I work at Johnson Space Center, developing software to assist in Shuttle and ISS mission planning. As interesting as the idea of opening up the source for NASA software may sound, if other programming projects are anything like the stuff I've been working on, you probably wouldn't want it.
Things like hardware cycles and adoption of new technologies tend to be be the norm, so you see things like mid-90's AIX workstations, X/Motif code, Ada, and Fortran that you thought had long since died. My group has recently been able to rewrite some of the more ancient stuff in Java, and gotten the powers that be to approve of switching the servers to Linux.
The applications themselves, that I've worked with anyway, are probably not of a lot of interest to most people either. Some examples:
An acronym-laden groupware product that tracks planning data as it makes its way through its lifecycle. Very specificially tailored to a particular bureaucratic process, network environment, database setup, and so on.
Simulations to calculate orbital trajectories, use those to calculate things like the ISS solar panels, use that to calculate panel efficiency, from that and the load levels figure out battery charge, and so on. Most people don't have a space station they need to run simulations of.
Also, keep in mind that NASA contractors do competitive bids every couple of years to keep their work, and there is turf-guarding and infighting. If you are the only company that knows how software Foo works, that gives you a big advantage at getting the contract for it again next time. Sad, but the way business works, and until software decisions are made solely based on technical considerations, being the most skilled and professional organization won't always assure you of getting the job.
Between the FUD that Microsoft and SCO have been throwing about, most non-technical people will have a very confused view about things like the GPL and open source IP issues. You have to be prepared to address these in simple, easy to understand terms and examples.
For instance, a lot of people get scared by the 'viral' GPL FUD, and think using open source products means they have to release all their own IP crown jewels to the public. You might counter this by pointing out that you can write closed source software with open source tools all you want, and only run into trouble if you actually incorporate their code into your product. Because this is something you couldn't do with non-open source software anyway, as you never see the code, the percieved risk isn't a factor for doing things the way you're used to.
Anti-open-source people have been throwing a lot of FUD around lately. The people you are trying to pitch this policy have heard some of it, and probably don't spend lots of time on Slashdot or Groklaw finding out the whole story. Part of your role is going to be to dispel all this FUD about the GPL, IP issues, and such.
Why make another C# compiler when Microsoft already has one? That's a pretty silly argument. I wonder what Neil thinks of the redundancy among C++ compilers: Borland, Watcom, Intel, CenterLine, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, GCC/G++... More choice is a good thing, people can pick the one that best suits their needs.
Also, whether Microsoft's C# compiler really adheres to an open standard or is eeeeeeeevil closed proprietary software is purely an academic question unless someone makes a non-Microsoft version. Then any parts of the original implementation that are mysterious black boxes, encumbered by patents, or otherwise not really so open become apparent.
Hey, the RIAA says an MP3 is worth $15,000. Here, you can get an audio file for only $1899, AND they throw in a laptop with a pretty paint job! What more could you possibly ask for?
Just to elaborate on what RzUpAnmsCwrds said a bit... For modern Intel based laptops, there are basically three levels of of power hunger.
Lower price laptops use the same CPUs (P4 or Celeron) as desktop PCs. These are great (aside from heat) if you keep them plugged in, but you may only get an hour or two of battery time.
Then there are the variants that are modified for lower power consumption, P4M / Mobile P4. These turn off some power wasting CPU features and run more power efficiently than desktop chips. These cost a little more but should keep you above two hours on battery life.
Finally, there is the Pentium-M, better known as Centrino as it is called when bundled with Intel's own chipset and wireless adapter. This is a different architecture, built with low power in mind. Intel basically started with a P3, which were less of a power hog than the P4, and added features to give it lots of processing capacity without making it need so much energy. The Pentium-M runs at a much lower clock rate than the P4, but executes more instructions per clock to compensate, and comes with a large cache. It's a really clever architecture, and you can get at least 4 hours of battery life, 7 if you use a secondary battery.
I'm not really sure how AMD and Transmeta stack up. Transmeta seems like they are aiming at the market segment that only needs a few hundred MHz instead of a full-blown desktop equivalent, willing to give up speed for low power use. The Pentium-M can be used in "ultra low power" configurations like this, but is most commonly seen in laptops that give a few hours of battery life while keeping performance on par with a desktop.
I prefer to press "0" at the automated phone tree, and save the outbursts of profanity for the morons who tell me they can't help me with my billing problem.
The newer technologies are nice in that they are thin and all, which is especially good for monitors. But, they do still have their drawbacks. LCDs don't display black as well as a CRT, making watching movies with dimly lit scenes annoying. LCDs have a very clear picture, but lose some of that sharpness if not run at native resolution or another that divides evenly into it (interpolating from one resoution to another causes slight bluriness or jaggedness of the pixels). Also, I have doubts as to whether the time between failures on LCD backlights is as good as CRT picture tubes.
Plasma is kinda neat, but has a reputation for burn-in and slowly losing brightness over time. If I was to buy a multi-thousand dollar TV, I'd want it to work for 8-10 years until the next big thing comes along.
For now, I'm still a CRT user. 35" Sony Trinitron for TV watching, 21" ViewSonic professional series for the PC. Keeping an eye on the new technologies but they're not quite "there" yet as far as I'm concerned.
In the U.S., there is something of a geek subculture which Slashdot in particular caters to. Obviously, not all programmers are true geeks at heart, but among the people in America who are really fascinated by computers, you have a greatly disproportionate number who are into science fiction, RPGs/LARPs, Lord of the Rings, Legos, Anime, etc.
Does this apply in India as well? Would, say, a Unix systems programmer there typically have such things as interests? If not, are there analogous hobbies that distinguish the Indian geek from everyone else?
and are playing TV spots about how satellite TV signals can be lost when it rains, when the wind blows
Cable companies like to use this as a marketing point, and there is some truth to it. As the worst part of a heavy storm blows through, you may lose satellite reception for a half hour or so. But it's not exclusively a satellite problem.
I have DirecTV and also basic cable for local channels and a cable modem. One night during a particularly nasty storm, I was trying to watch cable, and all the channels had a "searching for satellite signal" screen. Cable companies use satellite dishes within their infrastructure too, they're just big 6 foot ones instead of 18" dishes for the end user. Harder for a storm to knock out, but it can happen.
So, while I can certainly appreciate portable mass storage, what was the benefit of using an iPod instead of a regular USB or FireWire drive? It was plugged into a computer so the battery isn't a factor, he was using it for movies so it wasn't the MP3/AAC playback. Basically he paid twice as much for half the storage (compared to a 2.5" 80GB USB drive), but gets a lot of points from the Apple crowd for using one of their products.
As for the thing about him being chased around afraid robbers would get his draft copy of the movie, it sounds like the real story here is not the technology he used, but the technology he didn't use: encryption.
I was disappointed with the SCO mention too. It was just about how they were making enemies in the Linux community by suing IBM. No mention at all of sending extortion letters to end users of someone else's product, demanding payment for IP they have never presented any evidence that they own. I would think that would qualify them for a much higher spot.
Trademark registrations for generic terms are allowed, IF the term does not already have meaning in the industry you are doing business in. Think of the chaos otherwise, should I be allowed to name my video entertainment product "Television" (TM) and sue anyone else who uses "my" term to refer to their products? "Windows" was hardly a unique term in the software industry when Microsoft started using it. While people do, as you point out, associate it with Microsoft, the word will always have meaning in this domain completely independent of Microsoft, and granting the company sole rights to the word while ignoring its pre-existing meaning within the same field is absurd.
This isn't to say that Pixer will strike out and target adult audiences with violent-anime-esque features from now on, or anything, but Pixar is going to have a lot of room to flex its creative muscles, and basically do whatever it wants.
I'm excited about this prospect too. Having seen so many Disney movies, I've come to set my expectations for animated films by what they would make, but that standard can also be limiting. I remember when Shrek came out, there were probably a dozen points in the movie when I thought, "Disney would never have let them do that if they had been making this, but it was really funny!". The result was a much more multifaceted piece that had humor that could be appreciated on many levels, and not Disney style kid stuff. Hopefully now Pixar will get this kind of free reign too... could be the start of a really nice period for animated movies.
The way trademark law is supposed to work (in the U.S., no idea about the Netherlands) is that common words can be trademarked in a particular industry, as long as they had no prior meaning within that industry. Thus, a computer company calling itself "Apple" was fine because before that computers and apples had nothing to do with one another, so the association is a unique thing that company came up with.
In Windows' case, "windows" was already a term in the software industry for a particular GUI element before Microsoft ever came up with their product, and a trademark never should have been granted. However, since they have built a multibillion dollar business around that trademark, spend a lot of that money on lawyers and still more on convincing people that "windows" is something Microsoft actually invented, it is unlikely that Microsoft's illegal trademark grant will ever be corrected.
"Jackson, in my opinion, commits another Major Mistake in his handling of the Faramir storyline."
So the article writer's big three complaints are too much Arwen, no scouring of the Shire, and the Faramir storyline. In all I'd say Jackson did pretty well if that's the worst anyone can come up with.
"Building up (and distorting) Arwen's role was one of Jackson's Three Major Mistakes, in my opinion."
"I truly think that the beefing up of Arwen's role was the major mistake of Jackson's adaptation. Omission of the Scouring of the Shire is a close second."
Are there two "major mistakes", or was it three? And if so, what's the third one? Could this be a major mistake with the article's enumeration of major mistakes?
As a software engineer at Johnson Space Center, I just wanted to offer some clarification on this. If you want to be a literal rocket scientist or other NASA researcher, yes you would need a Ph.D. For jobs like software development, system administration, etc. you would be working for one of the contactors and typically have a BS degree. A Masters or Ph.D. would be a nice plus but most people in these positions do not have one. During the IT boom I knew someone who had no degree at all who was doing Java work for the Astronaut Office but this would be unlikely in the current climate. Also the contractors (don't know about NASA itself) do have intern positions for people still in school which would be a great way to get your foot in the door and build on the job experience.
Most positions do not require a security clearance. Several years ago that was the case, but now a security clearance would only be needed by someone working on projects that actually need one, such as Defense Department payloads. You do however need to pass an FBI background check for any type of space program job (to get access to NASA facilities) so hopefully for you that will not be a problem. This involves criminal history, foreign travel, work and residence history for the past several years, and so on.
Thank you for clarifying that... I suspected something like that was going on, as the numbers seemed far too high. But, even taking them at face value, it becomes apparent that whoever came up with the statistics was slanting their presentation to fit some agenda (probably "Women are in danger! Send us lots of money and we will tell you how to protect yourself!")
Apparently Sen. Lieberman is not at all bothered by the fact that you can beat up and kill male characters in the game too.
This reminds me of something I saw earlier today. I was in a conference room and saw leftover presentation materials from an earlier meeting, on the topic of crime prevention. The statistics included such facts as "82% of society will be victims of violent crime in their lifetime" and "3 out of 4 women will be victims of violent crime in their lifetime".
This irritated me. If the percentage for women is 75% but the overall is 82, then for men it must be nearly 90%. But of course the presentation did not say anything about this; 3 out of 4 women being victims of crime sounds much worse than 9 out of 10 men.
Why can't a society value all human life, instead of taking this attitude as Lieberman has that crime against women is bad, but crime against men would be fine?
Late 1996 or so, I found a FTP site with some songs from Faith Hill's then-most-recent "It Matters to Me" album. Unfortunately, the 486 I was still using couldn't seem to decode MP3's fast enough to play them back without skipping. I uncompressed the songs to WAVs, but my hard drive wasn't much more uber than my CPU, so I recorded the stuff onto a audiocasette tape to listen to. I've since bought that CD as well as the three follow-ups, proving early on that the RIAA are idiots and downloads lead to sales instead of hurting them.
Good plan. You should always test your spacecraft with chimps before flying humans in it. Soon Darl can join the ranks of his pioneering kinfolk, Ham and Enos...
The problem I see with this is that trademarks give a company the exclusive right to use a name, within a particular industry. When it comes to pr0n, the word "Playboy" belongs to these guys, but in an unrelated domain, they wouldn't. You could start up the Playboy linoleum manufacturing corporation and have no problems as long as you didn't try to use the bunny logo or otherwise create confusion that you were otherwise related to the other company with that name.
For search engines, this requires a subjective call to be made as to which queries trigger the trademark-protected usage of a company's mark and which don't... "computer apple" and "apple ipod" probably relate to the trademarked usage of the word, but "apple granny smith", "apple pie recipe", and "apple orange banana pear" don't. An "apple corps music" query might even refer to someone else's trademark. For cases in between it becomes more and more of a subjective judgement call, which computers aren't so good at anyway, and if you throw threats of lawsuits into the mix, the situation quickly turns into a real mess.
True, Tolkien is dead, which begs the question of how long someone has to be dead before any random person can put up a Web site without consent of their officially designated "estate". Could I have a domain name about, say, Jules Verne? George Washington? Could some dork who who happens to be a descendant of Emperor Nero of Rome sue the pants off of Nero Burning Rom, or is the power of the estate to throw the deceased weight around somehow tied to copyrights? And with copyrights now effectively perpetual (thank you Disney), in the future will we in fact see "estates" of centuries-dead historical figures living off their fortuitous ancestry in a biziarre reinvention of the aristocracy?
Credit reports? Yes, I'll admit it, I got my car payment in the mail late last February. Is that really a sign that I'm part of an Al-Qaeda hijacking conspiracy?
Slashdot Mirror
I work at Johnson Space Center, developing software to assist in Shuttle and ISS mission planning. As interesting as the idea of opening up the source for NASA software may sound, if other programming projects are anything like the stuff I've been working on, you probably wouldn't want it.
Things like hardware cycles and adoption of new technologies tend to be be the norm, so you see things like mid-90's AIX workstations, X/Motif code, Ada, and Fortran that you thought had long since died. My group has recently been able to rewrite some of the more ancient stuff in Java, and gotten the powers that be to approve of switching the servers to Linux.
The applications themselves, that I've worked with anyway, are probably not of a lot of interest to most people either. Some examples:
Also, keep in mind that NASA contractors do competitive bids every couple of years to keep their work, and there is turf-guarding and infighting. If you are the only company that knows how software Foo works, that gives you a big advantage at getting the contract for it again next time. Sad, but the way business works, and until software decisions are made solely based on technical considerations, being the most skilled and professional organization won't always assure you of getting the job.
Between the FUD that Microsoft and SCO have been throwing about, most non-technical people will have a very confused view about things like the GPL and open source IP issues. You have to be prepared to address these in simple, easy to understand terms and examples.
For instance, a lot of people get scared by the 'viral' GPL FUD, and think using open source products means they have to release all their own IP crown jewels to the public. You might counter this by pointing out that you can write closed source software with open source tools all you want, and only run into trouble if you actually incorporate their code into your product. Because this is something you couldn't do with non-open source software anyway, as you never see the code, the percieved risk isn't a factor for doing things the way you're used to.
Anti-open-source people have been throwing a lot of FUD around lately. The people you are trying to pitch this policy have heard some of it, and probably don't spend lots of time on Slashdot or Groklaw finding out the whole story. Part of your role is going to be to dispel all this FUD about the GPL, IP issues, and such.
Why make another C# compiler when Microsoft already has one? That's a pretty silly argument. I wonder what Neil thinks of the redundancy among C++ compilers: Borland, Watcom, Intel, CenterLine, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, GCC/G++... More choice is a good thing, people can pick the one that best suits their needs.
Also, whether Microsoft's C# compiler really adheres to an open standard or is eeeeeeeevil closed proprietary software is purely an academic question unless someone makes a non-Microsoft version. Then any parts of the original implementation that are mysterious black boxes, encumbered by patents, or otherwise not really so open become apparent.
1. SCO UNIX(R) is a Proven, Stable and Reliable Platform
Well, it worked when we bought it, and we're too busy suing people to update anything.
2. SCO UNIX(R) is backed by a single, experienced vendor
Vendor lock in, you know you want it!
3. SCO UNIX(R) has a Committed, Well-Defined Roadmap
Updates will only come when and if we feel like it.
4. SCO UNIX(R) is Secure
With market share like ours, who would bother to crack this platform?
5. SCO UNIX(R) is Legally Unencumbered
We're the one company you know SCO won't be suing.
Hey, the RIAA says an MP3 is worth $15,000. Here, you can get an audio file for only $1899, AND they throw in a laptop with a pretty paint job! What more could you possibly ask for?
Just to elaborate on what RzUpAnmsCwrds said a bit... For modern Intel based laptops, there are basically three levels of of power hunger.
Lower price laptops use the same CPUs (P4 or Celeron) as desktop PCs. These are great (aside from heat) if you keep them plugged in, but you may only get an hour or two of battery time.
Then there are the variants that are modified for lower power consumption, P4M / Mobile P4. These turn off some power wasting CPU features and run more power efficiently than desktop chips. These cost a little more but should keep you above two hours on battery life.
Finally, there is the Pentium-M, better known as Centrino as it is called when bundled with Intel's own chipset and wireless adapter. This is a different architecture, built with low power in mind. Intel basically started with a P3, which were less of a power hog than the P4, and added features to give it lots of processing capacity without making it need so much energy. The Pentium-M runs at a much lower clock rate than the P4, but executes more instructions per clock to compensate, and comes with a large cache. It's a really clever architecture, and you can get at least 4 hours of battery life, 7 if you use a secondary battery.
I'm not really sure how AMD and Transmeta stack up. Transmeta seems like they are aiming at the market segment that only needs a few hundred MHz instead of a full-blown desktop equivalent, willing to give up speed for low power use. The Pentium-M can be used in "ultra low power" configurations like this, but is most commonly seen in laptops that give a few hours of battery life while keeping performance on par with a desktop.
I prefer to press "0" at the automated phone tree, and save the outbursts of profanity for the morons who tell me they can't help me with my billing problem.
The newer technologies are nice in that they are thin and all, which is especially good for monitors. But, they do still have their drawbacks. LCDs don't display black as well as a CRT, making watching movies with dimly lit scenes annoying. LCDs have a very clear picture, but lose some of that sharpness if not run at native resolution or another that divides evenly into it (interpolating from one resoution to another causes slight bluriness or jaggedness of the pixels). Also, I have doubts as to whether the time between failures on LCD backlights is as good as CRT picture tubes.
Plasma is kinda neat, but has a reputation for burn-in and slowly losing brightness over time. If I was to buy a multi-thousand dollar TV, I'd want it to work for 8-10 years until the next big thing comes along.
For now, I'm still a CRT user. 35" Sony Trinitron for TV watching, 21" ViewSonic professional series for the PC. Keeping an eye on the new technologies but they're not quite "there" yet as far as I'm concerned.
In the U.S., there is something of a geek subculture which Slashdot in particular caters to. Obviously, not all programmers are true geeks at heart, but among the people in America who are really fascinated by computers, you have a greatly disproportionate number who are into science fiction, RPGs/LARPs, Lord of the Rings, Legos, Anime, etc.
Does this apply in India as well? Would, say, a Unix systems programmer there typically have such things as interests? If not, are there analogous hobbies that distinguish the Indian geek from everyone else?
and are playing TV spots about how satellite TV signals can be lost when it rains, when the wind blows
Cable companies like to use this as a marketing point, and there is some truth to it. As the worst part of a heavy storm blows through, you may lose satellite reception for a half hour or so. But it's not exclusively a satellite problem.
I have DirecTV and also basic cable for local channels and a cable modem. One night during a particularly nasty storm, I was trying to watch cable, and all the channels had a "searching for satellite signal" screen. Cable companies use satellite dishes within their infrastructure too, they're just big 6 foot ones instead of 18" dishes for the end user. Harder for a storm to knock out, but it can happen.
So, while I can certainly appreciate portable mass storage, what was the benefit of using an iPod instead of a regular USB or FireWire drive? It was plugged into a computer so the battery isn't a factor, he was using it for movies so it wasn't the MP3/AAC playback. Basically he paid twice as much for half the storage (compared to a 2.5" 80GB USB drive), but gets a lot of points from the Apple crowd for using one of their products.
As for the thing about him being chased around afraid robbers would get his draft copy of the movie, it sounds like the real story here is not the technology he used, but the technology he didn't use: encryption.
I was disappointed with the SCO mention too. It was just about how they were making enemies in the Linux community by suing IBM. No mention at all of sending extortion letters to end users of someone else's product, demanding payment for IP they have never presented any evidence that they own. I would think that would qualify them for a much higher spot.
Trademark registrations for generic terms are allowed, IF the term does not already have meaning in the industry you are doing business in. Think of the chaos otherwise, should I be allowed to name my video entertainment product "Television" (TM) and sue anyone else who uses "my" term to refer to their products? "Windows" was hardly a unique term in the software industry when Microsoft started using it. While people do, as you point out, associate it with Microsoft, the word will always have meaning in this domain completely independent of Microsoft, and granting the company sole rights to the word while ignoring its pre-existing meaning within the same field is absurd.
This isn't to say that Pixer will strike out and target adult audiences with violent-anime-esque features from now on, or anything, but Pixar is going to have a lot of room to flex its creative muscles, and basically do whatever it wants.
I'm excited about this prospect too. Having seen so many Disney movies, I've come to set my expectations for animated films by what they would make, but that standard can also be limiting. I remember when Shrek came out, there were probably a dozen points in the movie when I thought, "Disney would never have let them do that if they had been making this, but it was really funny!". The result was a much more multifaceted piece that had humor that could be appreciated on many levels, and not Disney style kid stuff. Hopefully now Pixar will get this kind of free reign too... could be the start of a really nice period for animated movies.
The way trademark law is supposed to work (in the U.S., no idea about the Netherlands) is that common words can be trademarked in a particular industry, as long as they had no prior meaning within that industry. Thus, a computer company calling itself "Apple" was fine because before that computers and apples had nothing to do with one another, so the association is a unique thing that company came up with.
In Windows' case, "windows" was already a term in the software industry for a particular GUI element before Microsoft ever came up with their product, and a trademark never should have been granted. However, since they have built a multibillion dollar business around that trademark, spend a lot of that money on lawyers and still more on convincing people that "windows" is something Microsoft actually invented, it is unlikely that Microsoft's illegal trademark grant will ever be corrected.
I R some more of TFA
"Jackson, in my opinion, commits another Major Mistake in his handling of the Faramir storyline."
So the article writer's big three complaints are too much Arwen, no scouring of the Shire, and the Faramir storyline. In all I'd say Jackson did pretty well if that's the worst anyone can come up with.
From the article:
"Building up (and distorting) Arwen's role was one of Jackson's Three Major Mistakes, in my opinion."
"I truly think that the beefing up of Arwen's role was the major mistake of Jackson's adaptation. Omission of the Scouring of the Shire is a close second."
Are there two "major mistakes", or was it three? And if so, what's the third one? Could this be a major mistake with the article's enumeration of major mistakes?
As a software engineer at Johnson Space Center, I just wanted to offer some clarification on this. If you want to be a literal rocket scientist or other NASA researcher, yes you would need a Ph.D. For jobs like software development, system administration, etc. you would be working for one of the contactors and typically have a BS degree. A Masters or Ph.D. would be a nice plus but most people in these positions do not have one. During the IT boom I knew someone who had no degree at all who was doing Java work for the Astronaut Office but this would be unlikely in the current climate. Also the contractors (don't know about NASA itself) do have intern positions for people still in school which would be a great way to get your foot in the door and build on the job experience.
Most positions do not require a security clearance. Several years ago that was the case, but now a security clearance would only be needed by someone working on projects that actually need one, such as Defense Department payloads. You do however need to pass an FBI background check for any type of space program job (to get access to NASA facilities) so hopefully for you that will not be a problem. This involves criminal history, foreign travel, work and residence history for the past several years, and so on.
Thank you for clarifying that... I suspected something like that was going on, as the numbers seemed far too high. But, even taking them at face value, it becomes apparent that whoever came up with the statistics was slanting their presentation to fit some agenda (probably "Women are in danger! Send us lots of money and we will tell you how to protect yourself!")
Apparently Sen. Lieberman is not at all bothered by the fact that you can beat up and kill male characters in the game too.
This reminds me of something I saw earlier today. I was in a conference room and saw leftover presentation materials from an earlier meeting, on the topic of crime prevention. The statistics included such facts as "82% of society will be victims of violent crime in their lifetime" and "3 out of 4 women will be victims of violent crime in their lifetime".
This irritated me. If the percentage for women is 75% but the overall is 82, then for men it must be nearly 90%. But of course the presentation did not say anything about this; 3 out of 4 women being victims of crime sounds much worse than 9 out of 10 men.
Why can't a society value all human life, instead of taking this attitude as Lieberman has that crime against women is bad, but crime against men would be fine?
Late 1996 or so, I found a FTP site with some songs from Faith Hill's then-most-recent "It Matters to Me" album. Unfortunately, the 486 I was still using couldn't seem to decode MP3's fast enough to play them back without skipping. I uncompressed the songs to WAVs, but my hard drive wasn't much more uber than my CPU, so I recorded the stuff onto a audiocasette tape to listen to. I've since bought that CD as well as the three follow-ups, proving early on that the RIAA are idiots and downloads lead to sales instead of hurting them.
Good plan. You should always test your spacecraft with chimps before flying humans in it. Soon Darl can join the ranks of his pioneering kinfolk, Ham and Enos...
The problem I see with this is that trademarks give a company the exclusive right to use a name, within a particular industry. When it comes to pr0n, the word "Playboy" belongs to these guys, but in an unrelated domain, they wouldn't. You could start up the Playboy linoleum manufacturing corporation and have no problems as long as you didn't try to use the bunny logo or otherwise create confusion that you were otherwise related to the other company with that name.
For search engines, this requires a subjective call to be made as to which queries trigger the trademark-protected usage of a company's mark and which don't... "computer apple" and "apple ipod" probably relate to the trademarked usage of the word, but "apple granny smith", "apple pie recipe", and "apple orange banana pear" don't. An "apple corps music" query might even refer to someone else's trademark. For cases in between it becomes more and more of a subjective judgement call, which computers aren't so good at anyway, and if you throw threats of lawsuits into the mix, the situation quickly turns into a real mess.
True, Tolkien is dead, which begs the question of how long someone has to be dead before any random person can put up a Web site without consent of their officially designated "estate". Could I have a domain name about, say, Jules Verne? George Washington? Could some dork who who happens to be a descendant of Emperor Nero of Rome sue the pants off of Nero Burning Rom, or is the power of the estate to throw the deceased weight around somehow tied to copyrights? And with copyrights now effectively perpetual (thank you Disney), in the future will we in fact see "estates" of centuries-dead historical figures living off their fortuitous ancestry in a biziarre reinvention of the aristocracy?
Credit reports? Yes, I'll admit it, I got my car payment in the mail late last February. Is that really a sign that I'm part of an Al-Qaeda hijacking conspiracy?