for private launches will have accomplished its goal.
Private commercial spaceflight will happen eventually. I just don't know if it will happen in America or somewhere else like China or India. It would be a sad day if socialism is so entrenched in America that private companies can't succeed to access the resources of space. This isn't just something said off the cuff as it should be pointed out that America has all but abandoned the private commercial spaceflight market, even for companies based in America. That Robert Bigelow needed to go to Russia in order to fly his space stations into orbit should have been seen as a low point in American spaceflight experience.
The real news here is that NASA is conceding the idea that launches into low-Earth orbit are now routine enough that they really shouldn't be spending money on building rockets going there. This is a very recent admission that has only happened under the Obama administration.
What will likely not be mentioned is how a great many other companies are also involved with this effort of having NASA get rid of its native launch capacity, or how nearly $20 billion is currently being spent on a heavy lift rocket that has no mission and will likely be cancelled in the next presidential administration (whomever that may be... in 2013 or 2017 of either political party). The other companies that are involved at the moment is really exciting, and shows amazing potential for America being a real leader in developing technologies for spaceflight.
The hope and dream of many people here is that travel into low-Earth orbit will become something as routine as sending passengers and cargo on intercontinental flights by airplane. There was a time that deservedly justified 40 point type headlines in newspapers, just as early flights into orbit did several decades later. The sad thing is how long it took for routine intercontinental flights to happen compared to when the first such flights happened, and then how long it is taking from when the first flights to low-Earth orbit happened to when they've become routine. As evidenced by the fact this is a major story and posted here in Slashdot, flights into orbit still aren't routine. That can and should change.
Humans suck at intuitively understanding and controlling stuff outside narrow realms of experience and reaction time.
I think this is one of the reasons why he suggested an approach for you to get that experience in a simulation to give you some information allowing you to comprehend the task at hand for SpaceX. Spending time building a rocket even in a fairly accurate simulator (which the Kerbal Space Program does very well for the price) can give you that ability.
I have killed enough astronauts in that simulator that I shouldn't set foot anywhere near a launch pad, and getting a vehicle to orbit at all is impressive enough. An in-orbit rendezvous and performing a docking maneuver is something that really does mark your ability to operate in space, and is an accomplishment which only three organizations in the history of mankind have ever been able to accomplish in real life. SpaceX is scheduled to be organization #4, and the first private company to even attempt such a feat. That by itself should speak volumes for what SpaceX is trying to accomplish tomorrow.
They really don't have other days to try and perform this launch either. The Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Station (a USAF base) is a very busy place with a great many launches happening going to a great many places being done by a great many different companies and people. Some of those other launches simply can't wait, and in fact are a higher priority to this launch by SpaceX (as they contain weather satellites, various military satellites, GPS satellites, and other things important for America as well).
Your ignorance is showing even more for posing this question at all. Besides, there is no reason for this launch to happen at a time convenient for you to be able to eat your breakfast and take in a bit of entertainment. This is rocket science.
But more to the point, there won't be days in the near future that would allow a launch window between 9 am and 9 pm and meet all of the other conditions needed for this flight as well as dealing with everything else that needs to happen at this launch site. Of all of the things that these engineers should be worrying about, your need for sleep is the last consideration they should have.
The problem with a very long copyright term is that the content doesn't go into the public domain. How old is old?
An example of a very old copyright is the King James Version of the Bible, which is still under copyright in the United Kingdom. Should the works of William Shakespeare still be under copyright by his heirs? What benefit would that provide?
Strong copyright really is a strong restriction on speech, where using the Steamboat Willie example you can't effectively use it in examples of early animation. Just as significant is the issue with copyrighted works of about the same age where the current copyright isn't even known. This is an issue known as "orphaned works", where in some cases the company who "owns" the copyright simply doesn't exist. If you want to re-publish some of these older work where the copyright status is uncertain, you take the risk of massive copyright infringement even if you have performed an extensive survey to see who might own that content. This includes simply trying to archive copyrighted material to simply preserve it for future generations, where strong copyright simply prevents even ordinary archiving of that content. This has resulted in some substantial works being lost.
There is also the general issue of content being made available for people to make derivative works. You mention why somebody should profit off of Star Wars? My counter argument to that is what stories have been lost because people can't enter the Star Wars universe and tell stories from that setting, do a "what if" speculation about what might have been if Luke Skywalker failed to destroy the Death Star, and other numerous stories. This isn't just speculation here either, as such stories have been squelched through copyright claims. Yes, fan fiction exists in various forms, but the original copyright holder heavily regulates these kind of stories.
Giving a good example of how stories entering the public domain can benefit from a retelling, "West Side Story" is essentially a retelling of "Romeo and Juliet" but in a much more contemporary setting. If William Shakespeare's copyright was still being honored, that story simply wouldn't have been told. I could say the same thing about "The Lion King" as a retelling of Hamlet. Both of these derivative stories are recycling the work of the past in a new way that really has added value to our culture and serves to encourage retelling these stories in very new ways.
Also, this debate about copyright term length goes back to the debate over the issue with the original constitution convention of 1787, where the issue of copyright terms was raised in that convention. Abuses of copyright at the time were rampant and the copyright clause was explicitly entered into the U.S. Constitution as a protest against the British copyright laws of the era. It should be telling that the first edition of the Bible printed in America was in Cherokee, as publication of the Bible in the English language was prohibited under the copyright laws of the time. It wasn't until after the American Revolution that a copy of the Bible in English was published... after which there were literally hundreds of presses making copies of that particular book. Other writings of the American Revolution as set up by the "Committee of Correspondence" were also critical to spreading knowledge about key issues of the day, where they used something akin to and open source license for spreading that information.
In short, the U.S. Constitution was written with a very limited term explicitly because the founding fathers knew the value of content in the public domain and expected that we should have access to our own cultural heritage. Long copyright terms prevent that. While it was a dissenting opinion (therefore not really law), I did appreciate Justice Breyer's opinion that he wrote for Eldred v. Ashcroft covering this specific topic and why lengthy copyright terms is a bad thing, going into very speci
You don't seem to understand the purpose of copyright. As it says in the constitution: "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts", not "to prevent someone else from making a buck". It does not matter WHY someone infringes copyright, because no matter what the reason is the creator has lost his exclusive rights, and that runs counter to the reason for copyright.
You forgot an important part of that clause in the U.S. Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Eldred v. Ashcroft notwitstanding, perpetual copyright is a part of the root cause of the problem here. You can't have your cake and eat it too.... either have a very strong copyright for a very limited period of time where the author has complete exclusivity to the copyrighted work, or grant generally weak copyrights that last generally forever.
The problem is when groups want strong copyright protection lasting forever that essentially kills a part of society as a result. Non-commercial infringement is one of those situations, where the lack of earning money from a copyrighted work is a part of the fair-use clause of the copyright law and can be a legitimate part of a defense for why a particular distribution of a portion of a copyrighted work may be perfectly legal (where a "portion" could be the whole work too). Yes, fair-use has other factors to consider apart from non-commercial infringement, but the non-commercial nature can be legitimately considered as a factor.
My argument here is that people insisting on very long copyright terms should also be opening themselves up for significant fair-use exceptions for distribution as well. While not explicitly codified, the age of a copyrighted work likely should be considered as well in terms of a fair-use exception. Something that was only recently created ought to have stronger copyright considerations as opposed to something made 75 years ago (but is still under copyright protection because of the life + 75 copyright term now on many copyrighted works).
If you want to argue that non-commercial infringement is harmful, you would also need to be arguing the limited time argument as well, suggesting that the author has not had sufficient time to market and vend the copyrighted material. I think it would be very difficult to prove that Walt Disney or the Walt Disney corporation has had insufficient time to gather profits from Steamboat Willey, much less George Lucas obtaining plenty of profit from Star Wars. It would be an even tougher stretch to suggest that the current time frame for copyright protection does much to encourage progress of "science and the useful arts". A few years of protection, perhaps. A century? I don't think Walt Disney is necessarily going to have any incentives at the moment to create any additional films due to royalty collections on Steamboat Willey, or his company for that matter.
I think it does make a difference in terms of having a diversity of backgrounds in a legislative body. These people who make our laws really should represent us including our backgrounds. That is sort of the point of a legislative body. I don't think a legislative body made entirely out of engineers would be a good thing either, but it ought to include farmers, engineers, school teachers, physicians, mechanics, and people from almost every walk of life.
I don't think a legislative body ought to have career politicians (aka somebody who graduated with a Political Science degree and spent their entire career as an elected official) nor should a legislative body be dominated by lawyers either.
At the moment, I think there is a deficiency in most legislative bodies having people with engineering experience. Some of this is due to professional pressures, as serving in legislative bodies is actually a negative factor for an engineering career. If you put down on a resume that you either have or are currently serving in a legislative capacity or seeking political office, you will be presumed to be a firebrand and gadfly that shouldn't be trusted to make engineering decisions or that you will bring controversy to your job and drive off clients. As an engineer, there is zero incentive to seek such an office in terms of professional development and may even be a negative factor.
If you are a lawyer on the other hand, having been elected to a state legislature or even a municipal council is considered a good thing and an enhancement on your resume. When you go into a courtroom and participate with a trial involving legislation you personally wrote, your thoughts on the matter can certainly be persuasive to a judge. There are other situations that come up too, but the real issue is that such legislative service is viewed by fellow lawyers as a good thing.
My point in all of this is that these societal pressures also skew the kinds of people that are representing us. When a legislative body needs to discuss a major engineering project like funding a new launch system for NASA, that body simply lacks people with expertise with engineering experience to be able to intelligently judge the merits of the proposal. Other examples could include something like copyright and patent reforms or other kinds of laws where expertise in engineering can be useful so at least some of the people in that body can stand up and say "This piece of legislation is a useless pile of crap! You will kill my profession if this passes!"
You would presume that with a body of 100 people in something like the United States Senate that there ought to be several people with experience outside of just the legal professions. There are some folks in that body who aren't lawyers, but far too many of them are.
Um, no. Actually is was Brittan,( and I am an American thank you) They invented the first Steam powered cars and buses in the 1840's-50's. Benz made the first vehicle power by gas in 1886. And what many of my lesser educated countrymen get confused on is the Ford Modle A. It was not the first car but the fist MASS produced car. Ford invented the assembly line. Not the car.
Ford really didn't invent the assembly line, but rather was the first person to apply that to automotive assembly. Ford got the idea for the assembly line from the Chicago meat packing plants which had cows come in one side and cuts of meat coming out the other with semi-skilled laborers running the plant in between where they would only have to perform a limited number of actions that were each easily taught rather than having skilled butchers being required to completely dress and butcher a cow. Ford's reasoning was that putting together an automobile was even easier to do than dressing a cow, which turned out in practice to be the case as well.
Because of the complexity of the case and the amount of time being spent on discussing programming concepts, the judge decided to take some personal time and learn how to program. In other words, he learned how to code while he was adjudicating the case.
I am impressed by somebody in a position like his taking that effort, and it shows not only the intelligence of the judge but that he was trying to apply the principles he was learning about in the course of the trial. I don't think there is any indication that the judge had studied or knew much about coding prior to the trial, but it does show that he is trying to make extra effort to understand the issues involved.
I admired the extra effort that Judge Jackson did with the DOJ v. Microsoft case where he went out of his way to explicitly try to remove Internet Explorer from his computer and noted how difficult Microsoft had made the task. I could name a few other examples but it is a rare judge to make that kind of effort.
It gets worse. The judge even reminded the Oracle lawyers that if they sought actual damages instead of statutory damages, that the amount he may award them might end up being $0 instead of the hoped for millions or even billions that Oracle wants even if infringement is found as a finding. Oracle chose to go for actual damages, giving the judge an easy out to find infringement but still award $0. It could even backfire for Oracle if infringement doesn't happen as they could even be liable for legal fees and other damages.
Anybody can register a copyright on anything. All it takes is just filing a $50 fee to the Library of Congress along with whatever you want to register. They don't even really look at what you have sent them other than to try and catalog what you've sent to them and your content (computer software, novel, painting, whatever you are trying to register) simply goes into the heap of other stuff being registered and makes the library get a bit larger with its collection.
As for if a court would recognize that copyright registration, that is something else completely different. The rangecheck function may be eligible for copyright nor not (that is a legal question), and for trivial stuff you are generally correct that it would be a dismissed claim. In other words, if you were trying to sue somebody for copyright infringement over a function like rangecheck, an intelligent judge would throw the case out as soon as you filed the case and perhaps even seek barratry charges against you for filing the lawsuit.
If you register copyright after it becomes an issue, you can't sue over previous copyright infringement in terms of seeking statutory damages, but you can use a copyright registration for prohibiting further copyright infringement and raising the specter of seeking statutory damages over future infringement. Often that is enough to convince somebody to stop messing with you, if that is your goal.
If you perform the registration earlier, it documents that you have been serious about enforcing copyright on a particular work. It also makes the task of seeking damages much, much easier as you don't even need to worry about how much actual damage has been caused due to copyright infringement... in other words you don't need to give a judge some sort of list of how much you lost in sales due to the copyright infringement. All you have to show is that the infringement happened in the first place so you are on the hook for damages as spelled out under the law as passed by Congress. This is the law that the MPAA is using to go after folks who copy movies as illegal torrents as all they have to prove is that you copied their content.... how much money you made or how much money they lost is irrelevant.
This law does tend to help ordinary folks though, as the statutory damages for most people are substantially higher than anything you can typically prove as "actual" damages, such as how much money you might have lost if your applet on the iPad store was copied by somebody else and they took credit for your work. You might only prove a couple thousand dollars worth of actual damages, but with copyright registration you can claim a substantially larger amount of money from the statutory damages.
It bites for Oracle though, because they are choosing to dismiss the statutory damages and are going for actual damages on the grounds that they think they will get more money from Google by using the computation for actual damages instead... with the risk of "winning" and potentially still getting nothing if the judge looks through and sees that no actual damage happened other than minor copyright infringement.
You don't need to register copyright, but if you do go through the motions of copyright registration you can (in America) claim statutory damages. Depending on the situation, statutory damages can be more than actual damages and also can count per infringement. If you are having a hard time proving actual loss of sales or trying to come up with a number representing how much the copyright infringement has damaged your ability to earn money from the copyrighted work, you can seek statutory damages instead which sets a minimum amount where all you need to prove is that copyright infringement happened in the first place.
At the very least such damages can help pay for a competent lawyer and certainly can cause somebody doing willful infringement to pause and take notice about the situation. As an insurance policy, I'd even suggest that open source projects consider every once in awhile to "pass the hat" to collect the fees and take the extra step of formally registering copyright with the Library of Congress (especially for a 1.0 version release or other major updates) if only to discourage anybody stupid enough to engage in willful copyright infringement. It also shows that you are being serious about copyright enforcement if you go through that step and it also makes the government as a part of your archival process as well by storing as a "backup" repository and date stamping your code base if somebody wants to be real stupid and file a software patent claim against your project. For $50 (or whatever the fee is at the moment) it is a cheap form of legal insurance.
The question to raise here is if a pharmaceutical patent is necessarily the only way to ensure that new therapies for improving your health can be discovered? Is even the notion that a new drug is the solution to improved health flawed in and of itself?
While I will agree that some new combinations of chemicals administered as a "drug" might be beneficial for improved overall health, and that some of these chemical therapies can be cheaper than alternatives like surgery, but as often if not more so these new drugs can cause more harm than good. Therapies like physical therapy, herbal medicine, or even simply reviewing drugs whose patents have expired because they've been around for a long time might reveal some therapies which work better than some of the new drugs being produced under the pharmaceutical patent process.
Your presumption that without patent protection there will not be any new kind of health therapy created or discovered is absurd. I'm not saying that big pharma companies are the pure essence of evil, but you can think with a larger scope.
I certainly resent going to a doctor with a health problem and walking out with just a prescription. Even worse is when that drug does absolutely does nothing to improve my health and may even do harm. There have been times I have taken prescriptions and simply tossed them into the garbage after doing my own research on what may be going on in my body as well as consulting other physicians who then tell me that the first physician was full of BS.
Pharmaceutical research protection really ought to have its own classification of laws anyway, as it really has its own needs. The concepts and legal traditions applying to a software algorithm (technically which shouldn't even be patentable in the first place as a mathematical function) are very different from a mechanical drawing and are still very different from a chemical formula. Don't even get me started on the patent status of a genetic sequence in DNA.
I find it sad that the big pharma companies try to push their nose into patent fights hoping for longer patent terms when everything else that needs to use patents under completely different regulatory environments suffers. This is so much the case that I think pharmaceutical development protection should be its own completely separate set of laws just to tell the folks from pharmaceutical companies to get lost in these kind of discussions. If they are trying to design a machine which produces these drugs (hence a mechanical device worthy of a patent in its own right) there may be a reason for some kind of a patent discussion, but those devices should be separate from the fabrication monopoly granted for producing the drugs themselves.
In the USA there already is the concept of personal fair use, which is distinctively different from fair use for educational purposes (aka what a bona fide instructor can share with their students to illustrate a point in the curriculum), which is furthermore very different from legitimate public fair use as applied to excerpts from copyrighted works such as in a movie review or scholarly articles about themes in copyrighted works, and all that is still very different from parody.
The assumption being made with fair use is that items which have a long period of copyright protection will have ways for the general public to be able to use the content in various ways in spite of the copyright protection. It is the trade-off that copyright holders get for their protection,. If anything, a much shorter copyright term would invalidate many of the issues with fair use as there would be a notion to wait until the copyright expired before you can manipulate, remix, or do anything with the copyrighted material. A longer copyright term in fact encourages more concepts like fair use and more grey areas of "copyright infringement".
At the moment, and contrary to what people like the MPAA, RIAA, ASCAP, and other similar groups would have you think, you are permitted in America and countries with similar systems of fair use/fair dealing to be able to copy and duplicate copyrighted works for your own personal use... usually to make a "backup copy" or to transfer content from one medium to another (from a DVD to your laptop or MP3 player). When I see places like Wal-Mart advertising they will provide a digital transfer service to do this... for a fee it makes my stomach flip as it is something you shouldn't need to do for any fee at all. You can't make a copy and give it to a friend (that is distribution of the copyrighted content), but as long as it stays with you personally it isn't a problem at all. Sharing that content with a roommate, spouse, or close immediate family member is debatable but generally isn't seen as a public performance (such as watching a DVD in your house) or other violation of personal fair use.
A similar kind of notion also applies to patents BTW, where you are permitted to perform "research experiments" on patented ideas and even try to implement concepts based upon the information in the patent application. You can't sell or distribute those items based upon those patented concepts but you certainly check out how they work, study the concepts in detail, and even write up a study or publish an article about what you discovered with the device or show off the device to a classroom full of students.
Bringing up the issues of fair use is a valid point to make though and in the large discussion of limited "intellectual property" terms I think it is justifiable to discuss what role fair use applies in shorter or longer terms. In a copyright term that is effectively forever, fair use becomes extremely strong to the point that I would dare argue that copyright even becomes meaningless.
... Except not... Conventionally, bodies which constituted only a small proportion of the total matter in their orbits were not considered planets but rather one asteroid in an asteroid belt or trojans captured by an obviously dominant body -- the planet. The model of the solar system and list of planets you and I both learned as kids was based on this premise.
That isn't exactly true. The model of the solar system from about 40 years ago (to pick an arbitrary date meaning at the beginning of the "space age") was mainly the big stuff, with asteroids treated as a special class of stuff. Dominance in their orbits had absolutely nothing to do with how they were defined, and in fact a "planet" really was whatever you could see in the sky that wasn't a star. They were really just big things.
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were treated as big things that weren't asteroids but were still hard to see with the naked eye. It was the discovery of Chiron that sort of started to shake up that notion, and the discovery of more stuff in the asteroid belt that indicated there might be more.
Keep in mind that the original definition of a planet included the Moon and the Sun, at least "original" meaning stuff in the sky that "wandered" from place to place. The root of the word "planet" means "wandering object in the sky". It was the notion there were "fixed" objects in the form of stars that didn't move about, and "planets" that changed their location from time to time. The planets were considered "gods" because they seemed to follow rules that other stuff in the sky.
As a small kid, this notion of "wandering objects in the sky" was very much what I was taught... by not just semi-literate school teachers but by professional astronomers I met trying to explain stuff in the sky. The Sun and the Moon obviously weren't considered planets in the mid 20th Century, but the definition of a planet certainly wasn't fixed on anything else other than something which changed places in the sky.
Funny how you don't care if Pluto is a planet but your incorrect recollection of the conventional, uncodified definition is one where Pluto would still be considered one, making it seem like we suddenly decided to change the notion of 'planet' to exclude it. In truth, Pluto would never have been considered a planet if we'd discovered other TNOs at roughly the same time and the codification of the conventional definition wouldn't have raised much of a fuss.
You simply can't know that, and frankly you are putting words into a group of people. BTW, for those who aren't in the daily thick of stuff, the notion that the definition was suddenly changed to explicitly exclude Pluto is indeed why it is a controversy at all. I don't know who "we" is in this case, so may I presume you are a member of the IAU and attended the conference where the definition was established? I know Neil DeGrasse Tyson was in the thick of things there, but I certainly am not a part of that "we".
Funny how nobody thought Ceres was misclassified (or even remembered its relationship to the old convention, as in the above quote) but now that its historical example is relevant to the status of Pluto everyone is like "Sure Ceres could be a planet too! Why not?"
Ceres was not only classified as a planet, but had a planetary symbol created for it (and several of the other larger asteroids) because they were explicitly classified as planets when they were first discovered. As more asteroids were discovered, it was felt there was something unique to the asteroid belt, but essentially the asteroids were treated as a special class of planet. I think you are mis-remembering how it was actually classified at the time.
Personally I don't care what we call Pluto so long as we acknowledge our updated information that it is not the dominant object of its orbital
Considering that every other country next to Switzerland fell under the direct control of the Nazi German government, it isn't an accident that they stayed neutral. I guess the same could be said about Sweden (who has been similarly accused of capitulating to German demands during WWII).
My point is that these two countries both used a similar kind of reserve military system which made any military campaign against either one of these countries to be something that was a bigger hassle than the benefits gained from conquest... thus they were largely spared the effects of the wars of the 20th Century. Yes, it wasn't perfect, and they needed to make some diplomatic concessions, but they certainly fared much better than Holland and Luxlembourg.
Geography was also a component for both Sweden and Switzerland. I'm just suggesting that the armies of these countries put together in the fashion that they have trained their soldiers made them substantially less appealing military targets than many of their neighbors. It was state militia groups like these that also convinced Napoleon III that an invasion of America was a particular awful idea (something that was contemplated... see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Civil_War)
Why should a reserve army be necessarily a rag-tag bunch of soldiers? They can have armored equipment, special forces, and other elite units.
The U.S. Army is relying even now upon such units, and it wouldn't even be possible for the U.S. Army to conduct operations without the state militias. This comment doesn't even seem to acknowledge what is currently being done in that regard.
"Weekend soliders" can and do perform a great service to the country. I'm just pointing out how that might be improved so the fears of a standing army can be mitigated and be more in line with how the founding fathers of America originally envisioned the role of state militias. BTW, the current term is "National Guard" instead of a state militia, but there is also nothing precluding states from organizing other units outside of the National Guard force as well, other than the huge amount of federal money pouring into states that employ national guard units.
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Adding insult to injury, the reason why the Columbia was destroyed upon re-entry is in part because the Environmental Protection Agency got into a feud with NASA over the foam being used for the cryogenic tank connectors. The original foam being used would have broken up and was much, much lighter where it wouldn't have caused any problem like what caused damage to the leading edge tiles that ultimately caused the problems for the Columbia. The problem was that the original foam had chlorofluorocarbon compounds that were perceived as "hazardous to the environment". I don't know how many lives were spared by the switch to the new foam due to slightly reduced skin cancer rates worldwide, but I know of at least seven astronauts who are dead because of that change. I sure hope that EPA bureaucrat feels nice warm fuzzies over all of the lives he saved because of that move.
On top of that, there were engineers who spotted the problems on the Columbia (or at least thought they were serious problems enough to kick the issue to upper management) within 24 hours of the launch. The Columbia was in orbit for over two weeks where engineers knew it was going to be destroyed upon re-entry yet NASA management dismissed the issue and didn't even bother to tell the astronauts on board that there might even be a problem or even try to find out if it could be a problem. The general attitude was that there was no rescue plan therefore the astronauts were as good as dead anyway... so they didn't even bother trying.
If the Challenger disaster showed "go fever" and general disregard for engineering recommendations, what happened with the Columbia was an unmitigated management failure so severe it should have brought about the end of the agency altogether.
In the press conference after the launch abort, SpaceX said this was essentially a similar failure to one they had on the initial Falcon 9 flight.
The #1 difference between this flight and the previous flight is that the launch window was so tight that they need to wait a couple of days to get the same launch opportunity again rather than doing a quick recycle and trying a minor fix like they did with the initial Falcon 9 launch. If all SpaceX had to do was to get this vehicle into orbit, it likely would already be there right now instead of being delayed by a couple more days.
BTW, this same situation also happened several times with the Space Shuttle, and you are correct that this is pretty par for the course of any space launch. Rocket science is hard stuff and very unforgiving if you try to apply public relations and political correctness into the Rocket Equation. I guess the next launch opportunity is going to be Tuesday, as the engineers involved want to inspect the #5 rocket engine and find out what went wrong. They are going to be very busy over the next couple of days, likely pulling substantial overtime hours as well.
On the other hand, COTS was seen as a back-up plan just in case Constellation didn't work out... which it really didn't. It was a sort of bastard step child and not really something that NASA treated seriously, even though I'll admit that the idea did start under the Bush administration.
The first NASA administrator to say that NASA needs to get out of the Earth to LEO transportation business was Charles Bolden, in testimony before the Spaceflight subcommittee of the House Transportation Committee (the actual names of those committees are longer, but that is what those respective committees and subcommittees really cover). Michael Griffin never stated anything like that at all, and in fact still seems resistant to the idea that private companies could ever take over this kind of a job from NASA even now that he is merely an aeronautical engineering professor instead of a government bureaucrat (well... perhaps still in government service but a different kind of service).
I'm not really impressed with Obama himself here, but NASA leadership under Charles Bolden and Lori Garver seems to be in pretty good hands from what I can see. Yes, there are some problems including what seems like a very abrasive personally that Lori Garver has, particularly towards members of Congress that rubs some of them the wrong way and Bolden trying to help Obama implement some of the social agenda stuff that has turned off some people to what NASA is doing (like the whole involvement of Arabs in the American space program).
Regardless, I'm glad that COTS was proposed and even considered at all under the Bush administration, and it seemed to have at the time flown under the radar for most members of congress until it became obvious that Constellation needed to be cut leaving COTS providers as the only real launch alternative. SLS is really an attempt to bring back at least the Ares V without calling that vehicle the Ares V.
The real reason why private commercial spaceflight hasn't advanced very far, IMHO, is that it has historically required relatively huge up-front capital costs, and because anything beyond communications satellites has been too expensive and too unprofitable for companies to pursue. A secondary reason, I suspect, is that the US was never very motivated to pursuing inexpensive spaceflight - efficiency was less important than "winning the space race" and the perceived military and technological advantage this implied. Russia, on the other hand, was relatively poor and their national development in the first half of the 20th century couldn't have been more different from America's.
The reason why private commercial spaceflight didn't take hold in the 1980's was explicitly because of a combination of regulations like ITAR and some bureaucrats at NASA which cut the legs out of commercial spaceflight by advertising unrealistic launch prices on the Space Shuttle. In order to sell the Space Shuttle to Congress, NASA made unbelievable promises about its cost, and insisted that the Shuttle could perform all of the launch tasks needed for American spaceflight... including everything for the military and any other group in America including commercial groups.
There were other commercial companies engaged in commercial spaceflight in the 1970's and 1980's. Look up the Conestoga rocket. The reason why it didn't continue to be developed was explicit interference by the U.S. government which killed the whole industry. Jim Benson also tried in vain to build commercial vehicles, and was thwarted by NASA at almost every move to the point he ended up dying of old age before he could finally get one of his rockets into space.
It wasn't a lack of capital, or at least that wasn't the major factor involved. Capital could be found and indeed there were investors in the 1980's willing to invest literally billions of dollars on private commercial spaceflight. Some of that money did end up being used on the Space Shuttle where there were even private commercial astronauts that went up on the Space Shuttle to perform explicitly commercial activities on the Space Shuttle and several kinds of commercial activities on the Shuttle.... stuff that should have happened on private vehicles and not something run by a government agency and even contrary to the legal charter given to NASA when the agency was set up.
I'll also point out that only a small fraction of the promised payloads that were supposed to fly on the Space Shuttle actually made the trip, particularly after the loss of the Challenger when NASA finally said that private commercial payloads couldn't fly on the Space Shuttle any more as well as ending the private commercial astronaut program. The astronauts who did fly were employees of companies doing stuff in space rather than being "space tourists", but there were a couple private astronauts that did go up before the Challenger disaster. Space tourists on the Space Shuttle was seriously considered, including placing a passenger module in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle that would hold another dozen people and other fanciful thinking about how it could have been used. The ultimate nail in the coffin for using the Space Shuttle for commercial purposes is that the actual cost to fly the thing ended up being even more expensive than flying the Saturn family of rockets when the costs were honestly evaluated and that the goal of using the Shuttle to drive down costs never happened at all.
The problem here was simply lousy commercial space policy that included a "giggle factor" where many bureaucrats lacked the vision that anything like what is happening today could even be done at all. I'm glad that there are entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, John Carmack, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow who are willing to put their money where their mouth is and simply dare to go into space in spite of what the government is telling them that they can't do.
This concern is vastly premature. Even before the advent of SpaceX, the US was the leader in commercial spaceflight with the only truly privately owned launch services in the world. That remains the case. The commercial services in Europe, Russia, China, and India all have substantial government ownership.
Sure, it's not hard to see a future where a short-sighted US has regulated this industry out of existence (we didn't need that future anyway!), but it hasn't happened yet.
This isn't true. Before SpaceX stepped up, commercial spaceflight had all but been acquiesced to the ESA and Roskosmos, with China filling in the gap. Boeing, ATK, and Lockheed-Martin for the past decade have been flying mainly government contracted payloads with very few commercial flights, and certainly weren't involved with launches of the communications satellite constellations like Iridium and a couple others which were proposed awhile back.
What is currently known as commercial spaceflight is a relatively recent resurgence in America, and is happening in spite of ITAR and other really messy regulations where satellite manufacturers in other countries are specifically avoiding American launchers explicitly because of ITAR and the rather strange regulatory environment that exists in America.
The difference at the moment seems to be an entrepreneurial spirit coming mainly from internet pioneers, some very real results that have happened from space prize competitions like the X-Prize and Lunar Landing Challenge (both of which spurred on several companies to develop spaceflight technologies), and the fact that NASA has completely left the commercial spaceflight market altogether. When NASA was claiming that the Space Shuttle would do commercial payloads for about $3k/kg (that was the price they were claiming in the 1980's), they completely cut the legs out from other commercial spaceflight endeavors like the Conestoga rocket or the Otrag rocket as well as other commercial projects in the works at the time.
That it has taken nearly 30 years to get American commercial spaceflight back to the state it was in the 1980s shows how a lousy government policy towards commercial spaceflight can destroy the industry. I can't imagine what should have happened over these past 30 years, but I do know that many of the same kinds of people who killed commercial spaceflight 30 years ago are still in the United States Congress and desire to set commercial endeavors in space at least for America back another 30 years. If that happens again, it will be other countries that take the lead, just as killing American commerical spaceflight efforts in the past provided an opening for the ESA to pounce upon contracts that should have gone to American launchers.
It is also about privatizing spaceflight as well.... explicitly one of the things NASA is by law supposed to be doing as it is a part of NASA's charter.
The telling thing to see if this move towards privatized launches makes any difference is if NASA and the U.S. federal government will constitute a majority of SpaceX's launch manifest in the future or if the market for private commercial ventures into space will begin to take over the manifest making the government launch market something more of a niche sideline thing or if that will be the main event.
Government purchases of intercontinental air freight is even now a significant market for commercial airliners, but by far and away most of the revenue for commercial airlines comes from private businesses and individuals. You don't see Airbus or Boeing building airplanes explicitly for government markets with the exception of military aircraft.... and those are so specialized that they would never be used for civilian purposes.
NASA has been using private contractors for launch services for nearly 20 years (from the Reagan administration when the concept first started) in the form of launch services from the United Launch Alliance. There shouldn't be anything different with SpaceX other than it being yet another contractor for NASA spaceflight needs. Federal government contracts may even continue to get a higher priority in terms of having a NASA flight bump a flight being done by Planetary Resources, but the hope is that flights by groups like Planetary Resources will be the more typical kind of flight, and that new opportunities can be found for people doing stuff in space. Private commercial spaceflight is already happening and is a multi-billion dollar industry in terms of annual revenue. If that can grow so the annual budgets of these private companies is either collectively or even individually larger than NASA's budget, commercial spaceflight will have finally arrived and this move for private launches will have accomplished its goal.
Private commercial spaceflight will happen eventually. I just don't know if it will happen in America or somewhere else like China or India. It would be a sad day if socialism is so entrenched in America that private companies can't succeed to access the resources of space. This isn't just something said off the cuff as it should be pointed out that America has all but abandoned the private commercial spaceflight market, even for companies based in America. That Robert Bigelow needed to go to Russia in order to fly his space stations into orbit should have been seen as a low point in American spaceflight experience.
The real news here is that NASA is conceding the idea that launches into low-Earth orbit are now routine enough that they really shouldn't be spending money on building rockets going there. This is a very recent admission that has only happened under the Obama administration.
What will likely not be mentioned is how a great many other companies are also involved with this effort of having NASA get rid of its native launch capacity, or how nearly $20 billion is currently being spent on a heavy lift rocket that has no mission and will likely be cancelled in the next presidential administration (whomever that may be... in 2013 or 2017 of either political party). The other companies that are involved at the moment is really exciting, and shows amazing potential for America being a real leader in developing technologies for spaceflight.
The hope and dream of many people here is that travel into low-Earth orbit will become something as routine as sending passengers and cargo on intercontinental flights by airplane. There was a time that deservedly justified 40 point type headlines in newspapers, just as early flights into orbit did several decades later. The sad thing is how long it took for routine intercontinental flights to happen compared to when the first such flights happened, and then how long it is taking from when the first flights to low-Earth orbit happened to when they've become routine. As evidenced by the fact this is a major story and posted here in Slashdot, flights into orbit still aren't routine. That can and should change.
Humans suck at intuitively understanding and controlling stuff outside narrow realms of experience and reaction time.
I think this is one of the reasons why he suggested an approach for you to get that experience in a simulation to give you some information allowing you to comprehend the task at hand for SpaceX. Spending time building a rocket even in a fairly accurate simulator (which the Kerbal Space Program does very well for the price) can give you that ability.
I have killed enough astronauts in that simulator that I shouldn't set foot anywhere near a launch pad, and getting a vehicle to orbit at all is impressive enough. An in-orbit rendezvous and performing a docking maneuver is something that really does mark your ability to operate in space, and is an accomplishment which only three organizations in the history of mankind have ever been able to accomplish in real life. SpaceX is scheduled to be organization #4, and the first private company to even attempt such a feat. That by itself should speak volumes for what SpaceX is trying to accomplish tomorrow.
They really don't have other days to try and perform this launch either. The Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Station (a USAF base) is a very busy place with a great many launches happening going to a great many places being done by a great many different companies and people. Some of those other launches simply can't wait, and in fact are a higher priority to this launch by SpaceX (as they contain weather satellites, various military satellites, GPS satellites, and other things important for America as well).
Your ignorance is showing even more for posing this question at all. Besides, there is no reason for this launch to happen at a time convenient for you to be able to eat your breakfast and take in a bit of entertainment. This is rocket science.
But more to the point, there won't be days in the near future that would allow a launch window between 9 am and 9 pm and meet all of the other conditions needed for this flight as well as dealing with everything else that needs to happen at this launch site. Of all of the things that these engineers should be worrying about, your need for sleep is the last consideration they should have.
The problem with a very long copyright term is that the content doesn't go into the public domain. How old is old?
An example of a very old copyright is the King James Version of the Bible, which is still under copyright in the United Kingdom. Should the works of William Shakespeare still be under copyright by his heirs? What benefit would that provide?
Strong copyright really is a strong restriction on speech, where using the Steamboat Willie example you can't effectively use it in examples of early animation. Just as significant is the issue with copyrighted works of about the same age where the current copyright isn't even known. This is an issue known as "orphaned works", where in some cases the company who "owns" the copyright simply doesn't exist. If you want to re-publish some of these older work where the copyright status is uncertain, you take the risk of massive copyright infringement even if you have performed an extensive survey to see who might own that content. This includes simply trying to archive copyrighted material to simply preserve it for future generations, where strong copyright simply prevents even ordinary archiving of that content. This has resulted in some substantial works being lost.
There is also the general issue of content being made available for people to make derivative works. You mention why somebody should profit off of Star Wars? My counter argument to that is what stories have been lost because people can't enter the Star Wars universe and tell stories from that setting, do a "what if" speculation about what might have been if Luke Skywalker failed to destroy the Death Star, and other numerous stories. This isn't just speculation here either, as such stories have been squelched through copyright claims. Yes, fan fiction exists in various forms, but the original copyright holder heavily regulates these kind of stories.
Giving a good example of how stories entering the public domain can benefit from a retelling, "West Side Story" is essentially a retelling of "Romeo and Juliet" but in a much more contemporary setting. If William Shakespeare's copyright was still being honored, that story simply wouldn't have been told. I could say the same thing about "The Lion King" as a retelling of Hamlet. Both of these derivative stories are recycling the work of the past in a new way that really has added value to our culture and serves to encourage retelling these stories in very new ways.
Also, this debate about copyright term length goes back to the debate over the issue with the original constitution convention of 1787, where the issue of copyright terms was raised in that convention. Abuses of copyright at the time were rampant and the copyright clause was explicitly entered into the U.S. Constitution as a protest against the British copyright laws of the era. It should be telling that the first edition of the Bible printed in America was in Cherokee, as publication of the Bible in the English language was prohibited under the copyright laws of the time. It wasn't until after the American Revolution that a copy of the Bible in English was published... after which there were literally hundreds of presses making copies of that particular book. Other writings of the American Revolution as set up by the "Committee of Correspondence" were also critical to spreading knowledge about key issues of the day, where they used something akin to and open source license for spreading that information.
In short, the U.S. Constitution was written with a very limited term explicitly because the founding fathers knew the value of content in the public domain and expected that we should have access to our own cultural heritage. Long copyright terms prevent that. While it was a dissenting opinion (therefore not really law), I did appreciate Justice Breyer's opinion that he wrote for Eldred v. Ashcroft covering this specific topic and why lengthy copyright terms is a bad thing, going into very speci
You don't seem to understand the purpose of copyright. As it says in the constitution: "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts", not "to prevent someone else from making a buck". It does not matter WHY someone infringes copyright, because no matter what the reason is the creator has lost his exclusive rights, and that runs counter to the reason for copyright.
You forgot an important part of that clause in the U.S. Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Eldred v. Ashcroft notwitstanding, perpetual copyright is a part of the root cause of the problem here. You can't have your cake and eat it too.... either have a very strong copyright for a very limited period of time where the author has complete exclusivity to the copyrighted work, or grant generally weak copyrights that last generally forever.
The problem is when groups want strong copyright protection lasting forever that essentially kills a part of society as a result. Non-commercial infringement is one of those situations, where the lack of earning money from a copyrighted work is a part of the fair-use clause of the copyright law and can be a legitimate part of a defense for why a particular distribution of a portion of a copyrighted work may be perfectly legal (where a "portion" could be the whole work too). Yes, fair-use has other factors to consider apart from non-commercial infringement, but the non-commercial nature can be legitimately considered as a factor.
My argument here is that people insisting on very long copyright terms should also be opening themselves up for significant fair-use exceptions for distribution as well. While not explicitly codified, the age of a copyrighted work likely should be considered as well in terms of a fair-use exception. Something that was only recently created ought to have stronger copyright considerations as opposed to something made 75 years ago (but is still under copyright protection because of the life + 75 copyright term now on many copyrighted works).
If you want to argue that non-commercial infringement is harmful, you would also need to be arguing the limited time argument as well, suggesting that the author has not had sufficient time to market and vend the copyrighted material. I think it would be very difficult to prove that Walt Disney or the Walt Disney corporation has had insufficient time to gather profits from Steamboat Willey, much less George Lucas obtaining plenty of profit from Star Wars. It would be an even tougher stretch to suggest that the current time frame for copyright protection does much to encourage progress of "science and the useful arts". A few years of protection, perhaps. A century? I don't think Walt Disney is necessarily going to have any incentives at the moment to create any additional films due to royalty collections on Steamboat Willey, or his company for that matter.
I think it does make a difference in terms of having a diversity of backgrounds in a legislative body. These people who make our laws really should represent us including our backgrounds. That is sort of the point of a legislative body. I don't think a legislative body made entirely out of engineers would be a good thing either, but it ought to include farmers, engineers, school teachers, physicians, mechanics, and people from almost every walk of life.
I don't think a legislative body ought to have career politicians (aka somebody who graduated with a Political Science degree and spent their entire career as an elected official) nor should a legislative body be dominated by lawyers either.
At the moment, I think there is a deficiency in most legislative bodies having people with engineering experience. Some of this is due to professional pressures, as serving in legislative bodies is actually a negative factor for an engineering career. If you put down on a resume that you either have or are currently serving in a legislative capacity or seeking political office, you will be presumed to be a firebrand and gadfly that shouldn't be trusted to make engineering decisions or that you will bring controversy to your job and drive off clients. As an engineer, there is zero incentive to seek such an office in terms of professional development and may even be a negative factor.
If you are a lawyer on the other hand, having been elected to a state legislature or even a municipal council is considered a good thing and an enhancement on your resume. When you go into a courtroom and participate with a trial involving legislation you personally wrote, your thoughts on the matter can certainly be persuasive to a judge. There are other situations that come up too, but the real issue is that such legislative service is viewed by fellow lawyers as a good thing.
My point in all of this is that these societal pressures also skew the kinds of people that are representing us. When a legislative body needs to discuss a major engineering project like funding a new launch system for NASA, that body simply lacks people with expertise with engineering experience to be able to intelligently judge the merits of the proposal. Other examples could include something like copyright and patent reforms or other kinds of laws where expertise in engineering can be useful so at least some of the people in that body can stand up and say "This piece of legislation is a useless pile of crap! You will kill my profession if this passes!"
You would presume that with a body of 100 people in something like the United States Senate that there ought to be several people with experience outside of just the legal professions. There are some folks in that body who aren't lawyers, but far too many of them are.
Um, no. Actually is was Brittan,( and I am an American thank you) They invented the first Steam powered cars and buses in the 1840's-50's. Benz made the first vehicle power by gas in 1886. And what many of my lesser educated countrymen get confused on is the Ford Modle A. It was not the first car but the fist MASS produced car. Ford invented the assembly line. Not the car.
Ford really didn't invent the assembly line, but rather was the first person to apply that to automotive assembly. Ford got the idea for the assembly line from the Chicago meat packing plants which had cows come in one side and cuts of meat coming out the other with semi-skilled laborers running the plant in between where they would only have to perform a limited number of actions that were each easily taught rather than having skilled butchers being required to completely dress and butcher a cow. Ford's reasoning was that putting together an automobile was even easier to do than dressing a cow, which turned out in practice to be the case as well.
Because of the complexity of the case and the amount of time being spent on discussing programming concepts, the judge decided to take some personal time and learn how to program. In other words, he learned how to code while he was adjudicating the case.
I am impressed by somebody in a position like his taking that effort, and it shows not only the intelligence of the judge but that he was trying to apply the principles he was learning about in the course of the trial. I don't think there is any indication that the judge had studied or knew much about coding prior to the trial, but it does show that he is trying to make extra effort to understand the issues involved.
I admired the extra effort that Judge Jackson did with the DOJ v. Microsoft case where he went out of his way to explicitly try to remove Internet Explorer from his computer and noted how difficult Microsoft had made the task. I could name a few other examples but it is a rare judge to make that kind of effort.
It gets worse. The judge even reminded the Oracle lawyers that if they sought actual damages instead of statutory damages, that the amount he may award them might end up being $0 instead of the hoped for millions or even billions that Oracle wants even if infringement is found as a finding. Oracle chose to go for actual damages, giving the judge an easy out to find infringement but still award $0. It could even backfire for Oracle if infringement doesn't happen as they could even be liable for legal fees and other damages.
Anybody can register a copyright on anything. All it takes is just filing a $50 fee to the Library of Congress along with whatever you want to register. They don't even really look at what you have sent them other than to try and catalog what you've sent to them and your content (computer software, novel, painting, whatever you are trying to register) simply goes into the heap of other stuff being registered and makes the library get a bit larger with its collection.
As for if a court would recognize that copyright registration, that is something else completely different. The rangecheck function may be eligible for copyright nor not (that is a legal question), and for trivial stuff you are generally correct that it would be a dismissed claim. In other words, if you were trying to sue somebody for copyright infringement over a function like rangecheck, an intelligent judge would throw the case out as soon as you filed the case and perhaps even seek barratry charges against you for filing the lawsuit.
If you register copyright after it becomes an issue, you can't sue over previous copyright infringement in terms of seeking statutory damages, but you can use a copyright registration for prohibiting further copyright infringement and raising the specter of seeking statutory damages over future infringement. Often that is enough to convince somebody to stop messing with you, if that is your goal.
If you perform the registration earlier, it documents that you have been serious about enforcing copyright on a particular work. It also makes the task of seeking damages much, much easier as you don't even need to worry about how much actual damage has been caused due to copyright infringement... in other words you don't need to give a judge some sort of list of how much you lost in sales due to the copyright infringement. All you have to show is that the infringement happened in the first place so you are on the hook for damages as spelled out under the law as passed by Congress. This is the law that the MPAA is using to go after folks who copy movies as illegal torrents as all they have to prove is that you copied their content.... how much money you made or how much money they lost is irrelevant.
This law does tend to help ordinary folks though, as the statutory damages for most people are substantially higher than anything you can typically prove as "actual" damages, such as how much money you might have lost if your applet on the iPad store was copied by somebody else and they took credit for your work. You might only prove a couple thousand dollars worth of actual damages, but with copyright registration you can claim a substantially larger amount of money from the statutory damages.
It bites for Oracle though, because they are choosing to dismiss the statutory damages and are going for actual damages on the grounds that they think they will get more money from Google by using the computation for actual damages instead... with the risk of "winning" and potentially still getting nothing if the judge looks through and sees that no actual damage happened other than minor copyright infringement.
You don't need to register copyright, but if you do go through the motions of copyright registration you can (in America) claim statutory damages. Depending on the situation, statutory damages can be more than actual damages and also can count per infringement. If you are having a hard time proving actual loss of sales or trying to come up with a number representing how much the copyright infringement has damaged your ability to earn money from the copyrighted work, you can seek statutory damages instead which sets a minimum amount where all you need to prove is that copyright infringement happened in the first place.
At the very least such damages can help pay for a competent lawyer and certainly can cause somebody doing willful infringement to pause and take notice about the situation. As an insurance policy, I'd even suggest that open source projects consider every once in awhile to "pass the hat" to collect the fees and take the extra step of formally registering copyright with the Library of Congress (especially for a 1.0 version release or other major updates) if only to discourage anybody stupid enough to engage in willful copyright infringement. It also shows that you are being serious about copyright enforcement if you go through that step and it also makes the government as a part of your archival process as well by storing as a "backup" repository and date stamping your code base if somebody wants to be real stupid and file a software patent claim against your project. For $50 (or whatever the fee is at the moment) it is a cheap form of legal insurance.
The question to raise here is if a pharmaceutical patent is necessarily the only way to ensure that new therapies for improving your health can be discovered? Is even the notion that a new drug is the solution to improved health flawed in and of itself?
While I will agree that some new combinations of chemicals administered as a "drug" might be beneficial for improved overall health, and that some of these chemical therapies can be cheaper than alternatives like surgery, but as often if not more so these new drugs can cause more harm than good. Therapies like physical therapy, herbal medicine, or even simply reviewing drugs whose patents have expired because they've been around for a long time might reveal some therapies which work better than some of the new drugs being produced under the pharmaceutical patent process.
Your presumption that without patent protection there will not be any new kind of health therapy created or discovered is absurd. I'm not saying that big pharma companies are the pure essence of evil, but you can think with a larger scope.
I certainly resent going to a doctor with a health problem and walking out with just a prescription. Even worse is when that drug does absolutely does nothing to improve my health and may even do harm. There have been times I have taken prescriptions and simply tossed them into the garbage after doing my own research on what may be going on in my body as well as consulting other physicians who then tell me that the first physician was full of BS.
How is that different from the current system?
Pharmaceutical research protection really ought to have its own classification of laws anyway, as it really has its own needs. The concepts and legal traditions applying to a software algorithm (technically which shouldn't even be patentable in the first place as a mathematical function) are very different from a mechanical drawing and are still very different from a chemical formula. Don't even get me started on the patent status of a genetic sequence in DNA.
I find it sad that the big pharma companies try to push their nose into patent fights hoping for longer patent terms when everything else that needs to use patents under completely different regulatory environments suffers. This is so much the case that I think pharmaceutical development protection should be its own completely separate set of laws just to tell the folks from pharmaceutical companies to get lost in these kind of discussions. If they are trying to design a machine which produces these drugs (hence a mechanical device worthy of a patent in its own right) there may be a reason for some kind of a patent discussion, but those devices should be separate from the fabrication monopoly granted for producing the drugs themselves.
In the USA there already is the concept of personal fair use, which is distinctively different from fair use for educational purposes (aka what a bona fide instructor can share with their students to illustrate a point in the curriculum), which is furthermore very different from legitimate public fair use as applied to excerpts from copyrighted works such as in a movie review or scholarly articles about themes in copyrighted works, and all that is still very different from parody.
The assumption being made with fair use is that items which have a long period of copyright protection will have ways for the general public to be able to use the content in various ways in spite of the copyright protection. It is the trade-off that copyright holders get for their protection,. If anything, a much shorter copyright term would invalidate many of the issues with fair use as there would be a notion to wait until the copyright expired before you can manipulate, remix, or do anything with the copyrighted material. A longer copyright term in fact encourages more concepts like fair use and more grey areas of "copyright infringement".
At the moment, and contrary to what people like the MPAA, RIAA, ASCAP, and other similar groups would have you think, you are permitted in America and countries with similar systems of fair use/fair dealing to be able to copy and duplicate copyrighted works for your own personal use... usually to make a "backup copy" or to transfer content from one medium to another (from a DVD to your laptop or MP3 player). When I see places like Wal-Mart advertising they will provide a digital transfer service to do this ... for a fee it makes my stomach flip as it is something you shouldn't need to do for any fee at all. You can't make a copy and give it to a friend (that is distribution of the copyrighted content), but as long as it stays with you personally it isn't a problem at all. Sharing that content with a roommate, spouse, or close immediate family member is debatable but generally isn't seen as a public performance (such as watching a DVD in your house) or other violation of personal fair use.
A similar kind of notion also applies to patents BTW, where you are permitted to perform "research experiments" on patented ideas and even try to implement concepts based upon the information in the patent application. You can't sell or distribute those items based upon those patented concepts but you certainly check out how they work, study the concepts in detail, and even write up a study or publish an article about what you discovered with the device or show off the device to a classroom full of students.
Bringing up the issues of fair use is a valid point to make though and in the large discussion of limited "intellectual property" terms I think it is justifiable to discuss what role fair use applies in shorter or longer terms. In a copyright term that is effectively forever, fair use becomes extremely strong to the point that I would dare argue that copyright even becomes meaningless.
... Except not... Conventionally, bodies which constituted only a small proportion of the total matter in their orbits were not considered planets but rather one asteroid in an asteroid belt or trojans captured by an obviously dominant body -- the planet. The model of the solar system and list of planets you and I both learned as kids was based on this premise.
That isn't exactly true. The model of the solar system from about 40 years ago (to pick an arbitrary date meaning at the beginning of the "space age") was mainly the big stuff, with asteroids treated as a special class of stuff. Dominance in their orbits had absolutely nothing to do with how they were defined, and in fact a "planet" really was whatever you could see in the sky that wasn't a star. They were really just big things.
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were treated as big things that weren't asteroids but were still hard to see with the naked eye. It was the discovery of Chiron that sort of started to shake up that notion, and the discovery of more stuff in the asteroid belt that indicated there might be more.
Keep in mind that the original definition of a planet included the Moon and the Sun, at least "original" meaning stuff in the sky that "wandered" from place to place. The root of the word "planet" means "wandering object in the sky". It was the notion there were "fixed" objects in the form of stars that didn't move about, and "planets" that changed their location from time to time. The planets were considered "gods" because they seemed to follow rules that other stuff in the sky.
As a small kid, this notion of "wandering objects in the sky" was very much what I was taught... by not just semi-literate school teachers but by professional astronomers I met trying to explain stuff in the sky. The Sun and the Moon obviously weren't considered planets in the mid 20th Century, but the definition of a planet certainly wasn't fixed on anything else other than something which changed places in the sky.
Funny how you don't care if Pluto is a planet but your incorrect recollection of the conventional, uncodified definition is one where Pluto would still be considered one, making it seem like we suddenly decided to change the notion of 'planet' to exclude it. In truth, Pluto would never have been considered a planet if we'd discovered other TNOs at roughly the same time and the codification of the conventional definition wouldn't have raised much of a fuss.
You simply can't know that, and frankly you are putting words into a group of people. BTW, for those who aren't in the daily thick of stuff, the notion that the definition was suddenly changed to explicitly exclude Pluto is indeed why it is a controversy at all. I don't know who "we" is in this case, so may I presume you are a member of the IAU and attended the conference where the definition was established? I know Neil DeGrasse Tyson was in the thick of things there, but I certainly am not a part of that "we".
Funny how nobody thought Ceres was misclassified (or even remembered its relationship to the old convention, as in the above quote) but now that its historical example is relevant to the status of Pluto everyone is like "Sure Ceres could be a planet too! Why not?"
Ceres was not only classified as a planet, but had a planetary symbol created for it (and several of the other larger asteroids) because they were explicitly classified as planets when they were first discovered. As more asteroids were discovered, it was felt there was something unique to the asteroid belt, but essentially the asteroids were treated as a special class of planet. I think you are mis-remembering how it was actually classified at the time.
Personally I don't care what we call Pluto so long as we acknowledge our updated information that it is not the dominant object of its orbital
Considering that every other country next to Switzerland fell under the direct control of the Nazi German government, it isn't an accident that they stayed neutral. I guess the same could be said about Sweden (who has been similarly accused of capitulating to German demands during WWII).
My point is that these two countries both used a similar kind of reserve military system which made any military campaign against either one of these countries to be something that was a bigger hassle than the benefits gained from conquest... thus they were largely spared the effects of the wars of the 20th Century. Yes, it wasn't perfect, and they needed to make some diplomatic concessions, but they certainly fared much better than Holland and Luxlembourg.
Geography was also a component for both Sweden and Switzerland. I'm just suggesting that the armies of these countries put together in the fashion that they have trained their soldiers made them substantially less appealing military targets than many of their neighbors. It was state militia groups like these that also convinced Napoleon III that an invasion of America was a particular awful idea (something that was contemplated... see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Civil_War)
Why should a reserve army be necessarily a rag-tag bunch of soldiers? They can have armored equipment, special forces, and other elite units.
The U.S. Army is relying even now upon such units, and it wouldn't even be possible for the U.S. Army to conduct operations without the state militias. This comment doesn't even seem to acknowledge what is currently being done in that regard.
"Weekend soliders" can and do perform a great service to the country. I'm just pointing out how that might be improved so the fears of a standing army can be mitigated and be more in line with how the founding fathers of America originally envisioned the role of state militias. BTW, the current term is "National Guard" instead of a state militia, but there is also nothing precluding states from organizing other units outside of the National Guard force as well, other than the huge amount of federal money pouring into states that employ national guard units.