I respect the hell out of Jim Lovell. The man's got a set o' stones on him like Notre Dame Cathedral. That said, he's wrong about the shuttle and ISS. They are not magnificent technological accomplishments and their value is minimal at best. The flaws with the shuttle are well known and get documented every fifty flights when one of them kills its crew. The ISS is a floating joke, in which the 3 "scientists" spend all their waking time trying to stay alive. The ISS doesn't deserve to hold the jockstrap of the memory of Skylab or Mir.
I understand the fear that so many have, that if we stop manned spaceflight until we have a sensible replacement for the shuttle or a sensible place to _go_ other than LEO (again) to do "science" experiments submitted by grade-school children (again), then we'll never go back. The money will be appropriated for other purposes, and that will be that. Maybe they're right. Maybe the only way to stay in space is to keep pouring billions of dollars into creaky, unsafe vehicles going nowhere and doing nothing. If so, though, what's the real point?
The most-often cited reasons for manned spaceflight are science, the human drive to explore, and the need to get our eggs into at least one more basket. The science coming out of the budget-gobbling manned program is dwarfed by that of the robotic probes. We're not pushing the boundaries of anything by going to the same place we've gone 100 times before for a couple of weeks each time. Anything extraterrestrial human dwelling would be inexorably tied to home so a disaster to Earth (e.g., Shoemaker-Levy bopping us instead of Jupiter) would doom them as well.
I guess I've just lost the "vision". In my youth I was a big proponent of manned spaceflight. We were going to swarm the solar system and after inventing FTL, the galaxy or even the universe. Those were the dreams of a fat kid with a poor understanding of physics, though. The reality is that there's nowhere for us to go, nowhere we can reach. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I see an unmanned spaceflight program as vastly more worthy of our money until we've gathered far more information about "the neighborhood" than we have now.
You are exactly correct in your analysis. Alas, it's the right answer because the CarTalk guys asked the wrong question. They asked which single format they should use for maximum reach and maximum ease. They should have asked which formatS would accomplish the task. In other words, why not WM for the hordes and Ogg/Shoutcast/OtherFreePackage for others? As the man said, "it don't cost nuthin'."
I can't see that it really matters if Microsoft tries to "hook" the Third World on their products. The Third World can't _afford_ Microsoft prices (sort of what makes them Third World) and so if they are using Microsoft products it will be at no gain to the company's bottom line.
At my job, that's usually the managers' collective fault. See, in my work environment a manager is all too often a person of minimal technical but supreme "people" skill. It's not what you know, it's whom you blow.
I do fairly complicated stuff. It's not incomprehensible, but it takes more than a bullet list with simple words and a line drawing to understand. Yet, at least once a month I receive orders to provide "a PowerPoint slide or two for a briefing". Last time I took four slides to discuss the topic in sufficient detail and submitted them to my boss. She let me know that the order was for one slide. I shrunk the font until all four fit on one. Petty, yes, but the equivalent of "teach me how to build an internal combustion engine in one slide" deserves nothing but contempt.
The article quotes a businessman lamenting that Microsoft's decision to stop supporting W98 gives "free reign" to the net's baddies. Today's English lesson is as follows:
The phrase, dear learners, is "free rein" and it refers to a horseman letting the horse decide where and how fast they're going to go. There's no monarchical meaning, and couldn't be if you stop and think about it. The king can do whatever he wants by definition (except for the modern show-pony monarchs of the world) so there'd be nothing _but_ "free reign".
Have you corrected the spelling of the message forwarded to ICANN? I have no intention of sending them an email that says "I have signed an agree with blahblah." What the hell is an agree?
It's not 1943 anymore, folks. Slightly better than one hydrogen atom in 7000 is deuterium and separating 18 from 19 by mass isn't hard to do. Water's a lot cheaper and safer to handle than hydrogen gas, which is why he could afford heavy water but not deuterium gas. And why shouldn't you be able to up and buy heavy water? It's not a chemical hazard, a biohazard, and so on.
Let me be the first NukeE to mention that the reporter didn't quite hear correctly -- it's a "moderator". Which raises the question of why the kid didn't just put a couple of Ziploc baggies full of water between the gadget and his detector.
Wen Ho Lee had been fired from the lab and lost his access to secure areas before the hard drive incident, so it's not too surprising that he was found not at fault for that. He is also not at fault for the Cerro Grande fire that sent us scurrying from town in the dark of night, nor is he currently thought to be a suspect in the local Blockbuster Video's inability to keep an unscratched DVD of "Shanghai Knights" in stock.
While I'm disgusted by Boies' participation in the case, I recognize that I shouldn't be. He is a high-profile attorney, a hired gun of the modern world.
As to your question of whether he is a hotshot or not, bear in mind that he beat Microsoft like a red-headed stepchild in court. Only the change of Administration and the new Antitrust Division's boss's utter, abject sellout of the citizenry saved the company. Joel Klein's Antitrust Division would never have submitted a bend-over-and-take-it settlement agreement and they damn sure would have been ashamed to show their faces at a press conference asserting that such a settlement was a win for the American People.
I'm awestruck by the moderation. Perhaps I should have put a smiley and a hyperlink to the shuttle Endeavour. I mean..."troll"? Whisky Tango Foxtrot, over?
There is no blanket test ban treaty. The US Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The current moratorium on nuclear testing is strictly an executive policy, subject to change at the President's whim.
It's less likely that the grant got pulled for comments Theo made in a Canadian newspaper than for the fact that the government which has assiduously spent the last 18 months dismantling our country's(*) claim to being the Land of the Free finally realized that their vastly-expanding surveillance capabilities would be hampered by increased computing security. Plug pulled, time for Clipper 2.
Once upon a time there was a little show called "The X Files". It had a quiet little time slot on Friday nights and against all odds, it became fairly successful. The numbers were small but the viewers were passionate and Fox said "Cool! Fanboys stay home on Friday nights for skiffy shows!" So in their finite wisdom they moved "The X Files" to Sundays and have sent skiffy-related show after show after show to die on Fridays because it turns out that "The X Files" was special.
Admittedly, some of the shows that have died have done so deservedly ("Freakylinks", anyone?) but programs like "Millennium" and "Firefly" and "Strange Luck" deserved better than to wither and die on the Friday vine.
We're in violent agreement. There was no reason for the ISS's compromise orbit. It should have been positioned for most effective getting-to via Soyuz. Groceries come up via unmanned rockets and people ride the capsule. Much better for the ISS and it's much cheaper to put the Americans on a plane to Baikonur for a Soyuz ride than to put them in the shuttle.
And you're probably right about that all-stop meaning that we're quitting, but that's too depressing to contemplate before noon on a Saturday (where I am).
I'm sure many will disagree, but the cost of the shuttle program is horrendous, and NASA's insistence on using it has led to some cataclysmically stupid decisions. One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."
The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.
Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.
It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.
It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.
It's not so much that it's "hip" and "cool" to rag on ESR as it is a growing recognition that the man is the Jesse Jackson of software, shouldering widows and orphans out of the camera eye for his own advancement.
Not necessarily true now, either. The article says that media will be available from 100MB up to 5GB. Any takers that it's the 100MB card that sells for $15 with the 5GB "model" going for several hundred?
You're overly kind to Disney with your list of their original work.
"Bambi" was taken from the Felix Salten novel of 1926, rights acquired by Disney in the late 30s and released as a movie in 1942. In true Disney fashion, Salten was bent over and fucked. His daughter inherited his rights and then when she died, her husband. When he decided that his copyright (remember, we're promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, here) should have brought him more money, Disney pointed to a short story publication of "Bambi" from 1923 lacking a copyright notice and claimed that the story was public domain from the get-go and even if it wasn't, it was _now_ because Salten's daughter didn't file for a copyright extension in time (assuming that the clock began ticking with the 1923 publication).
"101 Dalmatians" (with an 'a') was written by Dodie Smith in 1956 as an adaptation of her story "The Great Dog Robbery", published in Woman's Day magazine. Disney bought the film rights and released the animated film in 1959.
Face it, folks, even when Walt was running the company they were villainous, scurrilous, thieving bastards cashing in on adults' desire for their children to see big-eyed animals that sang.
Since CTEA went into effect, what science and useful art has Disney progressed? Well, there was the sequel to "The Little Mermaid", which you may recall was based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. There was a sequel to "Sleeping Beauty", which you may recall was based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. There was "The Tigger Movie", which you may recall was based on characters created by A.A. Milne. There was a remake of "The Parent Trap". There was a sequel to the remake of "Dalmatians". There was a sequel to "Mermaid". There was "Tarzan" and then a sequel to "Tarzan", the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs. There was a sequel to the stolen "Lion King". There was a sequel to Victor Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame". There is "Treasure Planet", a/k/a 'Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" in Space'. There's a sequel to the musical adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book". I could go on, but I can't go on, if you know what I mean (and I think you do).
Well, I'd reject this agreement if I were the judge who had to approval responsibility. Before explaining why, let me kick out some facts/numbers/minor assumptions.
0) Microsoft admits no wrongdoing in the settlement.
1) Microsoft isn't paying a $1.1B fine. It is issuing vouchers for _up to_ $1.1B in products, whether hardware or software, whether Microsoft's or someone else's.
2) The redemption rate on vouchers and coupons and rebates is historically very low. Everyone knows this; it's why manufacturers will include $50 rebate coupons in their products rather than just knocking $50 off the price. The lower the rebate, the lower the redemption rate. With the vouchers in this settlement being $29 for Excel or Office, $16 for Windows, and $5 for Word, an awful lot of people won't bother, especially since they won't be getting a check, they'll be getting a discount which means "you gotta spend money to save money" at a time when the economy's tight. Let's say Microsoft ends up issuing half a billion dollars' worth of these vouchers (which I think is way optimistic). There are two immediate consequences of that.
3a) Of the $500M issued to private claimants, 80% or so will go to businesses (assuming equal breakdown of claims to sales; the SJMerc reports businesses were responsible for 80% of MS sales in California). Whether through preferring to go with the 'standard' or through an honest belief that One Microsoft Way is more than an address, these businesses have made the decision to use Microsoft software and the hardware than runs it -- including some sold by Microsoft. It is reasonable to expect these businesses to redeem their vouchers on More Of The Same. They'll be using these vouchers to expand the use of Microsoft products. So long as they choose software, the cost to Microsoft falls effectively to zero. The same applies to the $100M issued to private citizens, although their claim rate is likely to be higher because of disgruntled Microsoft-haters who make sure to buy a Logitech mouse with the voucher from their Windows tax.
3a) The remaining fraction, $600M, is one-third kept by Microsoft (saving $200M off the top) and two-thirds (that's $400M, if you're bad at math) donated as vouchers to schools. They will likely do with those vouchers what private claimants do; namely, turn them into more Microsoft products. Again, much of that will be software, making Microsoft's effective price zero.
That means that of the Whopping, Staggering One Point One Billion Dollar Agreement, Microsoft will probably lose one-two hundred million in income due to the cash value of the vouchers. A company that size can afford that without a hitch, esp. since the income spike caused by voucher redemption (using your $16 coupon to buy a $200 XBox means another $184 for Microsoft plus future licensing fees on the games you'll buy) and the tax benefits of having to absorb a "$900M" court settlement will offset voucher value so it will almost certainly end up seeing a pretty sweet bump to its bottom line, plus the warm fuzzies many people will feel when they see Microsoft write a "$400M check" to those poor public schools.
In short, the agreement is going to help Microsoft immensely. It is going to do _very_ well if the court accepts the agreement.
So here's why I'd reject it: the purpose of the suit was to prove that Microsoft used its monopoly power to overcharge California customers. The purpose of a settlement or penalty is twofold: to make restitution to the overcharged and to dissuade the company from doing it again. I think the settlement would accomplish the first but it fails utterly in the second. The company walks away with increased revenue, improved PR, and no legal record of having broken the law. That is unacceptable to me. See you in court, Counselor.
You asked what _would_ be acceptable. Microsoft pays real money, not vouchers. It pays all the money to the state of California, to ensure that the company's penalty is real and not diminished by the large number of citizens who aren't worked up enough to claim their refunds. California can distribute the funds to claimants and distribute the rest to schools in whatever equitable manner the legislature decides (which would probably means giving $X to the schools, cutting the school budget allocation by $X, and increasing general fund spending by $X -- that's what the states with lotteries to benefit education do). Microsoft pays treble the estimated overcharge (let's call it $3.3B in the manner of the original settlement proposal). Microsoft admits willfully using its monopoly power to overcharge California customers. Microsoft pays all the undoubtedly soaring legal fees associated with the case. Microsoft pays California the cost of administering the refund program. The legal and administrative costs are in addition to the $3.3B penalty, not part of it. That, I could live with.
Steal a dollar and give a dime and they'll love you for it. It's great that the Gates Foundation is handing out huge chunks of cash to worthy causes but never lose sight of the fact that that money was obtained through the vile business practices you decry. By all means, separate the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and Bill Gates -- but the money all comes from the same place: ye and me.
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I respect the hell out of Jim Lovell. The man's got a set o' stones on him like Notre Dame Cathedral. That said, he's wrong about the shuttle and ISS. They are not magnificent technological accomplishments and their value is minimal at best. The flaws with the shuttle are well known and get documented every fifty flights when one of them kills its crew. The ISS is a floating joke, in which the 3 "scientists" spend all their waking time trying to stay alive. The ISS doesn't deserve to hold the jockstrap of the memory of Skylab or Mir.
I understand the fear that so many have, that if we stop manned spaceflight until we have a sensible replacement for the shuttle or a sensible place to _go_ other than LEO (again) to do "science" experiments submitted by grade-school children (again), then we'll never go back. The money will be appropriated for other purposes, and that will be that. Maybe they're right. Maybe the only way to stay in space is to keep pouring billions of dollars into creaky, unsafe vehicles going nowhere and doing nothing. If so, though, what's the real point?
The most-often cited reasons for manned spaceflight are science, the human drive to explore, and the need to get our eggs into at least one more basket. The science coming out of the budget-gobbling manned program is dwarfed by that of the robotic probes. We're not pushing the boundaries of anything by going to the same place we've gone 100 times before for a couple of weeks each time. Anything extraterrestrial human dwelling would be inexorably tied to home so a disaster to Earth (e.g., Shoemaker-Levy bopping us instead of Jupiter) would doom them as well.
I guess I've just lost the "vision". In my youth I was a big proponent of manned spaceflight. We were going to swarm the solar system and after inventing FTL, the galaxy or even the universe. Those were the dreams of a fat kid with a poor understanding of physics, though. The reality is that there's nowhere for us to go, nowhere we can reach. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I see an unmanned spaceflight program as vastly more worthy of our money until we've gathered far more information about "the neighborhood" than we have now.
You are exactly correct in your analysis. Alas, it's the right answer because the CarTalk guys asked the wrong question. They asked which single format they should use for maximum reach and maximum ease. They should have asked which formatS would accomplish the task. In other words, why not WM for the hordes and Ogg/Shoutcast/OtherFreePackage for others? As the man said, "it don't cost nuthin'."
I can't see that it really matters if Microsoft tries to "hook" the Third World on their products. The Third World can't _afford_ Microsoft prices (sort of what makes them Third World) and so if they are using Microsoft products it will be at no gain to the company's bottom line.
At my job, that's usually the managers' collective fault. See, in my work environment a manager is all too often a person of minimal technical but supreme "people" skill. It's not what you know, it's whom you blow.
I do fairly complicated stuff. It's not incomprehensible, but it takes more than a bullet list with simple words and a line drawing to understand. Yet, at least once a month I receive orders to provide "a PowerPoint slide or two for a briefing". Last time I took four slides to discuss the topic in sufficient detail and submitted them to my boss. She let me know that the order was for one slide. I shrunk the font until all four fit on one. Petty, yes, but the equivalent of "teach me how to build an internal combustion engine in one slide" deserves nothing but contempt.
The article quotes a businessman lamenting that Microsoft's decision to stop supporting W98 gives "free reign" to the net's baddies. Today's English lesson is as follows:
The phrase, dear learners, is "free rein" and it refers to a horseman letting the horse decide where and how fast they're going to go. There's no monarchical meaning, and couldn't be if you stop and think about it. The king can do whatever he wants by definition (except for the modern show-pony monarchs of the world) so there'd be nothing _but_ "free reign".
Here endeth the lesson.
The atomic mass unit is defined as 1/12 a C12 atom (used to be 1/16 an O16 atom)...I don't know if the amu is the same thing as a Dalton.
Have you corrected the spelling of the message forwarded to ICANN? I have no intention of sending them an email that says "I have signed an agree with blahblah." What the hell is an agree?
It's not 1943 anymore, folks. Slightly better than one hydrogen atom in 7000 is deuterium and separating 18 from 19 by mass isn't hard to do. Water's a lot cheaper and safer to handle than hydrogen gas, which is why he could afford heavy water but not deuterium gas. And why shouldn't you be able to up and buy heavy water? It's not a chemical hazard, a biohazard, and so on.
Let me be the first NukeE to mention that the reporter didn't quite hear correctly -- it's a "moderator". Which raises the question of why the kid didn't just put a couple of Ziploc baggies full of water between the gadget and his detector.
Wen Ho Lee had been fired from the lab and lost his access to secure areas before the hard drive incident, so it's not too surprising that he was found not at fault for that. He is also not at fault for the Cerro Grande fire that sent us scurrying from town in the dark of night, nor is he currently thought to be a suspect in the local Blockbuster Video's inability to keep an unscratched DVD of "Shanghai Knights" in stock.
Sheesh.
While I'm disgusted by Boies' participation in the case, I recognize that I shouldn't be. He is a high-profile attorney, a hired gun of the modern world.
As to your question of whether he is a hotshot or not, bear in mind that he beat Microsoft like a red-headed stepchild in court. Only the change of Administration and the new Antitrust Division's boss's utter, abject sellout of the citizenry saved the company. Joel Klein's Antitrust Division would never have submitted a bend-over-and-take-it settlement agreement and they damn sure would have been ashamed to show their faces at a press conference asserting that such a settlement was a win for the American People.
Go, Missouri Miners! If your solar car can get you out of Rolla, just keep going!
I'm awestruck by the moderation. Perhaps I should have put a smiley and a hyperlink to the shuttle Endeavour. I mean..."troll"? Whisky Tango Foxtrot, over?
"My graditude [sic] to everyone that has ever dared to travel to space. My thanks to those that have lost their lives in the endeavour."
No one has died in the Endeavour. Only the Challenger and Columbia have killed their crews.
Thank you! I'm here all week!
There is no blanket test ban treaty. The US Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The current moratorium on nuclear testing is strictly an executive policy, subject to change at the President's whim.
It's less likely that the grant got pulled for comments Theo made in a Canadian newspaper than for the fact that the government which has assiduously spent the last 18 months dismantling our country's(*) claim to being the Land of the Free finally realized that their vastly-expanding surveillance capabilities would be hampered by increased computing security. Plug pulled, time for Clipper 2.
(*) For values of "our country" == "the USA".
Once upon a time there was a little show called "The X Files". It had a quiet little time slot on Friday nights and against all odds, it became fairly successful. The numbers were small but the viewers were passionate and Fox said "Cool! Fanboys stay home on Friday nights for skiffy shows!" So in their finite wisdom they moved "The X Files" to Sundays and have sent skiffy-related show after show after show to die on Fridays because it turns out that "The X Files" was special.
Admittedly, some of the shows that have died have done so deservedly ("Freakylinks", anyone?) but programs like "Millennium" and "Firefly" and "Strange Luck" deserved better than to wither and die on the Friday vine.
If it's a Eugenia Loli-Queru review it can be boiled down to this: "It's not BeOS. It sucks."
We're in violent agreement. There was no reason for the ISS's compromise orbit. It should have been positioned for most effective getting-to via Soyuz. Groceries come up via unmanned rockets and people ride the capsule. Much better for the ISS and it's much cheaper to put the Americans on a plane to Baikonur for a Soyuz ride than to put them in the shuttle.
And you're probably right about that all-stop meaning that we're quitting, but that's too depressing to contemplate before noon on a Saturday (where I am).
I'm sure many will disagree, but the cost of the shuttle program is horrendous, and NASA's insistence on using it has led to some cataclysmically stupid decisions. One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."
The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.
Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.
It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.
It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.
Let's do it over. And do it right.
It's not so much that it's "hip" and "cool" to rag on ESR as it is a growing recognition that the man is the Jesse Jackson of software, shouldering widows and orphans out of the camera eye for his own advancement.
Not necessarily true now, either. The article says that media will be available from 100MB up to 5GB. Any takers that it's the 100MB card that sells for $15 with the 5GB "model" going for several hundred?
You're overly kind to Disney with your list of their original work.
"Bambi" was taken from the Felix Salten novel of 1926, rights acquired by Disney in the late 30s and released as a movie in 1942. In true Disney fashion, Salten was bent over and fucked. His daughter inherited his rights and then when she died, her husband. When he decided that his copyright (remember, we're promoting the progress of science and the useful arts, here) should have brought him more money, Disney pointed to a short story publication of "Bambi" from 1923 lacking a copyright notice and claimed that the story was public domain from the get-go and even if it wasn't, it was _now_ because Salten's daughter didn't file for a copyright extension in time (assuming that the clock began ticking with the 1923 publication).
"101 Dalmatians" (with an 'a') was written by Dodie Smith in 1956 as an adaptation of her story "The Great Dog Robbery", published in Woman's Day magazine. Disney bought the film rights and released the animated film in 1959.
Face it, folks, even when Walt was running the company they were villainous, scurrilous, thieving bastards cashing in on adults' desire for their children to see big-eyed animals that sang.
Since CTEA went into effect, what science and useful art has Disney progressed? Well, there was the sequel to "The Little Mermaid", which you may recall was based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. There was a sequel to "Sleeping Beauty", which you may recall was based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale. There was "The Tigger Movie", which you may recall was based on characters created by A.A. Milne. There was a remake of "The Parent Trap". There was a sequel to the remake of "Dalmatians". There was a sequel to "Mermaid". There was "Tarzan" and then a sequel to "Tarzan", the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs. There was a sequel to the stolen "Lion King". There was a sequel to Victor Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame". There is "Treasure Planet", a/k/a 'Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" in Space'. There's a sequel to the musical adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book". I could go on, but I can't go on, if you know what I mean (and I think you do).
Well, I'd reject this agreement if I were the judge who had to approval responsibility. Before explaining why, let me kick out some facts/numbers/minor assumptions.
0) Microsoft admits no wrongdoing in the settlement.
1) Microsoft isn't paying a $1.1B fine. It is issuing vouchers for _up to_ $1.1B in products, whether hardware or software, whether Microsoft's or someone else's.
2) The redemption rate on vouchers and coupons and rebates is historically very low. Everyone knows this; it's why manufacturers will include $50 rebate coupons in their products rather than just knocking $50 off the price. The lower the rebate, the lower the redemption rate. With the vouchers in this settlement being $29 for Excel or Office, $16 for Windows, and $5 for Word, an awful lot of people won't bother, especially since they won't be getting a check, they'll be getting a discount which means "you gotta spend money to save money" at a time when the economy's tight. Let's say Microsoft ends up issuing half a billion dollars' worth of these vouchers (which I think is way optimistic). There are two immediate consequences of that.
3a) Of the $500M issued to private claimants, 80% or so will go to businesses (assuming equal breakdown of claims to sales; the SJMerc reports businesses were responsible for 80% of MS sales in California). Whether through preferring to go with the 'standard' or through an honest belief that One Microsoft Way is more than an address, these businesses have made the decision to use Microsoft software and the hardware than runs it -- including some sold by Microsoft. It is reasonable to expect these businesses to redeem their vouchers on More Of The Same. They'll be using these vouchers to expand the use of Microsoft products. So long as they choose software, the cost to Microsoft falls effectively to zero. The same applies to the $100M issued to private citizens, although their claim rate is likely to be higher because of disgruntled Microsoft-haters who make sure to buy a Logitech mouse with the voucher from their Windows tax.
3a) The remaining fraction, $600M, is one-third kept by Microsoft (saving $200M off the top) and two-thirds (that's $400M, if you're bad at math) donated as vouchers to schools. They will likely do with those vouchers what private claimants do; namely, turn them into more Microsoft products. Again, much of that will be software, making Microsoft's effective price zero.
That means that of the Whopping, Staggering One Point One Billion Dollar Agreement, Microsoft will probably lose one-two hundred million in income due to the cash value of the vouchers. A company that size can afford that without a hitch, esp. since the income spike caused by voucher redemption (using your $16 coupon to buy a $200 XBox means another $184 for Microsoft plus future licensing fees on the games you'll buy) and the tax benefits of having to absorb a "$900M" court settlement will offset voucher value so it will almost certainly end up seeing a pretty sweet bump to its bottom line, plus the warm fuzzies many people will feel when they see Microsoft write a "$400M check" to those poor public schools.
In short, the agreement is going to help Microsoft immensely. It is going to do _very_ well if the court accepts the agreement.
So here's why I'd reject it: the purpose of the suit was to prove that Microsoft used its monopoly power to overcharge California customers. The purpose of a settlement or penalty is twofold: to make restitution to the overcharged and to dissuade the company from doing it again. I think the settlement would accomplish the first but it fails utterly in the second. The company walks away with increased revenue, improved PR, and no legal record of having broken the law. That is unacceptable to me. See you in court, Counselor.
You asked what _would_ be acceptable. Microsoft pays real money, not vouchers. It pays all the money to the state of California, to ensure that the company's penalty is real and not diminished by the large number of citizens who aren't worked up enough to claim their refunds. California can distribute the funds to claimants and distribute the rest to schools in whatever equitable manner the legislature decides (which would probably means giving $X to the schools, cutting the school budget allocation by $X, and increasing general fund spending by $X -- that's what the states with lotteries to benefit education do). Microsoft pays treble the estimated overcharge (let's call it $3.3B in the manner of the original settlement proposal). Microsoft admits willfully using its monopoly power to overcharge California customers. Microsoft pays all the undoubtedly soaring legal fees associated with the case. Microsoft pays California the cost of administering the refund program. The legal and administrative costs are in addition to the $3.3B penalty, not part of it. That, I could live with.
Steal a dollar and give a dime and they'll love you for it. It's great that the Gates Foundation is handing out huge chunks of cash to worthy causes but never lose sight of the fact that that money was obtained through the vile business practices you decry. By all means, separate the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and Bill Gates -- but the money all comes from the same place: ye and me.