What they own is the legal privilege of restricting the copying of Sys V code, not the code itself. There is no other explanation that explains fair use doctrine than that the code itself is unowned but the right to copy is restricted by the legal privilege granted in the patents and copyrights article of the US Constitution in order to further the advance of arts and sciences.
If the code itself is owned then when it falls into public domain via government directive, why doesn't the government have to write a check in compensation of this taking? Why doesn't the government have to write a check for every 'fair use'? No, the code itself has to be not subject to ownership.
I have yet to see any legal evidence presented that demonstrates that your statement that Linux contains Sys V code is true. Nobody knows the respective modules that are copied and whether SysV is the originator of that code or they themselves have copied if from some other source, perhaps BSD which is where Linux picked it up from. The BSD license generally permits such actions but doesn't permit somebody who takes code in this way from suing others for doing the exact same thing.
Nobody seems to have run any checks whether this code appears in BSD as well. If it does, this company is going to get buried under a ton of libel and slander accusations and will finish SCO.
Sure there are big company friendly variants of lawsuit reform but all the conservative intellectuals who have been pushing loser pays for decades now are generally advocating honest ones.
If you have a real legal grievance, the giant mega-corp can delay, dissemble, and throw up new issues until you run out of money. In a loser pays situation, any decent size law firm will pick up the tab because they know they'll get paid by the mega-corp when the judge finally rules against them and they also will get lots of nice publicity for their firm and a great number of revenue producing cases.
Yes, you might have some marginal cases where the screwee doesn't have the cash to pay and law firms aren't willing to risk the prospect of losing but loser pays is better because those plaintiffs already are screwed in the current system and there are entire other classes of plaintiffs and defendents who are screwed in US law today that would not be in a loser pays system.
They only have 13.1M shares outstanding and they're only selling at $11 a share. So you need 6.6M shares to stop the insanity by shareholder vote. If they win in court, they get bought out, it's that simple.
They may or may not be doing this legally. If they're talking about 80 lines out of hundreds of thousands, even if they didn't get into AT&T and Linux via a BSD heritage, this is a small enough proportion to be declared fair use and $0 being owed. Fair use is a tricky thing because what's fair isn't subject to iron clad rulings.
Remember, copyright isn't property but a legal privilege of monopoly in certain circumstances with certain rights to copy being held outside of the restrictive privilege.
*If* there was copying, *if* the copy was actually from Sys V and not from BSD or other source, *if* the copyright is enforceable, *if* the copying is sufficiently broad to not be fair use, then Linus may have to back out some kernel code and remake it.
There are four legal conditions that have to be satisfied. SCO has not satisfied any of them in a court of law. Until they do, you can't say that they are acting legally.
They could be engaging in libel, slander, extortion and abuse of process on the part of SCO and ethics violations requiring disbarment on the part of SCO's legal team. We don't know the actual facts of the matter which is why we're going to have a trial and investigate what's going on.
Copyright law may or may not be crap but judging the facts of a case out of court, before discovery, absolutely *is* crap.
Actually, the way to make SCOX (SCO's stock symbol) drop like a rock is to sell that stock short. Short interest has risen along with the price of SCOX and if you have a few thousand to spare, sell that puppy. If you believe that the lawsuit is without merit and will collapse soon, driving the stock down to $1 is a good way to encourage a new revenue and business model.
Actually, the reason they can sue is that the US doesn't have a loser pays rule and US lawyers have no shame. Now I don't have much hope of lawyers exercising voluntary self restraint on lawsuits but the Republicans are on record as backing tort reform.
Actually, when MS runs a little low on MS Office revenue, instead of holding a sale (and raising prices later) they just instruct their resellers to stop checking for student ID for the educational version. That gets the units sold number right up but is a blatant violation of the EULA that is promoted by the vendor. I've seen it happen in retail stores and seen an interview where the VP in charge of the Office division confirmed it was policy but, of course, didn't talk about that as piracy.
This is one more case where a loser pays rule would be an improvement on the US legal system. Right now, it makes sense for a company to pay SCO's license fees if they are below the cost of litigation even if the claims are baseless. The shareholders lose less money if you pay the dane geld (or at least that's the way I'm betting SCO priced out its licenses). I would expect a vast disparity between SCO licenses extracted in jurisdiction without loser pay and a vastly smaller number of licensees in loser pays jurisdictions.
Go price MS Office and then price out some of its competition. The network effects of having so many documents in that proprietary format allows them to extract a huge price bonus. This price bonus is enough to fund all the boat anchors of MS' unproductive divisions and to make MS one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world.
Apple customers + Linux customers are about 7% of the desktop market. The xxx Bank web banking solution doesn't support anything but Internet Explorer which is not available on any platform but Windows. As a shareholder, I'm concerned that we're losing customers and money because of this. I intend to bring this up at the shareholder's meeting. You're in the business of making the bank's shareholders money, not shilling for Microsoft. There is *no* reason not to support everybody's computer platform. Their money spends just as well.
It would be inconvenient as they're actually trying to create a programmer's tool in cocoa so that you can write and read from.doc as if it were a simple text file. The TextEdit capability is just a sample app to show that their project code is working. They could start with Oo.O but they probably would need to completely rewrite it so why bother?
So increased entropy = dirty in your book. Well, by that standard we might as well ignore pollution because we'll never be rid of it unless we all drop dead and it'll still exist, we just won't be around to care anymore.
So, do you belong to the Volunteer Human Extinction Movement?
I don't see why region encoding should be illegal. Let them encode so long as I have the right to buy a player that ignores their encoding. They do it the other way around. They code disks that won't play on my mac cd player, ignoring the standard so why shouldn't my player ignore the data that I find inconvenient for my legal enjoyment of their product?
You get to the same result in the end but my method is more pro-freedom as you are just letting people be free. I have no doubt that the consumer electronics industry would be more than happy to take my money for a region free DVD player.
What he can't get is goods that have not been released for the respective country. For instance, Apple puts out a new version of their OS but they haven't got around to updating the Magyar language strings. Well, should they delay release? No, they just don't release the product to Hungary and release it later when they've finished localizing it. Buying goods in other markets and then importing it is called grey market purchasing and is perfectly legal, if frowned upon by the manufacturer. That's what this fellow wants to do. he doesn't want to wait for the new Hungarian language instructions on the new iPod to be ready, he wants his iPod now and screw the fact he'll have to read the directions in English.
There's a real need for an expat friendly cross shipping service that will allow you to have a virtual US presence, e-mail you your postal mail, and ship your stuff further on, once it has arrived at your US address. If you can have a credit card issued to you with a US billing address nobody gives a damn that the check is drawn on a Hungarian bank when you pay your bills.
I've informally done this kind of work for a Romanian firm who needed to buy a copy of some specific variant of Fortran but couldn't get anybody to take their money. No, you can't patent it as I claim prior art but feel free to open a formal business on this plan.
You've made an unwarranted assumption that the new free energy is not also clean. Fusion is clean, beamed solar energy is clean, and pure hydrogen fuel cells are clean so why is this unidentified, energium X source automatically dirty?
You're not only a wacko environmentalist too quick with the regulation, tax, and protest but you're also a militarist, imperialist who can't tolerate different approaches and will roll over any resistence.
Why is it that I always read about 1 or 2 X Prize competitors. Armadillo joined the race at the same time ARCA did but just because slashdot people like quake Armadillo gets all the glory.
So you're shifting the scenario from a private greed conspiracy to a government one to slow/stop the massive dislocation that a radical reduction in energy prices would produce? Well, where's the money going to go? Governments that tend to rely heavily on energy (nowadays oil) revenues for their budgets are very badly affected by the corruption bug. A lot of countries wouldn't go along with that, especially if they can gain an economic advantage through lower taxation.
So what stops someone else from undercutting the markup and starting a race for the bottom? Nothing, in fact stops it and the energy business turns into a very low margin utility. If energy is free or almost free then transportation costs are likely to be minimal. You can't buy *every* jurisdiction to politically keep out new market entrants and there can't be high costs to entry otherwise the energy would not be free, it would cost the generation cost plus the amortization of the significant entry costs in plant and equipment, etc.
A lot of things would change. A great many jobs would disappear while a great many others would appear and the disruption would be economically awesome. We'd stop having to do all sorts of tricks to minimize power loss because power loss would no longer be a significant expense.
Freedom is generally the default option in the US system. When someone wants to restrict freedom, they have the burden of proof. Environmentalists usually want to restrict action and thus are burdened with proving their claims in order to justify laws to restrict the freedom of people to do as they please. If you don't like it, go find a system where what is permitted is explicit and what is denied is the default. Unfortunately for the people in those societies they tend to not work very well.
When you have two parrallel school systems covering the same geography (NYC) and one spends $10k/student (public school) and one spends X Prize. For historical reasons you might just look at The Spirit of St. Louis and even poor Mr. Coanda's jet. Hopefully, the Romanian X Prize team will do better than Mr. Coanda.
But private space exploitation has barriers in some of the language in the space treaties, in the competition from government funded rocketry, from the justified fear that the government can tax you to subsidize their own launch systems at any time the whim strikes. It takes a radical new approach that the Govt. can't just copy to justify private investment. I've somewhat followed the field and people tried only to be squeezed out by NASA who can lower prices on the taxpayer's dime anytime they can convince Congress to up their budget.
The Liftport people seem to have successfully raised their first million in a stock offering (damn, I missed it) but will be raising another $5M next year. I have no doubt that that issue will also be oversubscribed. That's because the shuttle and the various rocket systems would not be serious competititon for the lift prices an elevator could charge. The total cost estimate for the whole system is $20B and they're looking for a $20B contingency estimate since this stuff *is* at an early stage of development. Are capital markets developed enough to raise $40B over 20 years? I certainly think so. Heck, MS could write the check out of current cash reserves today.
There are wide sections of the US that have trees now that did not have them before because the plains indians purposefully and regularly burned them to expand buffalo range. Indian control does not equal no human influence. You provide some evidence and that's good but it's local in nature and doesn't really prove what you claim.
A funny thing about proof, it's objective and doesn't always play your ideological way. I'm willing to go where the evidence leads me and change my beliefs based on external reality. We just went through a nice 5 year period where we reformed government charity to look a bit more like private charity. The results were objectively a success, work requirements, allowing more variation by the states in how programs are administered, and all the other innovations were all resisted mightily by the left on exactly the grounds that you state now but they were a success.
So now, with evidence at hand, the call goes out to reauthorize the bill and it's the same fight all over again, the right wants to reform even further and the left wants to gut the program, going back to the old days with just cosmetics left from all that success.
I happened to participate in a conversation to found a non-profit just the other day. It was an interesting discussion that would never have taken place if the government was already taking care of that particular interest (it was an immigrant help group). I know because I help out new immigrants all the time and usually it's a conversation chock full of go to this agency or that. Nobody in a private charity ever wants to compete with the government. They'll outspend you and you won't get any donations. Anybody you ask will say, what am I paying taxes for? The govt. will take care of it.
So it's pretty obvious that govt. action crowds out private action on social services subjects. The one great exception is where the government is visibly viewed as a horrible failure. We don't have people starving in the streets much but we do have schools that turn out illiterate high school graduates. There private competition is offered and yet again, the left argues against reform, trying to stand in the schoolhouse door to keep people trapped in schools that don't educate them. All of a sudden they don't give a damn about the children when it comes time for that influential union endorsement.
Republicans have electoral interests as do Democrats. Republicans would handily win elections if everybody was in the middle class. Democrats would win elections if everybody was either very poor or very rich. Both parties create policy to mold the electorate in a shape that will maximize their long-run chances at being in power most of the time.
Private charity works and the apocalyptic predictions were around for decades but they've never come true. Reform, when it was finally tried, created a better situation for everybody. Why are the people who cried wolf before so much more credible than the people who turned out to be right? That's not skepticism or caution, that's blind faith.
Finally, about that space elevator, we have a situation where all sorts of neat things are coming out and demanding capital. The space elevator is but one of them. The smaller that pool of capital, the more of those neat things will stay undeveloped, unexploited. Henri Coanda flew the first jet airplane in 1910 in Paris. He didn't do it in his native Romania because there was no capital available and no structure for experimentation. In Paris he flew, but there still wasn't enough capital to fund such a crazy idea. We could have had jets 20 years earlier.
Now whose fault was it? You can't identify which alternate use of capital did the deed. It's all chaotic white noise. And if there's no money today for a space elevator it is equally unidentifiable. The only thing that can be done is to work as hard as possible to make capital cheap and plentiful.
You complain about my optimism and guessing but you guess yourself when you assume that standing board feet numbers would prove your position right. You are responsible for gathering actual data to support your side of the debate.
Michael Bellesiles and John Lott just went through this on 2nd Amendment issues with their respective books Arming America and More Guns, Less Crime. The problem was that the anti gun (Bellesiles) fellow made up his figures and used bad research methodology that wasn't replicable by others to recreate his numbers. Some of the numbers he quoted seem to have gone up in smoke in record house fires many decades ago and no extant copies have been found anywhere. Lott's work was put to similar scrutiny but seems to have held up better, though he too has been forced to make some corrections to his work in later editions. But that's the academic game and nobody's perfect.
This is how proper policy is done, not with assumptions and whining when your opponents don't do your research for you. The lumber industry's non-release of the figures could just be a nice "screw you, do your own research" to the environmental movement. It's not like there's a lot of good feeling between the two.
Now I gave you some facts and figures on space lift via elevator. It would have been nice to get some stipulations like:
Yes, $100-200/kg lift prices would enable solar power satellites and remove 10-15% of fossil fuel consumption (the share used by earthly powerplants) from the pollution stream (this would be done on a replacement basis) without the major economic pain associated with such reductions done by traditional illegalize and sanction methods.
Yes, being able to orbitally beam power would radically change the game when it came to power generation because the earthly transport infrastructure would be markedly reduced, much fewer power lines would be needed as you can beam everywhere. Among other things, this would change the silly situation we have regarding aluminum where each new cheap power source we get seems to inevitably attract a new aluminum smelter and contribute to chronic overproduction.
Yes, space mining would become practical and we would largely remove most of our raw materials limitations (where it comes to minerals) while improving our environment.
Yes, such changes would create huge follow-on effects (the elimination of the 3rd world as it grows into something better) and really need as much capital as possible available at the time.
After all that we could go further and work out where we remain divided and where we really *don't* have a shot at common ground, that's honest debating. I gave ground on standing board feet (and asked for evidence, which doesn't seem to be available), where's your similar flexibility? Be fair.
Because of chaos effects (remember chaos theory?) complex systems are *very* hard to predict out very far and quickly become impossible without knowing the exact initial conditions. If anything's complex it's human society and the world environment.
In the 1st world, especially the US, the easy environmental gains have long been adopted and if new inventions provide cheap, large environmental gains, societally we're prepared to make small sacrifices. But large pain for very small gain is a fool's game.
It's like those old aerospace engineers trying to create designs that relied on very complex analog controls to stabilize inherently unstable designs. You just couldn't do it with then current technology so they were curiosities never put into production. Then the digital revolution came along and now it's possible with fly by wire systems to computer control aircraft that are very unstable (and thus highly maneuverable) and easily keep them flying straight and steady when they want them that way. So you see designs for fighter planes with forward swept wings, etc.
The reality is that the greenhouse effects that Kyoto is aimed at, even in the current worst case scenarios, are going to sh
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What they own is the legal privilege of restricting the copying of Sys V code, not the code itself. There is no other explanation that explains fair use doctrine than that the code itself is unowned but the right to copy is restricted by the legal privilege granted in the patents and copyrights article of the US Constitution in order to further the advance of arts and sciences.
If the code itself is owned then when it falls into public domain via government directive, why doesn't the government have to write a check in compensation of this taking? Why doesn't the government have to write a check for every 'fair use'? No, the code itself has to be not subject to ownership.
I have yet to see any legal evidence presented that demonstrates that your statement that Linux contains Sys V code is true. Nobody knows the respective modules that are copied and whether SysV is the originator of that code or they themselves have copied if from some other source, perhaps BSD which is where Linux picked it up from. The BSD license generally permits such actions but doesn't permit somebody who takes code in this way from suing others for doing the exact same thing.
Nobody seems to have run any checks whether this code appears in BSD as well. If it does, this company is going to get buried under a ton of libel and slander accusations and will finish SCO.
Sure there are big company friendly variants of lawsuit reform but all the conservative intellectuals who have been pushing loser pays for decades now are generally advocating honest ones.
If you have a real legal grievance, the giant mega-corp can delay, dissemble, and throw up new issues until you run out of money. In a loser pays situation, any decent size law firm will pick up the tab because they know they'll get paid by the mega-corp when the judge finally rules against them and they also will get lots of nice publicity for their firm and a great number of revenue producing cases.
Yes, you might have some marginal cases where the screwee doesn't have the cash to pay and law firms aren't willing to risk the prospect of losing but loser pays is better because those plaintiffs already are screwed in the current system and there are entire other classes of plaintiffs and defendents who are screwed in US law today that would not be in a loser pays system.
They only have 13.1M shares outstanding and they're only selling at $11 a share. So you need 6.6M shares to stop the insanity by shareholder vote. If they win in court, they get bought out, it's that simple.
They may or may not be doing this legally. If they're talking about 80 lines out of hundreds of thousands, even if they didn't get into AT&T and Linux via a BSD heritage, this is a small enough proportion to be declared fair use and $0 being owed. Fair use is a tricky thing because what's fair isn't subject to iron clad rulings.
Remember, copyright isn't property but a legal privilege of monopoly in certain circumstances with certain rights to copy being held outside of the restrictive privilege.
*If* there was copying, *if* the copy was actually from Sys V and not from BSD or other source, *if* the copyright is enforceable, *if* the copying is sufficiently broad to not be fair use, then Linus may have to back out some kernel code and remake it.
There are four legal conditions that have to be satisfied. SCO has not satisfied any of them in a court of law. Until they do, you can't say that they are acting legally.
They could be engaging in libel, slander, extortion and abuse of process on the part of SCO and ethics violations requiring disbarment on the part of SCO's legal team. We don't know the actual facts of the matter which is why we're going to have a trial and investigate what's going on.
Copyright law may or may not be crap but judging the facts of a case out of court, before discovery, absolutely *is* crap.
Actually, the way to make SCOX (SCO's stock symbol) drop like a rock is to sell that stock short. Short interest has risen along with the price of SCOX and if you have a few thousand to spare, sell that puppy. If you believe that the lawsuit is without merit and will collapse soon, driving the stock down to $1 is a good way to encourage a new revenue and business model.
Actually, the reason they can sue is that the US doesn't have a loser pays rule and US lawyers have no shame. Now I don't have much hope of lawyers exercising voluntary self restraint on lawsuits but the Republicans are on record as backing tort reform.
Actually, when MS runs a little low on MS Office revenue, instead of holding a sale (and raising prices later) they just instruct their resellers to stop checking for student ID for the educational version. That gets the units sold number right up but is a blatant violation of the EULA that is promoted by the vendor. I've seen it happen in retail stores and seen an interview where the VP in charge of the Office division confirmed it was policy but, of course, didn't talk about that as piracy.
This is one more case where a loser pays rule would be an improvement on the US legal system. Right now, it makes sense for a company to pay SCO's license fees if they are below the cost of litigation even if the claims are baseless. The shareholders lose less money if you pay the dane geld (or at least that's the way I'm betting SCO priced out its licenses). I would expect a vast disparity between SCO licenses extracted in jurisdiction without loser pay and a vastly smaller number of licensees in loser pays jurisdictions.
The snopes article above notes that this particular cyst was deemed inoperable in the physician's report sent to the draft board.
Gee, the US hasn't had conscripts since the '70s so maybe you have no idea what you're talking about.
Btw: unless you want to categorize Rush Limbaugh as a sunflower-loving hippie, mac users are a bit more diverse than the stereotype.
1 left liberal, 1 post, 2 wrong stereotypes. Bleah
Go price MS Office and then price out some of its competition. The network effects of having so many documents in that proprietary format allows them to extract a huge price bonus. This price bonus is enough to fund all the boat anchors of MS' unproductive divisions and to make MS one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world.
Web services nightmare
July 4, 2006
Dear Mr. Bank CEO,
Apple customers + Linux customers are about 7% of the desktop market. The xxx Bank web banking solution doesn't support anything but Internet Explorer which is not available on any platform but Windows. As a shareholder, I'm concerned that we're losing customers and money because of this. I intend to bring this up at the shareholder's meeting. You're in the business of making the bank's shareholders money, not shilling for Microsoft. There is *no* reason not to support everybody's computer platform. Their money spends just as well.
Sincerely,
Large shareholder mac user
In other words, you can use our web browser but only if you use our ISP service. Doesn't that mean that IE is now no longer a free browser?
It would be inconvenient as they're actually trying to create a programmer's tool in cocoa so that you can write and read from .doc as if it were a simple text file. The TextEdit capability is just a sample app to show that their project code is working. They could start with Oo.O but they probably would need to completely rewrite it so why bother?
So increased entropy = dirty in your book. Well, by that standard we might as well ignore pollution because we'll never be rid of it unless we all drop dead and it'll still exist, we just won't be around to care anymore.
So, do you belong to the Volunteer Human Extinction Movement?
I don't see why region encoding should be illegal. Let them encode so long as I have the right to buy a player that ignores their encoding. They do it the other way around. They code disks that won't play on my mac cd player, ignoring the standard so why shouldn't my player ignore the data that I find inconvenient for my legal enjoyment of their product?
You get to the same result in the end but my method is more pro-freedom as you are just letting people be free. I have no doubt that the consumer electronics industry would be more than happy to take my money for a region free DVD player.
What he can't get is goods that have not been released for the respective country. For instance, Apple puts out a new version of their OS but they haven't got around to updating the Magyar language strings. Well, should they delay release? No, they just don't release the product to Hungary and release it later when they've finished localizing it. Buying goods in other markets and then importing it is called grey market purchasing and is perfectly legal, if frowned upon by the manufacturer. That's what this fellow wants to do. he doesn't want to wait for the new Hungarian language instructions on the new iPod to be ready, he wants his iPod now and screw the fact he'll have to read the directions in English.
There's a real need for an expat friendly cross shipping service that will allow you to have a virtual US presence, e-mail you your postal mail, and ship your stuff further on, once it has arrived at your US address. If you can have a credit card issued to you with a US billing address nobody gives a damn that the check is drawn on a Hungarian bank when you pay your bills.
I've informally done this kind of work for a Romanian firm who needed to buy a copy of some specific variant of Fortran but couldn't get anybody to take their money. No, you can't patent it as I claim prior art but feel free to open a formal business on this plan.
You've made an unwarranted assumption that the new free energy is not also clean. Fusion is clean, beamed solar energy is clean, and pure hydrogen fuel cells are clean so why is this unidentified, energium X source automatically dirty?
You're not only a wacko environmentalist too quick with the regulation, tax, and protest but you're also a militarist, imperialist who can't tolerate different approaches and will roll over any resistence.
Why is it that I always read about 1 or 2 X Prize competitors. Armadillo joined the race at the same time ARCA did but just because slashdot people like quake Armadillo gets all the glory.
So you're shifting the scenario from a private greed conspiracy to a government one to slow/stop the massive dislocation that a radical reduction in energy prices would produce? Well, where's the money going to go? Governments that tend to rely heavily on energy (nowadays oil) revenues for their budgets are very badly affected by the corruption bug. A lot of countries wouldn't go along with that, especially if they can gain an economic advantage through lower taxation.
So what stops someone else from undercutting the markup and starting a race for the bottom? Nothing, in fact stops it and the energy business turns into a very low margin utility. If energy is free or almost free then transportation costs are likely to be minimal. You can't buy *every* jurisdiction to politically keep out new market entrants and there can't be high costs to entry otherwise the energy would not be free, it would cost the generation cost plus the amortization of the significant entry costs in plant and equipment, etc.
A lot of things would change. A great many jobs would disappear while a great many others would appear and the disruption would be economically awesome. We'd stop having to do all sorts of tricks to minimize power loss because power loss would no longer be a significant expense.
Freedom is generally the default option in the US system. When someone wants to restrict freedom, they have the burden of proof. Environmentalists usually want to restrict action and thus are burdened with proving their claims in order to justify laws to restrict the freedom of people to do as they please. If you don't like it, go find a system where what is permitted is explicit and what is denied is the default. Unfortunately for the people in those societies they tend to not work very well.
When you have two parrallel school systems covering the same geography (NYC) and one spends $10k/student (public school) and one spends X Prize. For historical reasons you might just look at The Spirit of St. Louis and even poor Mr. Coanda's jet. Hopefully, the Romanian X Prize team will do better than Mr. Coanda.
But private space exploitation has barriers in some of the language in the space treaties, in the competition from government funded rocketry, from the justified fear that the government can tax you to subsidize their own launch systems at any time the whim strikes. It takes a radical new approach that the Govt. can't just copy to justify private investment. I've somewhat followed the field and people tried only to be squeezed out by NASA who can lower prices on the taxpayer's dime anytime they can convince Congress to up their budget.
The Liftport people seem to have successfully raised their first million in a stock offering (damn, I missed it) but will be raising another $5M next year. I have no doubt that that issue will also be oversubscribed. That's because the shuttle and the various rocket systems would not be serious competititon for the lift prices an elevator could charge. The total cost estimate for the whole system is $20B and they're looking for a $20B contingency estimate since this stuff *is* at an early stage of development. Are capital markets developed enough to raise $40B over 20 years? I certainly think so. Heck, MS could write the check out of current cash reserves today.
There are wide sections of the US that have trees now that did not have them before because the plains indians purposefully and regularly burned them to expand buffalo range. Indian control does not equal no human influence. You provide some evidence and that's good but it's local in nature and doesn't really prove what you claim.
A funny thing about proof, it's objective and doesn't always play your ideological way. I'm willing to go where the evidence leads me and change my beliefs based on external reality. We just went through a nice 5 year period where we reformed government charity to look a bit more like private charity. The results were objectively a success, work requirements, allowing more variation by the states in how programs are administered, and all the other innovations were all resisted mightily by the left on exactly the grounds that you state now but they were a success.
So now, with evidence at hand, the call goes out to reauthorize the bill and it's the same fight all over again, the right wants to reform even further and the left wants to gut the program, going back to the old days with just cosmetics left from all that success.
I happened to participate in a conversation to found a non-profit just the other day. It was an interesting discussion that would never have taken place if the government was already taking care of that particular interest (it was an immigrant help group). I know because I help out new immigrants all the time and usually it's a conversation chock full of go to this agency or that. Nobody in a private charity ever wants to compete with the government. They'll outspend you and you won't get any donations. Anybody you ask will say, what am I paying taxes for? The govt. will take care of it.
So it's pretty obvious that govt. action crowds out private action on social services subjects. The one great exception is where the government is visibly viewed as a horrible failure. We don't have people starving in the streets much but we do have schools that turn out illiterate high school graduates. There private competition is offered and yet again, the left argues against reform, trying to stand in the schoolhouse door to keep people trapped in schools that don't educate them. All of a sudden they don't give a damn about the children when it comes time for that influential union endorsement.
Republicans have electoral interests as do Democrats. Republicans would handily win elections if everybody was in the middle class. Democrats would win elections if everybody was either very poor or very rich. Both parties create policy to mold the electorate in a shape that will maximize their long-run chances at being in power most of the time.
Private charity works and the apocalyptic predictions were around for decades but they've never come true. Reform, when it was finally tried, created a better situation for everybody. Why are the people who cried wolf before so much more credible than the people who turned out to be right? That's not skepticism or caution, that's blind faith.
Finally, about that space elevator, we have a situation where all sorts of neat things are coming out and demanding capital. The space elevator is but one of them. The smaller that pool of capital, the more of those neat things will stay undeveloped, unexploited. Henri Coanda flew the first jet airplane in 1910 in Paris. He didn't do it in his native Romania because there was no capital available and no structure for experimentation. In Paris he flew, but there still wasn't enough capital to fund such a crazy idea. We could have had jets 20 years earlier.
Now whose fault was it? You can't identify which alternate use of capital did the deed. It's all chaotic white noise. And if there's no money today for a space elevator it is equally unidentifiable. The only thing that can be done is to work as hard as possible to make capital cheap and plentiful.
You complain about my optimism and guessing but you guess yourself when you assume that standing board feet numbers would prove your position right. You are responsible for gathering actual data to support your side of the debate.
Michael Bellesiles and John Lott just went through this on 2nd Amendment issues with their respective books Arming America and More Guns, Less Crime. The problem was that the anti gun (Bellesiles) fellow made up his figures and used bad research methodology that wasn't replicable by others to recreate his numbers. Some of the numbers he quoted seem to have gone up in smoke in record house fires many decades ago and no extant copies have been found anywhere. Lott's work was put to similar scrutiny but seems to have held up better, though he too has been forced to make some corrections to his work in later editions. But that's the academic game and nobody's perfect.
This is how proper policy is done, not with assumptions and whining when your opponents don't do your research for you. The lumber industry's non-release of the figures could just be a nice "screw you, do your own research" to the environmental movement. It's not like there's a lot of good feeling between the two.
Now I gave you some facts and figures on space lift via elevator. It would have been nice to get some stipulations like:
Yes, $100-200/kg lift prices would enable solar power satellites and remove 10-15% of fossil fuel consumption (the share used by earthly powerplants) from the pollution stream (this would be done on a replacement basis) without the major economic pain associated with such reductions done by traditional illegalize and sanction methods.
Yes, being able to orbitally beam power would radically change the game when it came to power generation because the earthly transport infrastructure would be markedly reduced, much fewer power lines would be needed as you can beam everywhere. Among other things, this would change the silly situation we have regarding aluminum where each new cheap power source we get seems to inevitably attract a new aluminum smelter and contribute to chronic overproduction.
Yes, space mining would become practical and we would largely remove most of our raw materials limitations (where it comes to minerals) while improving our environment.
Yes, such changes would create huge follow-on effects (the elimination of the 3rd world as it grows into something better) and really need as much capital as possible available at the time.
After all that we could go further and work out where we remain divided and where we really *don't* have a shot at common ground, that's honest debating. I gave ground on standing board feet (and asked for evidence, which doesn't seem to be available), where's your similar flexibility? Be fair.
Because of chaos effects (remember chaos theory?) complex systems are *very* hard to predict out very far and quickly become impossible without knowing the exact initial conditions. If anything's complex it's human society and the world environment.
In the 1st world, especially the US, the easy environmental gains have long been adopted and if new inventions provide cheap, large environmental gains, societally we're prepared to make small sacrifices. But large pain for very small gain is a fool's game.
It's like those old aerospace engineers trying to create designs that relied on very complex analog controls to stabilize inherently unstable designs. You just couldn't do it with then current technology so they were curiosities never put into production. Then the digital revolution came along and now it's possible with fly by wire systems to computer control aircraft that are very unstable (and thus highly maneuverable) and easily keep them flying straight and steady when they want them that way. So you see designs for fighter planes with forward swept wings, etc.
The reality is that the greenhouse effects that Kyoto is aimed at, even in the current worst case scenarios, are going to sh