It's arrogant if he means that Linux users have trouble absorbing what normal people can absorb, but what if all he means is "I'll try to phrase my arguement using points that linux users already know from their experience with linux" (As opposed to "I'm talking to people who are already intimately familiar with both OS's", or "I'll try to explain this to people who have/don't have an EE degree, or specifically to people who moved to Linux from Windows without trying BSD along the way", or some other alternative)?
Mycrosoft's use of BSD code is both legal, and ethical, in that it is a voluntary action, done with the informed consent of both the parties involved.
However, that alternatives exist at all is not a test for Monopoly. If it were, there could never be a true monopoly, ever. A monopoly exists wherever those alternatives face constraints other than those of the market in surviving, gaining a share, or making a profit. Now you know why "everyone, even the court system", disagrees with you. It's legal to have a widely used product, all the way to 100% share. It's not legal to engage in what the court calls anti- competitive practices to protect or augment that share.
Refusing to sell to hardware vendors unless they do not enter into other contracts with your competitors, for example. Given that the hardware vendors are publicly traded companies, they cannot legally refuse to take such a deal, as the short term penalties to their own stock would be a violation of existing laws protecting shareholders. Ergo, a monopoly exists, at least so long as the shareholder protection law exists.
Maybe in a world where there were not a lot of other laws, monopoly would be as impossible as you seem to think it is. So, let's get rid of the Sherman anti-trust law, RIGHT AFTER we repeal all the other laws that made it vitally necessary. Better yet, let's figure out how to change these laws, a few at a time and with the overall goal of moving smoothly from Mercantilism to a true free amrket.
You said a lot of reasonably good stuff, but what's this "not in a scripting language" bit doing in there? Wouldn't it be better to argue that they haven't personally produced any code worth infringing on? You can do things in a scripting language that it becomes worth worrying about their infringment, and you can write your own C++, even quite useful C++, but produce nothing anyone else want's to infringe on.
Wouldn't it be good to hear more from people who have actually produced something with demonstratable worth, even if it's yet another MP3 player, or just a program for one particular type of business that sells replacement flatware patterns for incomplete sets, and see which liscence they chose and what their thinking is?
1. You can't remind people who are not thinking for themselves to start without offending some who already are. 2. You can't address a large group without talking to some who aren't thinking for themselves. So, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Let's ask him if he's stopped beating his wife next.
There are things that have to be learned in order. Step 5 may just make no sense unless you have thorougly mastered the others, and plenty of smart people may know steps 1, 2, and 4 well, but not yet have assimilated step 3. People can call them stupid, but who's smarter, a person who can learn step 5 with training, or a person who immediately figures out step 5 on their own when you help them fill in a few gaps in their knowledge of step 3?
The educational system, most places, produces a lot of little gaps. People who don't really know whether infinity should be counted as a number or not won't see why Newton's "fluxions" version of the fundamental theorem makes people who really, deeply understand "lower" math often the ones who have the most trouble with a first year calculus course.
You can program for years without having to understand that there can be no irrational numbers inside a machine that has a cap on bits precision, but Intel still lost millions in sales once by not taking this into account.
People have talked about the idiocy of large groups, of mobs and riots, but its only in the last few years that scientists ahve shown that less than a quarter of people in a mob are actively looting and fighting, and usually more than half are interested first in leaving the scene as quickly as appears safe. Some of these misjudge just how far they need to move to get to safety, or how risky it is to proceed in a given direction, and that's one of the things that keeps a riot going, but that's also more normal than stupid.
It's not just deeply religious people, or computer illiterate people, or people who leap quickly to stupid assumptions that make this logo a problem. First, the name isn't clear or catchy enough to be widely recognized, so the devil image becomes all most people have to go on. Imagine running across the person wearing a Duke Blue Devils sweatshirt, but the First word is "Forxgnarb", you've never heard the term before, there's no thing or place named that anywhere nearby, and when you ask what the blue devil stands for, the first things you hear are all about vaguely political issues, as seen by some small minority organization. How stupid is it really, to jump to the conclusion the sweatshirt wearer is in some cult?
NetBSD isn't going to get brand recognition from the word, just like Adidas didn't build brand recognition just on the word. It sounds too odd for that. Like Adidas, it's competing against words that have more relevance to the area (Microsoft sounded like computer stuff way back when it started, with words like software already paving the way for recognition - Nike is the greek goddess of victory, as most Olympic atheletes know).
If anything, the cuteness of the logo works against it more than an association with evil. It's a Warner Bros toon style devil. That's already saying "fine for home users, but would you trust a business to it?".
The economic system has to think that not staying in the same one basket with the rest of the eggs is worth something. Unfortunately the way cost benefit analysis is usually done, you can't prove that the long term survival of the human race is worth investing in. It is probably easier to change the way we do economics than to live through a near species killer and convince the survivors after the fact, and it relies less on luck. Hope that we can get the economists on our side instead of waiting for ebolapox-2 to evolve.
I'm still mot following this. It only takes 1 person to actually shoot anyone. It may take a lot of others to put him into the location to do it, but the topic wasn't armies, it was the number of degrees of seperation between two individuals. Or are you assuming that I'm claiming Sergeant Y is all picked out, and Bush knows who he is right now? People often don't know who the other people in a path are, and have no idea how they may be connected - that doesn't mean the connections aren't there.
By the way, "will get to" is future tense, so obviously I'm speculating on a possibility there. I also gave a more serious answer in the present tense, that if one person working for a current Afghan politico is a double agent for Al-Quida there could be a path with six or fewer links right now. Something president Bush might say really could get passed on to OBL, even something he intended to only go as far as an ambassador or federal agency head. I note you didn't respond to that more serious point.
You keep accusing me of being nasty and fantasizing, without yet explaining how. You seem to think we can't shoot people, because in the bronze age, we only have spears andd swords or something. You have yet to say anything that makes coherent sense. Huummm, OK TROLL, you got me!
Emphasize all you want. "By line of code" can still be aggregate reporting if multiple lines are all part of the same tort. You're reading into the requirement more than it actually says. Further, doing it that way could involve substantial additional legal costs. If the judge insists on SCO writing:
Line 57 - developer bubba - under standard non-disclosure agreement - April 14 1996 Line 58 - developer bubba - under standard non-disclosure agreement - April 14 1996 Line 59 - developer bubba - under standard non-disclosure agreement - April 14 1996...
instead of "Line 57 through 103 - all by developer Bubba, who was under a NDA dated April 14 1996 (Date of hire)", that's an arbitrary requirement unrelated to the interests of justice. Specificity doesn't mean "write it out line by line", it means specify the lines.
Insisting on SCO incurring additional costs to say what is clearly the same thing in fewer words would in fact give them an excellent grounds for appeal on judicial misconduct, so not only do I doubt the judge did that, we had all better hope that he didn't.
If the judge orders you to submit the document s on clay tablets in cuneiform, you don't submit the documents on clay tablets, you immediately appeal to a higher court (requesting a competency hearing for the judge). Alternately, you comply, and pass the additional costs back to the government.
For the first few years of a permanent base, we'll probably want 100%+ coverage as fast as we can get it. That can be accomplished with either a few satellites (probably more like 4 or 5 than 2 because luna-synchronous orbit isn't real stable with the moon's 2 week day, and 1/6th G and a bigger planet nearby), or a line of relay horns on lunar mountain tops. One of the most reliable ways might be rather old fashioned, a small communications shack on the earth facing side, possibly manned by 3 or so people even if the far side base has 50. Because libration means that about 59% of the moon's surface actually points towards the earth sometimes, running cable is probably not workable unless the locations are both near the same pole (as near the lunar equator, the cable might have to stretch across 4 1/2% of the moon's circumference or so. Ergo, the moon will either be satellite or wireless.
What he's saying is, by the time it gets to somewhere near Jupiter's orbit, the Sun's gravity will have slowed it to a stop, and it will eventually fall back into the inner system (probably a very narrow eliptical orbit, possibly one that grazes the sun). If Jupiter is near enough the point in its orbit where you have aimed the mass, Jupiter's massive gravity will attract it past the equilibrium point and it will end up falling towards Jupiter.
With a bit more nudge, you can do the same with Pluto. Since Pluto has much less gravity, the equilibrium point is almost all the way there. (If I recall correctly, Jupiter's is about 97% of the way out, and Pluto's must be 99.some fraction % of there. But that's just a back of the envelope calculation).
We're probably going to want a base on the far side. Not looking towards the earth will be more useful for conventional astronomy, and having the mass of the moon between a dish and earth will be better for radio telescopy. But, such a base will also not have direct communication with Earth. This starts sounding like a minimum of 2 bases will be needed.
There was an attempt in the 50's to design a nuclear powered bomber. No fuel required, just heat the air as a working fluid, and the thing could stay up for 8 weeks or so. Shielding for crew was prohibitive on accout of total weight. Some provisional designs were considered that would be entirely remote controlled, but in the 50s, THAT looked unreliable (Remotely flying a plane over US to Russia distances before anyone thought of a GPS type system, and making a robot craft that wasn't vulnerable to Soviet couter electronic measures, were just two of the objections), so the project was scrapped.
I've been waiting for someone to point this out. Why have people assumed that to comply with the judge's order, SCO has to list every line individually? Isn't it possible SCO has listed them as "Lines 43 through 3,427 and 5,614 through 30,010 of foo.bar"? Or maybe "The line starting with "blah" through the line ending in "blah, blah"?
Some/. readers seem to have invested so much in the "SCO is just crazy" position that they are looking for ways to interpret every action that will support that position.
It's like poker. If you're holding a full house and nobody else has anything, everything usually gets resolved quickly and you don't win a lot. If you're showing 3/5s of a straight and one of the other players has two Kings up, that's when the bidding and the bluffing go on and on and someone eventually loses a lot of money. Why is it so unlikely that SCO thought they had something at the start of the hand?
I think you're right in your final conclusion, but some of the steps you took are sort of iffy. 1. Microsoft is interested in selling music, so blocking non-liscenced downloads may look as good to them as it does to the RIAA. They may or may not have the same take as the RIAA does on whether a bit of free sampling hurts sales, but that suggests that they are at best neutral or less agressive about it, just as they haven't agressivly targeted small scale software pirates running individual copies of windows. That means their priorities aren't really that different, but yes their history suggests they may be just different enough. 2. Microsoft has had some sort of sweetheart arrangements with some RIAA/MPAA members, such as Time Warner and Disney, for a long time. Remember how Win 95/IE 4 had desktop links enabled for Disney, et al, by default? Us mere mortals don't really know just what favors MS and various RIAA types owe each other, so we're equally unsure how much effect it will have. 3. Microsoft wants to plug their DRM initiative. So long as that looks like a money maker, catching lots of illicit downloading might be a tool to make Paladium look more effective. Would it be worth the risk of making inflated claims for it and getting caught? I don't have even a good guess on that last question.
So long as AT&T is in the equation, I'd expect MS to fall somewhere in the middle, trying to out-compete both the others by persuing two conflicting approaches at once. I don't think that will let MS grab market share, and judging by this article, they don't either. So there will stay some real competition for a time.
(I'm still not a lawyer - I'm not a jelly donut either).
People commonly point out that the Sherman act doesn't really define Monopoly "strictly" (as you put it). However, being a monopoly isn't what the Sherman Act makes illegal. It makes it illegal for a monopoly to do certain things, such as taking certain steps to stay a monopoly, not to merely exist. The point then becomes, "Could a non-monopoly business succeed by thking those very same steps?" If the actions would only work if monopoly existed as a precodition, and the actions worked, then monopoly is inferred. Yes, that has a touch of circular reasoning about it. However, the definitions of what actions the monopoly is taking are pretty strictly defined, even if monopoly itself is less so.
It's a lot like obsecenity law. The court may have to claim they know waht obscenity is when they see it, but in practice, the minimal conditions that have to be met before it can even be considered are spelled out pretty clearly, which helps keep the law from being abused.
Microsoft doesn't deserve to be harrassed. They deserve to have to comply with the law. They deserve it if customers choose to take their business elsewhere. Harassment is something else -it's called taking the law into your own hands. Robertson doesn't have any special right to take the law into his own hands. His contributions to OSS projects don't give him a special right to cross the line into taking the law into his own hands. He is not an agent of the court, and it is not his job to help ensure that Microsoft pays the biggest penalties possible under law, even if many customers don't choose to file.
Informing customers of the existence of the class action case, assisting them by taking their data and submitting it to the legal system, these would normally be within his rights, or yours or mine.
Urging customers to join, not to get back what the court has ruled they may be entitled to, but to stick it to Microsoft for others, is not within his rights. None of those Ca. citizens should join merely to help penalize Microsoft more. I think my state made a mistake in settling with Microsoft in the way it did, but the citizens of California are not supposed to be trying to second guess my state government by sueing on behalf of people such as me, as well as themselves. I'll take my state's actions up with the people I elected, thank you.
What "army of one fantasy" are you talking about? What makes it nasty? I've looked back over what I wrote, and you're whole comment makes about as much sense as a nitrocellulose ping pong ball on a flaming table.
Let me get this straight, you want to talk links to the president rather than the more general case, and you want to exclude links that go through government offices. Why not ask me to find a link between you and the surgeon who performed the first heart transplant, but exclude all people who ever practiced medicine or have relatives in South Africa?
You - Your high school principal - Your school superintendant - State secretary of education - FSE - president. Ooops, you're right, that's government officials. You - Your supervisor at work - 1 layer of upper management - the CEO - local republican party chairman - state chair - W. There, technically none of those intermediate steps are officials - you can't count party membership as being in the government. Still, there's probably someone on the white house staff that is actually interposed there answering the phone, so maybe you're right.
Ok, so we've got a worker on an assembly line. He's somehow never met a connected person. He didn't attend high school, let alone graduate. He's never had medical care from a really skilled practicioner. (My childhood allergy specialist was also a good surgeon, who was once on a team that treated W's dad - that might be a 2, but is probably a 3 or maybe even a 4.). He rents, but not from a landlord with connections. (I once rented from a woman who had photos of herself at every demo fundraiser for the last 20 years, handing 10,000$+ checks to various - I'f she'd only have been a Republican, she'd put me at 4 or 3 all by herself). Your guy doesn't attend church, or not one with much in the way of professional requirements for their clergy. (One former priest I knew was an ex Navy vice admiral taking a second job after retirement - his chain is probably another 3, and so any person attending a church of my faith in my state, or the ones bordering it has a chain of 4 or at most 5 right there). Your hypothetical person doesn't know any criminals curently serving time, or he's at 5, or likely a 4 if he knows their lawyer. He's a working stiff, but not poor enough, or too proud, to get state or federal assistance, or he's a 5 again).
I've done a few blue collar jobs and such in my time. I got to know the priest in my example by building bookshelves for him. I drove a fork-lift for a couple of years, and had two paths that were 5 or 4 that I know of, during that time. (I was a Spc 4, driving for a light Col. in the national guard, one weekend a month, and one of my cousins had just become an FBI agent - It's always 4 levels from a field agent to the top.).
There is no "we" doing anything yet. If there ever is, they will be mining to get metals, because the economy needs them. No one in history has ever, ever, ever mined for sport, and they've never done a full scale operation for research value either. Whether the "they" that can afford to start up such programs will want to use the results to put more men in space is by no means certain.
Do you really think that, if sending automated machinery into the asteroid belt will improve some corporate bottom line, they will choose to do it in a more expensive way that better supports colonization instead? Do you think the present economy will mine for resources to build a generation ship or L-5 habitat, or will they be more likely to use whatever resources they obtain on earth, at least for the forseeable future?
Which is it, do we need to mine to support colonization or do we need to have colonies as an excuse to mine? If colonizing space is a good thing (which I actually think it is), then mining might be a method towards that end. But people who don't agree that colonizing space is a good thing are not going to change their minds if we claim that colonizing space will let us mine it, and we can use what we mine to colonize space. Either colonizing space can be an end in iteslf, or mining can be, but they can't both be each other's ends.
Congradulations - You just read a lot into a post that simply wasn't said or even remotely implied there, created a straw man arguenent and then shot that down. Have you considered a career in politics?
Massdrivers capable of targeting earth with multi- megaton equivalent loads are an ultimately destabilizing weapon. You get the damage of a nuke, with no fallout to affect neutral or allied parties, and put that in the hands of politicians who will never understand until they use a few that it's not just a big rock moving fast, it's a BIG rock moving FAST.
If the US controls the moon, and starts building one, expect some of our more hostile neighbor powers to preempt with nukes or worse, before we get a nuke equivalent that we will claim doesn't count as a weapon of mass distruction so long as we have the only one.
We don't need to send people, but not doing so creates a paradox of sorts. Machines may be able to harvest the heavy metals likely to be found in the belt, but this will have two results. It will help build an economy rich enough to support a real space program, while simultaneously proving that men are not needed to staff one.
Last I saw on Usenet, there was a someone who was making a big deal about not revealing the full titles of films in headers, because the MPAA or the guys with black helicopters or sombody might notice. This same sombody had just posted Eight Legged Freaks, and insisted on abbreviating it "ELF". Makes you wonder.
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It's arrogant if he means that Linux users have trouble absorbing what normal people can absorb, but what if all he means is "I'll try to phrase my arguement using points that linux users already know from their experience with linux" (As opposed to "I'm talking to people who are already intimately familiar with both OS's", or "I'll try to explain this to people who have/don't have an EE degree, or specifically to people who moved to Linux from Windows without trying BSD along the way", or some other alternative)?
Mycrosoft's use of BSD code is both legal, and ethical, in that it is a voluntary action, done with the informed consent of both the parties involved.
However, that alternatives exist at all is not a test for Monopoly. If it were, there could never be a true monopoly, ever. A monopoly exists wherever those alternatives face constraints other than those of the market in surviving, gaining a share, or making a profit. Now you know why "everyone, even the court system", disagrees with you. It's legal to have a widely used product, all the way to 100% share. It's not legal to engage in what the court calls anti- competitive practices to protect or augment that share.
Refusing to sell to hardware vendors unless they do not enter into other contracts with your competitors, for example. Given that the hardware vendors are publicly traded companies, they cannot legally refuse to take such a deal, as the short term penalties to their own stock would be a violation of existing laws protecting shareholders. Ergo, a monopoly exists, at least so long as the shareholder protection law exists.
Maybe in a world where there were not a lot of other laws, monopoly would be as impossible as you seem to think it is. So, let's get rid of the Sherman anti-trust law, RIGHT AFTER we repeal all the other laws that made it vitally necessary. Better yet, let's figure out how to change these laws, a few at a time and with the overall goal of moving smoothly from Mercantilism to a true free amrket.
You said a lot of reasonably good stuff, but what's this "not in a scripting language" bit doing in there? Wouldn't it be better to argue that they haven't personally produced any code worth infringing on? You can do things in a scripting language that it becomes worth worrying about their infringment, and you can write your own C++, even quite useful C++, but produce nothing anyone else want's to infringe on.
Wouldn't it be good to hear more from people who have actually produced something with demonstratable worth, even if it's yet another MP3 player, or just a program for one particular type of business that sells replacement flatware patterns for incomplete sets, and see which liscence they chose and what their thinking is?
1. You can't remind people who are not thinking for themselves to start without offending some who already are.
2. You can't address a large group without talking to some who aren't thinking for themselves.
So, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Let's ask him if he's stopped beating his wife next.
There are things that have to be learned in order. Step 5 may just make no sense unless you have thorougly mastered the others, and plenty of smart people may know steps 1, 2, and 4 well, but not yet have assimilated step 3. People can call them stupid, but who's smarter, a person who can learn step 5 with training, or a person who immediately figures out step 5 on their own when you help them fill in a few gaps in their knowledge of step 3?
The educational system, most places, produces a lot of little gaps. People who don't really know whether infinity should be counted as a number or not won't see why Newton's "fluxions" version of the fundamental theorem makes people who really, deeply understand "lower" math often the ones who have the most trouble with a first year calculus course.
You can program for years without having to understand that there can be no irrational numbers inside a machine that has a cap on bits precision, but Intel still lost millions in sales once by not taking this into account.
People have talked about the idiocy of large groups, of mobs and riots, but its only in the last few years that scientists ahve shown that less than a quarter of people in a mob are actively looting and fighting, and usually more than half are interested first in leaving the scene as quickly as appears safe. Some of these misjudge just how far they need to move to get to safety, or how risky it is to proceed in a given direction, and that's one of the things that keeps a riot going, but that's also more normal than stupid.
It's not just deeply religious people, or computer illiterate people, or people who leap quickly to stupid assumptions that make this logo a problem. First, the name isn't clear or catchy enough to be widely recognized, so the devil image becomes all most people have to go on. Imagine running across the person wearing a Duke Blue Devils sweatshirt, but the First word is "Forxgnarb", you've never heard the term before, there's no thing or place named that anywhere nearby, and when you ask what the blue devil stands for, the first things you hear are all about vaguely political issues, as seen by some small minority organization. How stupid is it really, to jump to the conclusion the sweatshirt wearer is in some cult?
NetBSD isn't going to get brand recognition from the word, just like Adidas didn't build brand recognition just on the word. It sounds too odd for that. Like Adidas, it's competing against words that have more relevance to the area (Microsoft sounded like computer stuff way back when it started, with words like software already paving the way for recognition - Nike is the greek goddess of victory, as most Olympic atheletes know).
If anything, the cuteness of the logo works against it more than an association with evil. It's a Warner Bros toon style devil. That's already saying "fine for home users, but would you trust a business to it?".
The economic system has to think that not staying in the same one basket with the rest of the eggs is worth something. Unfortunately the way cost benefit analysis is usually done, you can't prove that the long term survival of the human race is worth investing in. It is probably easier to change the way we do economics than to live through a near species killer and convince the survivors after the fact, and it relies less on luck. Hope that we can get the economists on our side instead of waiting for ebolapox-2 to evolve.
I'm still mot following this. It only takes 1 person to actually shoot anyone. It may take a lot of others to put him into the location to do it, but the topic wasn't armies, it was the number of degrees of seperation between two individuals. Or are you assuming that I'm claiming Sergeant Y is all picked out, and Bush knows who he is right now? People often don't know who the other people in a path are, and have no idea how they may be connected - that doesn't mean the connections aren't there.
By the way, "will get to" is future tense, so obviously I'm speculating on a possibility there. I also gave a more serious answer in the present tense, that if one person working for a current Afghan politico is a double agent for Al-Quida there could be a path with six or fewer links right now. Something president Bush might say really could get passed on to OBL, even something he intended to only go as far as an ambassador or federal agency head. I note you didn't respond to that more serious point.
You keep accusing me of being nasty and fantasizing, without yet explaining how. You seem to think we can't shoot people, because in the bronze age, we only have spears andd swords or something. You have yet to say anything that makes coherent sense. Huummm, OK TROLL, you got me!
Emphasize all you want. "By line of code" can still be aggregate reporting if multiple lines are all part of the same tort. You're reading into the requirement more than it actually says. Further, doing it that way could involve substantial additional legal costs. If the judge insists on SCO writing:
...
Line 57 - developer bubba - under standard non-disclosure agreement - April 14 1996
Line 58 - developer bubba - under standard non-disclosure agreement - April 14 1996
Line 59 - developer bubba - under standard non-disclosure agreement - April 14 1996
instead of "Line 57 through 103 - all by developer Bubba, who was under a NDA dated April 14 1996 (Date of hire)", that's an arbitrary requirement unrelated to the interests of justice. Specificity doesn't mean "write it out line by line", it means specify the lines.
Insisting on SCO incurring additional costs to say what is clearly the same thing in fewer words would in fact give them an excellent grounds for appeal on judicial misconduct, so not only do I doubt the judge did that, we had all better hope that he didn't.
If the judge orders you to submit the document s on clay tablets in cuneiform, you don't submit the documents on clay tablets, you immediately appeal to a higher court (requesting a competency hearing for the judge). Alternately, you comply, and pass the additional costs back to the government.
For the first few years of a permanent base, we'll probably want 100%+ coverage as fast as we can get it. That can be accomplished with either a few satellites (probably more like 4 or 5 than 2 because luna-synchronous orbit isn't real stable with the moon's 2 week day, and 1/6th G and a bigger planet nearby), or a line of relay horns on lunar mountain tops. One of the most reliable ways might be rather old fashioned, a small communications shack on the earth facing side, possibly manned by 3 or so people even if the far side base has 50. Because libration means that about 59% of the moon's surface actually points towards the earth sometimes, running cable is probably not workable unless the locations are both near the same pole (as near the lunar equator, the cable might have to stretch across 4 1/2% of the moon's circumference or so. Ergo, the moon will either be satellite or wireless.
What he's saying is, by the time it gets to somewhere near Jupiter's orbit, the Sun's gravity will have slowed it to a stop, and it will eventually fall back into the inner system (probably a very narrow eliptical orbit, possibly one that grazes the sun). If Jupiter is near enough the point in its orbit where you have aimed the mass, Jupiter's massive gravity will attract it past the equilibrium point and it will end up falling towards Jupiter.
With a bit more nudge, you can do the same with Pluto. Since Pluto has much less gravity, the equilibrium point is almost all the way there. (If I recall correctly, Jupiter's is about 97% of the way out, and Pluto's must be 99.some fraction % of there. But that's just a back of the envelope calculation).
Well, maybe for an African shuttle, but what about a European shuttle?
We're probably going to want a base on the far side. Not looking towards the earth will be more useful for conventional astronomy, and having the mass of the moon between a dish and earth will be better for radio telescopy. But, such a base will also not have direct communication with Earth. This starts sounding like a minimum of 2 bases will be needed.
There was an attempt in the 50's to design a nuclear powered bomber. No fuel required, just heat the air as a working fluid, and the thing could stay up for 8 weeks or so. Shielding for crew was prohibitive on accout of total weight. Some provisional designs were considered that would be entirely remote controlled, but in the 50s, THAT looked unreliable (Remotely flying a plane over US to Russia distances before anyone thought of a GPS type system, and making a robot craft that wasn't vulnerable to Soviet couter electronic measures, were just two of the objections), so the project was scrapped.
I've been waiting for someone to point this out. Why have people assumed that to comply with the judge's order, SCO has to list every line individually? Isn't it possible SCO has listed them as "Lines 43 through 3,427 and 5,614 through 30,010 of foo.bar"? Or maybe "The line starting with "blah" through the line ending in "blah, blah"? /. readers seem to have invested so much in the "SCO is just crazy" position that they are looking for ways to interpret every action that will support that position.
Some
It's like poker. If you're holding a full house and nobody else has anything, everything usually gets resolved quickly and you don't win a lot. If you're showing 3/5s of a straight and one of the other players has two Kings up, that's when the bidding and the bluffing go on and on and someone eventually loses a lot of money. Why is it so unlikely that SCO thought they had something at the start of the hand?
I think you're right in your final conclusion, but some of the steps you took are sort of iffy.
1. Microsoft is interested in selling music, so blocking non-liscenced downloads may look as good to them as it does to the RIAA. They may or may not have the same take as the RIAA does on whether a bit of free sampling hurts sales, but that suggests that they are at best neutral or less agressive about it, just as they haven't agressivly targeted small scale software pirates running individual copies of windows. That means their priorities aren't really that different, but yes their history suggests they may be just different enough.
2. Microsoft has had some sort of sweetheart arrangements with some RIAA/MPAA members, such as Time Warner and Disney, for a long time. Remember how Win 95/IE 4 had desktop links enabled for Disney, et al, by default? Us mere mortals don't really know just what favors MS and various RIAA types owe each other, so we're equally unsure how much effect it will have.
3. Microsoft wants to plug their DRM initiative. So long as that looks like a money maker, catching lots of illicit downloading might be a tool to make Paladium look more effective. Would it be worth the risk of making inflated claims for it and getting caught? I don't have even a good guess on that last question.
So long as AT&T is in the equation, I'd expect MS to fall somewhere in the middle, trying to out-compete both the others by persuing two conflicting approaches at once. I don't think that will let MS grab market share, and judging by this article, they don't either. So there will stay some real competition for a time.
(I'm still not a lawyer - I'm not a jelly donut either).
People commonly point out that the Sherman act doesn't really define Monopoly "strictly" (as you put it). However, being a monopoly isn't what the Sherman Act makes illegal. It makes it illegal for a monopoly to do certain things, such as taking certain steps to stay a monopoly, not to merely exist. The point then becomes, "Could a non-monopoly business succeed by thking those very same steps?" If the actions would only work if monopoly existed as a precodition, and the actions worked, then monopoly is inferred. Yes, that has a touch of circular reasoning about it. However, the definitions of what actions the monopoly is taking are pretty strictly defined, even if monopoly itself is less so.
It's a lot like obsecenity law. The court may have to claim they know waht obscenity is when they see it, but in practice, the minimal conditions that have to be met before it can even be considered are spelled out pretty clearly, which helps keep the law from being abused.
Microsoft doesn't deserve to be harrassed. They deserve to have to comply with the law. They deserve it if customers choose to take their business elsewhere. Harassment is something else -it's called taking the law into your own hands. Robertson doesn't have any special right to take the law into his own hands. His contributions to OSS projects don't give him a special right to cross the line into taking the law into his own hands. He is not an agent of the court, and it is not his job to help ensure that Microsoft pays the biggest penalties possible under law, even if many customers don't choose to file.
Informing customers of the existence of the class action case, assisting them by taking their data and submitting it to the legal system, these would normally be within his rights, or yours or mine.
Urging customers to join, not to get back what the court has ruled they may be entitled to, but to stick it to Microsoft for others, is not within his rights. None of those Ca. citizens should join merely to help penalize Microsoft more. I think my state made a mistake in settling with Microsoft in the way it did, but the citizens of California are not supposed to be trying to second guess my state government by sueing on behalf of people such as me, as well as themselves. I'll take my state's actions up with the people I elected, thank you.
What "army of one fantasy" are you talking about? What makes it nasty? I've looked back over what I wrote, and you're whole comment makes about as much sense as a nitrocellulose ping pong ball on a flaming table.
Let me get this straight, you want to talk links to the president rather than the more general case, and you want to exclude links that go through government offices. Why not ask me to find a link between you and the surgeon who performed the first heart transplant, but exclude all people who ever practiced medicine or have relatives in South Africa?
You - Your high school principal - Your school superintendant - State secretary of education - FSE - president. Ooops, you're right, that's government officials.
You - Your supervisor at work - 1 layer of upper management - the CEO - local republican party chairman - state chair - W. There, technically none of those intermediate steps are officials - you can't count party membership as being in the government. Still, there's probably someone on the white house staff that is actually interposed there answering the phone, so maybe you're right.
Ok, so we've got a worker on an assembly line. He's somehow never met a connected person. He didn't attend high school, let alone graduate. He's never had medical care from a really skilled practicioner. (My childhood allergy specialist was also a good surgeon, who was once on a team that treated W's dad - that might be a 2, but is probably a 3 or maybe even a 4.). He rents, but not from a landlord with connections. (I once rented from a woman who had photos of herself at every demo fundraiser for the last 20 years, handing 10,000$+ checks to various - I'f she'd only have been a Republican, she'd put me at 4 or 3 all by herself). Your guy doesn't attend church, or not one with much in the way of professional requirements for their clergy. (One former priest I knew was an ex Navy vice admiral taking a second job after retirement - his chain is probably another 3, and so any person attending a church of my faith in my state, or the ones bordering it has a chain of 4 or at most 5 right there). Your hypothetical person doesn't know any criminals curently serving time, or he's at 5, or likely a 4 if he knows their lawyer. He's a working stiff, but not poor enough, or too proud, to get state or federal assistance, or he's a 5 again).
I've done a few blue collar jobs and such in my time. I got to know the priest in my example by building bookshelves for him. I drove a fork-lift for a couple of years, and had two paths that were 5 or 4 that I know of, during that time. (I was a Spc 4, driving for a light Col. in the national guard, one weekend a month, and one of my cousins had just become an FBI agent - It's always 4 levels from a field agent to the top.).
There is no "we" doing anything yet. If there ever is, they will be mining to get metals, because the economy needs them. No one in history has ever, ever, ever mined for sport, and they've never done a full scale operation for research value either. Whether the "they" that can afford to start up such programs will want to use the results to put more men in space is by no means certain.
Do you really think that, if sending automated machinery into the asteroid belt will improve some corporate bottom line, they will choose to do it in a more expensive way that better supports colonization instead? Do you think the present economy will mine for resources to build a generation ship or L-5 habitat, or will they be more likely to use whatever resources they obtain on earth, at least for the forseeable future?
Which is it, do we need to mine to support colonization or do we need to have colonies as an excuse to mine? If colonizing space is a good thing (which I actually think it is), then mining might be a method towards that end. But people who don't agree that colonizing space is a good thing are not going to change their minds if we claim that colonizing space will let us mine it, and we can use what we mine to colonize space. Either colonizing space can be an end in iteslf, or mining can be, but they can't both be each other's ends.
Congradulations - You just read a lot into a post that simply wasn't said or even remotely implied there, created a straw man arguenent and then shot that down. Have you considered a career in politics?
Massdrivers capable of targeting earth with multi- megaton equivalent loads are an ultimately destabilizing weapon. You get the damage of a nuke, with no fallout to affect neutral or allied parties, and put that in the hands of politicians who will never understand until they use a few that it's not just a big rock moving fast, it's a BIG rock moving FAST.
If the US controls the moon, and starts building one, expect some of our more hostile neighbor powers to preempt with nukes or worse, before we get a nuke equivalent that we will claim doesn't count as a weapon of mass distruction so long as we have the only one.
We don't need to send people, but not doing so creates a paradox of sorts. Machines may be able to harvest the heavy metals likely to be found in the belt, but this will have two results. It will help build an economy rich enough to support a real space program, while simultaneously proving that men are not needed to staff one.
Last I saw on Usenet, there was a someone who was making a big deal about not revealing the full titles of films in headers, because the MPAA or the guys with black helicopters or sombody might notice. This same sombody had just posted Eight Legged Freaks, and insisted on abbreviating it "ELF". Makes you wonder.