The carbon nanotube material is designed to break apart into small pieces and come down as powder. It would be a bad pollution day at most as much of it would burn up in the atmosphere. Wear a face mask and wash your car, problem solved.
A week after your very expensive 1 year of planning comes to fruition, the space elevator's back up and you've just given the authorities all sorts of new clues on how to reach back and destroy your group. If they could have rebuilt the WTC in a week for minimal cost, do you really think that Al Queda would have gone after it?
The trick under US law to getting rid of an organization is to demonstrate that they are behaving inconsistent with their charter in some core way and should no longer exist. But the RIAA is just a group of groups so you wouldn't be doing much as they'd reorganize with the same personnel and slightly modified policies in a week. The trick would be to demonstrate that they are a criminal enterprise bent on abusing their govt. granted monopolies (copyrights) and have engaged in a criminal conspiracy through the umbrella organization RIAA to overly restrict the right to copy through intimidation and abuse of process.
That would not only get the RIAA banned but would threaten the existance of the underlying distribution networks and land people in jail as criminal conspirators, ie radioactive for any other position of trust in corporate governance.
The question remains are the intimidation tactics, abuse of P2P networks, SLAP suits, etc. evidence of hardball tactics or something more sinister?
a rocket gets launched trailing a reel of carbon nanotubes. This original cable is very small, almost useless but it will hold enough weight for a small car to go up it laying down a reinforcing layer. Every three days another car goes up and every three days the cable gets thicker, stronger, and capable of sustaining more weight. Eventually, the entire thing is ready to go and what's the first thing they're going to launch? Reels of full sized space elevator cable so when the original inevitably breaks, it'll take just a few days to reel the replacement down at a negligible cost.
The ease of replacement, more than anything, is what is going to keep the thing off any terrorist's a-list of targets.
Oh, I don't know, solving the problem of producing enough energy to have the entire world living at 1st world standards seems like a decent goal (solar power satellites need $100-$200/lb lift costs to be practical).
I think that the really big deal that the practical people on earth will drool over will be the discovery and lowering of resource price ceilings. When we've got launch and retrieval costs down enough, asteroid mining becomes a new territory that will require manned space flight. It'll be funny though, how much of the US' space corps in that era will end up coming from Appalachia.
As asteroid mining starts up might the opposite problem occur and ll the stuff going down speed up the earth's angular momentum?
Seriously, my guess is that there's going to be enough money floating around this operation for a mathematician to be engaged just to sort this stuff out.
I don't have to wade into the cesspool to determine that it is unpleasant and stinks. I followed your link, just to be sure you weren't something new under the sun, and wasn't impressed.
It's just not true that the msn pages render perfect in every version of opera except the newest ones.
As shown by the above link, if MSN had spent less money and *not* developed specific opera pages, they would have enhanced the Opera compatibility of the code.
It's not childish or silly at all but fraudulent. There is a general understanding that your web site will make a good faith effort to be readable by every browser out there, not that it will pick out a competitor's product and break it on purpose. MSN users are being defrauded out of the superior experience they were promised. It's a small fraud on MS' usual scale but at what point do you stop cutting them slack and start enforcing the law against lying to your customers?
Apparently you not only didn't read the article but you didn't read my proposal either (or at least not carefully). I'm proposing a non-profit corp to do the work, not a govt. mandate (funded or not) so the court would not be burdened, and would probably get a bit of money from copying fees on transcripts. Heck, they might even score some free computers and start word processing instead of using those old manual typewriters they have currently (sarcasm alert).
I understand the motivations of westlaw and lexis and think that they are similar to what you're saying. However, I think that it's just not good enough and eventually something very similar to what I have said will come to pass.
Apparently a librarian mediated search is not sufficient because a librarian is coming forward asking for alternatives. As others have noted, mediating through a librarian slows the search process down and reduces the ability to change direction, browsing if you will, based on a passing mention of a heretofore unheard of section of case law.
As I understand it, Westlaw has a rep in every court in the land and takes the decisions, types them up, analyzes them, and puts them into a database with proprietary search engine. It's similar but not quite the same thing.
The Spanish Revolution was a crock and my idea has nothing to do with anarchism, merely advocating a long-understood, long-used solution to the problem of providing certain goods and services in a capitalist society, the non-profit corporation.
I've actually been working on the business plan for a few years. That's not for this instantiation specifically but for a generalized company that would, for a small fee, gather the resources to do this or any other public interest idea. If every time such an article came up there was a method given to actually fix the problem the law of fundraising averages would ensure a steady stream of revenue to the company. At the end of the day, you've raised your endowment and you can start operations.
As for going bankrupt, that's the risk of any organization, even govt. (see Argentina for a current example) so that's a red herring. Non-profits are fully compatible with the free market system. They provide services that for-profit corporations have not found it useful to fill. In this case that's case law access for public libraries.
It's all about you isn't it. You create a fund for it, get people to donate, and when you have enough money the service gets rolled out. It's very simple actually when you don't care whether you personally will gain access to the service.
The thing that's missing is a company that creates such funds at maximum efficiency and least drag. A fund like this might gain a few thousand dollars a year and take 3 or 4 decades to fully fund, not worth administering in the normal scheme of things. But if it is a project of an uber "public-interest fund" that has thousands of projects it makes sense.
Why does it need to be taxpayer funded? Why not privately funded as a non-profit? It saves the effort of counteracting Westlaw/Nexis/Lexis campaign contributions and would have the eventual effect of lowering public expense because if a non-profit is willing to do it based on interest off a nice fat endowment, the govt. doesn't have to pay these private for profit firms to do the same thing. The companies could still exist as they might have better search algorithms but it would certainly be an improved situation and not subject to political pressure to reverse course later.
People who are serious about research have their own encyclopedias or pay their own subscriptions.
Is the casual user who might look things up once or twice a year really a likely customer of WestLaw or Lexis/Nexis?
That all being said, the real solution is for a non-profit to be created to simply drive them out of business by replicating what they are doing directly through the courts.
If all case law was made available on-line by the courts themselves, all you would need would be a sophisticated database query assembler to poke the right courts with the right queries and assemble it all in a web page at the end.
If the current companies refuse to do business with you, replicate them, preferrably with a business model that will bankrupt them.
A non-profit entity that would take this market away from companies that are not taking their social responsibilites seriously is the perfect counter strike.
And what are they going to do about it? You can't make profit offering the same product for more money.
You might want to do research more than an hour at a time instead of getting kicked off the terminal by some 13 year old who is next in line. Somehow, I think that the case law searches by proffessionals will still largely be done outside the public library.
When you buy software, you take a lot on faith. The warranty disclaimers are severe, the ability to recoup losses is almost nil so you have to hang your hat and depend on the vendor's honesty, integrity, and intent to do the best they can both in the core functions of the application and on interoperability.
MS fails the honesty and integrity test. They have been demonstrated to intentionally sabotage other companies' work. If a product that competes with Microsoft's offerings is better for your enterprise, is it acceptable that this product is handicapped in any way by purposeful malcode coming from the microsoft portions of your infrastructure?
Beyond that, when you're making your multi-year commitment to a development framework, for many ISVs a bet the business decision, is it acceptable for the sales representations you depend on to contain knowingly fraudulent information?
Past a certain point, MS ceases to be a normal corporation and becomes a criminal enterprise. I do think that they can be saved but not without people going to jail.
Then again, 10% of gross may exceed the ill-gotten gains. The point is to set a penalty that is a deterrant that is not so draconian as to be repealed after its first use.
Let's take your logic and apply it in other elements of law and see if it makes sense. Let's calculate my ill gotten gains for going 85mph in a 55mph zone. I figure, I might have gained 15 minutes in a daily commute. At an $80/hour bill rate that comes to $20 of ill gotten gains. But the speeding ticket will cost me $300, the mandatory court appearance for exceeding 25mph over the speed limit will cost me a half day's pay of $320 and getting and fixing the mandatory suspension of my drivers license will probably cost another $800.
Eeek. I'd rather disgorge all my ill-gotten gains for each time they actually catch me, paying my $20 fine with a smile.
As I've said elsewhere, the problem with monopolies isn't that they have some sort of market power due to their size. The problem is that they lie, cheat, and steal in order to keep that dominant position. Anti-trust, all too often, seems to be an exercise in saying big is bad. Big can merely be the result of incompetent competitors and there's plenty of those in the history of the PC field.
I would say that most MS anti-trust violations can be restated as fraud or some other non-trust crime. When MS paid engineers to generate incompatibilities between DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 they defrauded their customers and, arguably, their shareholders. Ditto for the DR-DOS affair where they sent out media kits with doctored copies of Windows that gave out spurious errors when it was detected that DR-DOS, not MS-DOS was installed.
The problem isn't that MS is dominant, but how they react when they legitimately get beaten on the competitive realm. Their predatory actions have destroyed economic value in the billions of lost hours, misguided business plans, and foregone opportunities because nobody wants to get near the nasty-tempered beast that is MS.
Apple licensing is commercial tending towards open. MS licensing is commercial tending towards consumer serfdom. Apple does pull the rug out from under developers occasionaly with undocumented function call changes in order to force ISVs to go through the API. Microsoft refuses to document all its APIs and uses those APIs over the years to gain persistent advantage over its competitors.
In the case of Safari, Apple took an open source core and made improvements (releasing them back) wrapping the results in a better UI. Omniweb is going to take Apple's improved code and put their own UI over it, curing their most persistant problem, standards compliance.
The fact that others are choosing not to compete in this fashion is unfortunate, but nothing like what MS did to DR-DOS or even purposefully working to break Lotus 1-2-3 back in the DOS 3 days.
Slashdot Mirror
The carbon nanotube material is designed to break apart into small pieces and come down as powder. It would be a bad pollution day at most as much of it would burn up in the atmosphere. Wear a face mask and wash your car, problem solved.
A week after your very expensive 1 year of planning comes to fruition, the space elevator's back up and you've just given the authorities all sorts of new clues on how to reach back and destroy your group. If they could have rebuilt the WTC in a week for minimal cost, do you really think that Al Queda would have gone after it?
The trick under US law to getting rid of an organization is to demonstrate that they are behaving inconsistent with their charter in some core way and should no longer exist. But the RIAA is just a group of groups so you wouldn't be doing much as they'd reorganize with the same personnel and slightly modified policies in a week. The trick would be to demonstrate that they are a criminal enterprise bent on abusing their govt. granted monopolies (copyrights) and have engaged in a criminal conspiracy through the umbrella organization RIAA to overly restrict the right to copy through intimidation and abuse of process.
That would not only get the RIAA banned but would threaten the existance of the underlying distribution networks and land people in jail as criminal conspirators, ie radioactive for any other position of trust in corporate governance.
The question remains are the intimidation tactics, abuse of P2P networks, SLAP suits, etc. evidence of hardball tactics or something more sinister?
a rocket gets launched trailing a reel of carbon nanotubes. This original cable is very small, almost useless but it will hold enough weight for a small car to go up it laying down a reinforcing layer. Every three days another car goes up and every three days the cable gets thicker, stronger, and capable of sustaining more weight. Eventually, the entire thing is ready to go and what's the first thing they're going to launch? Reels of full sized space elevator cable so when the original inevitably breaks, it'll take just a few days to reel the replacement down at a negligible cost.
The ease of replacement, more than anything, is what is going to keep the thing off any terrorist's a-list of targets.
Oh, I don't know, solving the problem of producing enough energy to have the entire world living at 1st world standards seems like a decent goal (solar power satellites need $100-$200/lb lift costs to be practical).
I think that the really big deal that the practical people on earth will drool over will be the discovery and lowering of resource price ceilings. When we've got launch and retrieval costs down enough, asteroid mining becomes a new territory that will require manned space flight. It'll be funny though, how much of the US' space corps in that era will end up coming from Appalachia.
Oh, it's an easy sell. 17B USD gets us lift costs low enough to run solar power satellites and eliminate dependence on foreign oil.
It also gets you lift costs so low you can practically launch JDAMs into orbit and essentially have guided meteorites whenever you want.
I believe it's a three day trip.
Or instead of cutting the ribbon, maybe if you just let go?
As asteroid mining starts up might the opposite problem occur and ll the stuff going down speed up the earth's angular momentum?
Seriously, my guess is that there's going to be enough money floating around this operation for a mathematician to be engaged just to sort this stuff out.
I suggest you try updating your belief system to something not discredited entirely by events.
I don't have to wade into the cesspool to determine that it is unpleasant and stinks. I followed your link, just to be sure you weren't something new under the sun, and wasn't impressed.
It's just not true that the msn pages render perfect in every version of opera except the newest ones.
As shown by the above link, if MSN had spent less money and *not* developed specific opera pages, they would have enhanced the Opera compatibility of the code.
It's not childish or silly at all but fraudulent. There is a general understanding that your web site will make a good faith effort to be readable by every browser out there, not that it will pick out a competitor's product and break it on purpose. MSN users are being defrauded out of the superior experience they were promised. It's a small fraud on MS' usual scale but at what point do you stop cutting them slack and start enforcing the law against lying to your customers?
Apparently you not only didn't read the article but you didn't read my proposal either (or at least not carefully). I'm proposing a non-profit corp to do the work, not a govt. mandate (funded or not) so the court would not be burdened, and would probably get a bit of money from copying fees on transcripts. Heck, they might even score some free computers and start word processing instead of using those old manual typewriters they have currently (sarcasm alert).
I understand the motivations of westlaw and lexis and think that they are similar to what you're saying. However, I think that it's just not good enough and eventually something very similar to what I have said will come to pass.
Apparently a librarian mediated search is not sufficient because a librarian is coming forward asking for alternatives. As others have noted, mediating through a librarian slows the search process down and reduces the ability to change direction, browsing if you will, based on a passing mention of a heretofore unheard of section of case law.
As I understand it, Westlaw has a rep in every court in the land and takes the decisions, types them up, analyzes them, and puts them into a database with proprietary search engine. It's similar but not quite the same thing.
The Spanish Revolution was a crock and my idea has nothing to do with anarchism, merely advocating a long-understood, long-used solution to the problem of providing certain goods and services in a capitalist society, the non-profit corporation.
I've actually been working on the business plan for a few years. That's not for this instantiation specifically but for a generalized company that would, for a small fee, gather the resources to do this or any other public interest idea. If every time such an article came up there was a method given to actually fix the problem the law of fundraising averages would ensure a steady stream of revenue to the company. At the end of the day, you've raised your endowment and you can start operations.
As for going bankrupt, that's the risk of any organization, even govt. (see Argentina for a current example) so that's a red herring. Non-profits are fully compatible with the free market system. They provide services that for-profit corporations have not found it useful to fill. In this case that's case law access for public libraries.
It's all about you isn't it. You create a fund for it, get people to donate, and when you have enough money the service gets rolled out. It's very simple actually when you don't care whether you personally will gain access to the service.
The thing that's missing is a company that creates such funds at maximum efficiency and least drag. A fund like this might gain a few thousand dollars a year and take 3 or 4 decades to fully fund, not worth administering in the normal scheme of things. But if it is a project of an uber "public-interest fund" that has thousands of projects it makes sense.
Why does it need to be taxpayer funded? Why not privately funded as a non-profit? It saves the effort of counteracting Westlaw/Nexis/Lexis campaign contributions and would have the eventual effect of lowering public expense because if a non-profit is willing to do it based on interest off a nice fat endowment, the govt. doesn't have to pay these private for profit firms to do the same thing. The companies could still exist as they might have better search algorithms but it would certainly be an improved situation and not subject to political pressure to reverse course later.
People who are serious about research have their own encyclopedias or pay their own subscriptions.
Is the casual user who might look things up once or twice a year really a likely customer of WestLaw or Lexis/Nexis?
That all being said, the real solution is for a non-profit to be created to simply drive them out of business by replicating what they are doing directly through the courts.
If all case law was made available on-line by the courts themselves, all you would need would be a sophisticated database query assembler to poke the right courts with the right queries and assemble it all in a web page at the end.
If the current companies refuse to do business with you, replicate them, preferrably with a business model that will bankrupt them.
A non-profit entity that would take this market away from companies that are not taking their social responsibilites seriously is the perfect counter strike.
And what are they going to do about it? You can't make profit offering the same product for more money.
You might want to do research more than an hour at a time instead of getting kicked off the terminal by some 13 year old who is next in line. Somehow, I think that the case law searches by proffessionals will still largely be done outside the public library.
When you buy software, you take a lot on faith. The warranty disclaimers are severe, the ability to recoup losses is almost nil so you have to hang your hat and depend on the vendor's honesty, integrity, and intent to do the best they can both in the core functions of the application and on interoperability.
MS fails the honesty and integrity test. They have been demonstrated to intentionally sabotage other companies' work. If a product that competes with Microsoft's offerings is better for your enterprise, is it acceptable that this product is handicapped in any way by purposeful malcode coming from the microsoft portions of your infrastructure?
Beyond that, when you're making your multi-year commitment to a development framework, for many ISVs a bet the business decision, is it acceptable for the sales representations you depend on to contain knowingly fraudulent information?
Past a certain point, MS ceases to be a normal corporation and becomes a criminal enterprise. I do think that they can be saved but not without people going to jail.
I take it then that you support my assertion that SCSI and Firewire are two different things
Then again, 10% of gross may exceed the ill-gotten gains. The point is to set a penalty that is a deterrant that is not so draconian as to be repealed after its first use.
Let's take your logic and apply it in other elements of law and see if it makes sense. Let's calculate my ill gotten gains for going 85mph in a 55mph zone. I figure, I might have gained 15 minutes in a daily commute. At an $80/hour bill rate that comes to $20 of ill gotten gains. But the speeding ticket will cost me $300, the mandatory court appearance for exceeding 25mph over the speed limit will cost me a half day's pay of $320 and getting and fixing the mandatory suspension of my drivers license will probably cost another $800.
Eeek. I'd rather disgorge all my ill-gotten gains for each time they actually catch me, paying my $20 fine with a smile.
As I've said elsewhere, the problem with monopolies isn't that they have some sort of market power due to their size. The problem is that they lie, cheat, and steal in order to keep that dominant position. Anti-trust, all too often, seems to be an exercise in saying big is bad. Big can merely be the result of incompetent competitors and there's plenty of those in the history of the PC field.
I would say that most MS anti-trust violations can be restated as fraud or some other non-trust crime. When MS paid engineers to generate incompatibilities between DOS and Lotus 1-2-3 they defrauded their customers and, arguably, their shareholders. Ditto for the DR-DOS affair where they sent out media kits with doctored copies of Windows that gave out spurious errors when it was detected that DR-DOS, not MS-DOS was installed.
The problem isn't that MS is dominant, but how they react when they legitimately get beaten on the competitive realm. Their predatory actions have destroyed economic value in the billions of lost hours, misguided business plans, and foregone opportunities because nobody wants to get near the nasty-tempered beast that is MS.
Apple licensing is commercial tending towards open. MS licensing is commercial tending towards consumer serfdom. Apple does pull the rug out from under developers occasionaly with undocumented function call changes in order to force ISVs to go through the API. Microsoft refuses to document all its APIs and uses those APIs over the years to gain persistent advantage over its competitors.
In the case of Safari, Apple took an open source core and made improvements (releasing them back) wrapping the results in a better UI. Omniweb is going to take Apple's improved code and put their own UI over it, curing their most persistant problem, standards compliance.
The fact that others are choosing not to compete in this fashion is unfortunate, but nothing like what MS did to DR-DOS or even purposefully working to break Lotus 1-2-3 back in the DOS 3 days.