Also your employer can fire any of your idiotic coworkers once they show themselves to be idiots not a year later once their clusterfucks have pilled up high enough to block lawsuits.
I have had people, I think on the Creative Commons mailing lists, tell me that this is not the case in their countries... That the work must be original or creative or something along those lines and that things like a recording of water cooler conversations and the like would likely fail this and not get copyright protection. Good point, there probably are many things which don't count. My point was as you mentioned that anything that you can get copyright for you get copyright for automatically in the US. It used to be that you didn't I think.
Well I apparently wasn't accurate, apparently you have to register to sue but it seems you can register at any time (even after infringement). To quote the US copyright office webpage:
-In general, copyright registration is a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright. However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection. -Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U.S. origin. -If registration is made within 3 months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner. -Registration may be made at any time within the life of the copyright. Unlike the law before 1978, when a work has been registered in unpublished form, it is not necessary to make another registration when the work becomes published, although the copyright owner may register the published edition, if desired.
You have copyright on everything you create by default and you never lose it (unless you give it away). If you don't register it the result is that you simplu can't sue for quite as much as you could otherwise (although you can still sue).
Note however that if you publish in a certain medium you may be providing certain implied license terms even if you explicitly claim otherwise. For example you can't put a notice on a website saying that all copying of it (outside strict fair use) is prohibited as to even read that notice it has to be copied (to the user's ram and browser cache if nothing else). Likewise usenet posts also would have an implied license to be distributed via usenet servers.
Yes, that's how it's supposed to work, but the GP is right that in practice, we are asked to base policies on our trust of them. Which is irrelevant, you fly on planes that you rarely understand the basic principles of much less the engineering. You drive on cars whose inner working are sometimes trade secrets. You eat food whose origin is a mystery in most cases and whose composition you never even try to check.
We trust a lot of things which means very little. Nothing is perfect and often there is a bloody good reason for that. Claiming something will make it better is usually how you make things much much worse.
There are big economies of scale in probe construction and deployment. Not really, most of the construction and deployment needs very specialized parts and 30 is nowhere near large scale production. For most things 30 costs almost as much to make per unit as 1. The savings come from being able to spread the R&D costs over 30 units (you can use the exact same process to make 1 or 30 in many cases) NOT from being able to make each one for cheaply.
Second, the cost of building 30 probes is going to be cheaper per unit than the cost of building 2 probes. Depends, if you need to train new people due to the effort required it may not be cheaper. There is a non-trivial cost to increasing the rate of production of something this complex.
Launch costs can be considerably reduced by launching all thirty over a few years and spread over several launchers. There is a small window during which you can send things to Mars in a cost effective manner. Also you gain little from multiple launches as rockets don't scale with smaller size, actually they may get less cost efficient with smaller size (after a point).
Finally, operation costs for managing 30 probes would only be a modest bit more than the cost of managing 2 probes. How in bloody hell do 15 times more personel cost the same amount? Rovers are very much manual things to control and everything needs to be planned in insane detail. There is a reason they move slower than snails. Any problems require teams of experts to solve and fixes need to be carefully planned. A single mistake can permanently kill a rover. Also you'd need more bandwidth so you need to send more communication sats and ground side receivers/transmitters.
End result is that conservatively, launch and construction costs can at least be halved per probe and operation costs are a fifth the cost per probe. Launch costs are fixed. Actually due to lack of infrastructure for building and sending up so many rockets they would go UP with that many probes not down (as the facilities would be worthless afterwards and likely just left to rust). Construction costs would go down but since there is a lot of quality control and specialized parts I doubt they'd go down that much (especially if you need to train people to do so and they're not as good as their predecessors).
That yields per probe costs of around $140 million including construction, launch, and operations. Pointless number, NASA has a small fixed budget. They can spend only a couple billion per mission so if you want 100 of them they need to be a simpler design than currently exists. Even 100 modern probes will provide little compared to 1 probe in 10 years. A single $14 billion probe would likewise be able to have so many instruments it would provide orders of magnitude more useful data than 100 probes.
I would assume it wasn't better because in most cases electricity has to travel over a long distance UNUSED between production and final usage point (ie: power generator and someone's home). AC can relatively easily be upped to high voltage which is good for sending over long distance (much higher efficiency) IF you don't need to use it along the way. Also I think single speed AC motors are easy to make.
Subways (and the like) are unique because the transmission line is also your final output/usage point. You CAN'T send electricity at high voltage for part of the trip. So you only need to make electricity at one voltage and feed it straight into the line with no conversions for efficiency. It doesn't matter that you can't change the DC voltage as it would actually be counter productive to do so.
This is also why I assume subways have their own dedicated power stations or used to at least.
No it's not because the probes are NOT identical. That is unless you mean to compare 30 probes at $1 billion each versus 2 probes at $1 billion each. In any sane reality you are comparing 30 probes worth $75 million each versus 2 probes worth $1 billion each. This disparity in per-probe funding filters down to the cost of continual support from earth not just in initial build/launch cost. Furthermore each of those 30 probes has to be much smaller than if only 2 probes were used (or launch costs grow too high).
The question is in other words between sending 30 relatively simple/small probes or two large/complex probes. The later will be able to have much higher quality control (on build if not design) and more space for redundancy. Higher quality components can also be used as there is money available for them. Likewise each of those two probes will be able to have a much larger number of support personnel on earth capable of giving them continuous individual attention.
Well it is one off in the sense that you launch a dozen copies of something ONCE (ie: within a short period of time). All the infrastructure needed to build and launch these things becomes worthless once they are launched, assuming you have nothing else to use it for. It has to be a one off thign as otherwise there is a constant bugdet drain on NASA from the high number of launches which is likely way beyond it's ability to pay for (long term). Now you could launch them over a long period of time but then it's not much use as you're sending quite obsolete devices after a short period of time.
No, the long term costs go down if a high volume is sustained or if the current infrastructure can trivially support higher volume. For a single one off launch the costs are higher as all the launch/manufacturing facilities need to be upgraded (and the extra capacity will see little future use).
The DARPA vehicles also had extensively testing in the same environment, had to run for one day and still failed quite often. It also had a very large powerful engine and probably more kg of autonomous driving equipment than the mass of a whole mars rover.
Also Mars is NOT Earth, it is not a pleasant environment. The trip there is even less pleasant. Normal electronics would likely arrive dead. Normal machinery would die quickly on Mars. Hell, machinery dies quickly on Earth if it weren't for constant maintenance.
Except the choice is a detailed look at a few places and a un-detailed look at 10 places (I expect 60%+ of those rovers to fail before doing anything useful).
No very high end desktop drives are SCSI 15k rpm drives, I know as I had a couple a while back. They're fast but expensive and some are loud as a jet engine, they have existed for a decade probably if not more.
Nonetheless the fastest reasonable sanely priced hard drives for desktops are 7200. If you actually care about the utterly highest performance then you don't want a laptop, it's simple as that. The majority of people don't, for them 7200 is essentially the fastest desktop drive.
1. They are too fragile. So are desktops if you tried carrying them around and throwing them about.
2. The internal guts are too hard to work with. Anything more than a RAM upgrade is a nightmare of tiny screws and shielding tape. So? Very, very few people do upgrades on their computers nowadays. They may build them from parts but aside from the hard drive and ram "upgrade" means getting a whole new system (motherboard, cpu, video card, etc.). Technology changes too quickly and parts are not that backwards compatible. For most people messing with the inside of their computer is simply a waste of time, both techies and non-techies.
3. Operating systems are targeted for desktops and servers, they don't make it easy to set up a laptop the way you want, with encrypted partitions, network configuration, etc. Sure these features are there for the tinkering, but I don't want to mess around, I just want to get to work. So you want to mess with the hardware but not the software? Anyway, everything requires tinkering if you want it to do what you want. You're simply used to doing things ones way (and setting them up) on a desktop.
4. Laptop hard drives are so slow! You would think there could be a slightly larger drive form factor that would allow for a drive whose speed approaches that of a standard hard drive. ...when was the last time you even saw a laptop 1995???? Laptop hard drives are 7200, guess what desktop hard drives are? 7200.
5. The batteries are all different. Hard drives, RAM, etc. are interchangeable to some extent, why not batteries? Because manufacturers have nothing to gain from it and battery sizes vary a lot.
6. Those tiny little laptop cooling fans drive me batty. I really hate the high-pitched whine. So get a laptop with a large fan.
7. While I appreciate the small size, I would gladly trade a pound or so and a quarter inch of thickness for less whiney fans and a faster hard drive. If it's too big to fit in my pocket, it should be a real computer. I repeat my previous point "...when was the last time you even saw a laptop 1995????"
8. Not much to be done about it, but it's not possible to use one in comfort; the ergonomics inherently suck. It's called a docking bay with external monitor, keyboard and mouse.
* Leave you car at home, ride a bike to go to work, visit your friends It would take me an hour or so to bike to work, everything added in (like a shower). That's an hour (or two if I go both ways) I could have spent on something else. Yes a full hour, it's oddly difficult to read a book while biking to work but not that difficult when taking the bus. You can also read a book (or watch tv) when doing cardio in a gym or at home.
Also, biking to work entails a non-trivial chance of death or severe bodily harm for me due to the route I'd need to take.
* Dont use escalators or elevators Decent idea, a few of my co-workers do this.
* Run a few blocks in the morning or evening See first point about time.
* Get a hobby that does not involve sitting in front of a tv or monitor Well since I don't do it now it likely doesn't interest me. In which case I may as well just go to the gym instead.
And what if the cops are chasing someone with a pacemaker? Hell since this thing isn't so precise a better question is "what if a bystander with a pacemaker is hit"?
Well one idea for quickly thermoforming venus is to drop comets on it, broken up before impact to impact all their energy into the atmosphere. The idea being that the simplest method to get rid of the atmosphere is to simply blow it into space. Sadly it seems that the energy required would be quite a lot, as in you'd need to hit the planet with a lot of comets or whatever other space junk you find.
have access to all scientific software at much much cheaper "academic" rates Your point being? The goverment doesn't force this, I mean are you advocating communism here or something?
and can pay grad students slave wages ($15,000 per year for a 3000 hour work week is well below the Federal minimum wage). Does the grad student have to pay tuition or not? Also salaried workers can also be paid little due to lack of overtime.
First of all firefox has somewhat high memory usage in general, it's not a bug but simply how it works. The memory usage in the 2.* branch is stable but not tiny, some people don't like that while most don't care (why else do I have so much ram in this machine?).
Also everyone is not complaining, a small number of people are complaining (I've seen a lot of people complaining on slashdot, this ain't it) which apparently your own delusional mind thinks is "everyone."
Most large non-profits pay their CEOs good money because good CEOs cost money (even then these CEOs are taking a large pay cut compared to for profit companies). Otherwise they'd have shitty CEOs who would run them into the ground. Or CEOs who would rob them blind then move to some country they can't get extradited out of.
The only thing I've seen mess up firefox cpu wise recently were: -slashdot, I think it's some horrid flash ad. -badly coded javascript on webpages -badly coded extensions (I got ff to infinite loop to death with one of mine before by accident).
Also 200mb of memory seems normal actually, if you want it to use less you need to probably change the caching options and so on.
Likewise I find that bug report to be very spare on actual details and how to reproduce it. See you ASSUME that the bug shows up for everyone easily while it's bloody clear (due to lack of complaints) that it doesn't. Then of course when your failure to provide enough information/analysis (exactly what set of web pages triggers it, when doesn't it trigger, etc.) makes the bug unreproducible to everyone else you bitch that FF devs suck (when in reality only god himself could do anything to fix it given your information).
Clearly, you think it makes sense to blow massive amounts on evangelizing Firefox with full-page ads in the national press while, at the same time, writing off the entire Mac platform rather than address a technical problem. 90% + of computer users are on PCs, it makes perfect sense to target them and ignore other platforms.
As for addressing the problem, is the a bug ticket on it? Can yo reproduce it on a clean ff install? Can others reproduce it? It's hard to solve a problem that cannot be reproduced and that seems to be the case for many of these bugs that people somehow think can magically be fixed in 10 seconds.
Perhaps this is the core of the problem: any commercial application would be desperate to grow rather than reduce their marketshare. Many, many, many commercial applications ignore the mac and linux markets totally while others release sub-standard versions for them (see MS office and IE for example). It's beyond logical, they can either spend money to retain 10% of 5% of the market or to retain 10% of 90% of the market, assuming it costs the same to fix the same severity bug on both. As a result bugs on less used platforms if they only appear on those platforms logically take lower precedence.
Instead, we have a grossly overpaid layer of bureaucrats who know little and care less about the technical enthusiasm and volunteered time that made Firefox a success in the first place. Enthusiasm takes you only so far, in the end it's much better if there is money to pay you for what you're doing.
This might be fine if it wasn't for the fact that sharper, hungrier competitors have their eyes on the same prize. So? If someone does it better then let them, I'm not a fanboy or fanatic so I could care less. FF has a lot of problems that are probably unfixable due to it's code (and it's complexity, design or what not). If someone can do it better from scratch then all the power to them.
Anyone who writes off millions of their existing users as "a minor user base" simply no longer gets it, especially when you consider that members of that "minor user base" are proportionately far more likely than Windows users to also be contributing developers. So why haven't all these "mac firefox developers" fixed your bug already? Well? Firefox is open source and they can easily enough contribute, heck you claim they do already. Then again even if mac has twice the rate of developers it's still only what a fifth the total number as there are on windows?
There is no way that the head of an open source project should be taking half a mil in compensation. No, it's the CEO (and I think other posts?) of a non-profit corporation (and a for-profit one I think as well) that is making half a million. The company that person works for happens to work on a number of open source projects but that it irrelevant really. It is in the end just that, a company, one that has $60 million in revenue to deal with.
A good CEO for a for-profit company can easily make millions or tens of millions. Those for non-profits can easily make hundreds of thousands and Mozilla isn't exactly a tiny non-profit.
They're paying the CEO what is essentially a fair wage for the position and even then the person being paid it is sacrificing massive amount of potential money just by working for Mozilla (instead of a for-profit).
I'm sorry but the problem is YOU or YOUR system not firefox in general. Maybe it's a mac problem but thats a minor user base so it's far from a major bug.
Any recent version of firefox not running horrendously broken extensions doesn't have memory problems. Older versions had problems and extensions can leak memory if badly designed but firefox itself doesn't. I keep it open for WEEKS and it never goes over 200mb unless it needs to, say for massively image filled threads (and then it goes back down when it no longer needs to).
Slashdot Mirror
Also your employer can fire any of your idiotic coworkers once they show themselves to be idiots not a year later once their clusterfucks have pilled up high enough to block lawsuits.
Well I apparently wasn't accurate, apparently you have to register to sue but it seems you can register at any time (even after infringement). To quote the US copyright office webpage:
-In general, copyright registration is a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright. However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection.
-Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U.S. origin.
-If registration is made within 3 months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner.
-Registration may be made at any time within the life of the copyright. Unlike the law before 1978, when a work has been registered in unpublished form, it is not necessary to make another registration when the work becomes published, although the copyright owner may register the published edition, if desired.
You have copyright on everything you create by default and you never lose it (unless you give it away). If you don't register it the result is that you simplu can't sue for quite as much as you could otherwise (although you can still sue).
Note however that if you publish in a certain medium you may be providing certain implied license terms even if you explicitly claim otherwise. For example you can't put a notice on a website saying that all copying of it (outside strict fair use) is prohibited as to even read that notice it has to be copied (to the user's ram and browser cache if nothing else). Likewise usenet posts also would have an implied license to be distributed via usenet servers.
We trust a lot of things which means very little. Nothing is perfect and often there is a bloody good reason for that. Claiming something will make it better is usually how you make things much much worse.
I would assume it wasn't better because in most cases electricity has to travel over a long distance UNUSED between production and final usage point (ie: power generator and someone's home). AC can relatively easily be upped to high voltage which is good for sending over long distance (much higher efficiency) IF you don't need to use it along the way. Also I think single speed AC motors are easy to make.
Subways (and the like) are unique because the transmission line is also your final output/usage point. You CAN'T send electricity at high voltage for part of the trip. So you only need to make electricity at one voltage and feed it straight into the line with no conversions for efficiency. It doesn't matter that you can't change the DC voltage as it would actually be counter productive to do so.
This is also why I assume subways have their own dedicated power stations or used to at least.
No it's not because the probes are NOT identical. That is unless you mean to compare 30 probes at $1 billion each versus 2 probes at $1 billion each. In any sane reality you are comparing 30 probes worth $75 million each versus 2 probes worth $1 billion each. This disparity in per-probe funding filters down to the cost of continual support from earth not just in initial build/launch cost. Furthermore each of those 30 probes has to be much smaller than if only 2 probes were used (or launch costs grow too high).
The question is in other words between sending 30 relatively simple/small probes or two large/complex probes. The later will be able to have much higher quality control (on build if not design) and more space for redundancy. Higher quality components can also be used as there is money available for them. Likewise each of those two probes will be able to have a much larger number of support personnel on earth capable of giving them continuous individual attention.
Well it is one off in the sense that you launch a dozen copies of something ONCE (ie: within a short period of time). All the infrastructure needed to build and launch these things becomes worthless once they are launched, assuming you have nothing else to use it for. It has to be a one off thign as otherwise there is a constant bugdet drain on NASA from the high number of launches which is likely way beyond it's ability to pay for (long term). Now you could launch them over a long period of time but then it's not much use as you're sending quite obsolete devices after a short period of time.
No, the long term costs go down if a high volume is sustained or if the current infrastructure can trivially support higher volume. For a single one off launch the costs are higher as all the launch/manufacturing facilities need to be upgraded (and the extra capacity will see little future use).
The DARPA vehicles also had extensively testing in the same environment, had to run for one day and still failed quite often. It also had a very large powerful engine and probably more kg of autonomous driving equipment than the mass of a whole mars rover.
Also Mars is NOT Earth, it is not a pleasant environment. The trip there is even less pleasant. Normal electronics would likely arrive dead. Normal machinery would die quickly on Mars. Hell, machinery dies quickly on Earth if it weren't for constant maintenance.
Except the choice is a detailed look at a few places and a un-detailed look at 10 places (I expect 60%+ of those rovers to fail before doing anything useful).
No very high end desktop drives are SCSI 15k rpm drives, I know as I had a couple a while back. They're fast but expensive and some are loud as a jet engine, they have existed for a decade probably if not more.
Nonetheless the fastest reasonable sanely priced hard drives for desktops are 7200. If you actually care about the utterly highest performance then you don't want a laptop, it's simple as that. The majority of people don't, for them 7200 is essentially the fastest desktop drive.
Also, biking to work entails a non-trivial chance of death or severe bodily harm for me due to the route I'd need to take. * Dont use escalators or elevators Decent idea, a few of my co-workers do this. * Run a few blocks in the morning or evening See first point about time. * Get a hobby that does not involve sitting in front of a tv or monitor Well since I don't do it now it likely doesn't interest me. In which case I may as well just go to the gym instead.
Well one idea for quickly thermoforming venus is to drop comets on it, broken up before impact to impact all their energy into the atmosphere. The idea being that the simplest method to get rid of the atmosphere is to simply blow it into space. Sadly it seems that the energy required would be quite a lot, as in you'd need to hit the planet with a lot of comets or whatever other space junk you find.
First of all firefox has somewhat high memory usage in general, it's not a bug but simply how it works. The memory usage in the 2.* branch is stable but not tiny, some people don't like that while most don't care (why else do I have so much ram in this machine?).
Also everyone is not complaining, a small number of people are complaining (I've seen a lot of people complaining on slashdot, this ain't it) which apparently your own delusional mind thinks is "everyone."
Most large non-profits pay their CEOs good money because good CEOs cost money (even then these CEOs are taking a large pay cut compared to for profit companies). Otherwise they'd have shitty CEOs who would run them into the ground. Or CEOs who would rob them blind then move to some country they can't get extradited out of.
The only thing I've seen mess up firefox cpu wise recently were:
/analysis (exactly what set of web pages triggers it, when doesn't it trigger, etc.) makes the bug unreproducible to everyone else you bitch that FF devs suck (when in reality only god himself could do anything to fix it given your information).
-slashdot, I think it's some horrid flash ad.
-badly coded javascript on webpages
-badly coded extensions (I got ff to infinite loop to death with one of mine before by accident).
Also 200mb of memory seems normal actually, if you want it to use less you need to probably change the caching options and so on.
Likewise I find that bug report to be very spare on actual details and how to reproduce it. See you ASSUME that the bug shows up for everyone easily while it's bloody clear (due to lack of complaints) that it doesn't. Then of course when your failure to provide enough information
As for addressing the problem, is the a bug ticket on it? Can yo reproduce it on a clean ff install? Can others reproduce it? It's hard to solve a problem that cannot be reproduced and that seems to be the case for many of these bugs that people somehow think can magically be fixed in 10 seconds. Perhaps this is the core of the problem: any commercial application would be desperate to grow rather than reduce their marketshare. Many, many, many commercial applications ignore the mac and linux markets totally while others release sub-standard versions for them (see MS office and IE for example). It's beyond logical, they can either spend money to retain 10% of 5% of the market or to retain 10% of 90% of the market, assuming it costs the same to fix the same severity bug on both. As a result bugs on less used platforms if they only appear on those platforms logically take lower precedence. Instead, we have a grossly overpaid layer of bureaucrats who know little and care less about the technical enthusiasm and volunteered time that made Firefox a success in the first place. Enthusiasm takes you only so far, in the end it's much better if there is money to pay you for what you're doing. This might be fine if it wasn't for the fact that sharper, hungrier competitors have their eyes on the same prize. So? If someone does it better then let them, I'm not a fanboy or fanatic so I could care less. FF has a lot of problems that are probably unfixable due to it's code (and it's complexity, design or what not). If someone can do it better from scratch then all the power to them. Anyone who writes off millions of their existing users as "a minor user base" simply no longer gets it, especially when you consider that members of that "minor user base" are proportionately far more likely than Windows users to also be contributing developers. So why haven't all these "mac firefox developers" fixed your bug already? Well? Firefox is open source and they can easily enough contribute, heck you claim they do already. Then again even if mac has twice the rate of developers it's still only what a fifth the total number as there are on windows?
No, they spent $11 million on development. Then again it's much easier to ignore the truth, take quotes out of focus and spread FUD right?
A good CEO for a for-profit company can easily make millions or tens of millions. Those for non-profits can easily make hundreds of thousands and Mozilla isn't exactly a tiny non-profit.
They're paying the CEO what is essentially a fair wage for the position and even then the person being paid it is sacrificing massive amount of potential money just by working for Mozilla (instead of a for-profit).
I'm sorry but the problem is YOU or YOUR system not firefox in general. Maybe it's a mac problem but thats a minor user base so it's far from a major bug.
Any recent version of firefox not running horrendously broken extensions doesn't have memory problems. Older versions had problems and extensions can leak memory if badly designed but firefox itself doesn't. I keep it open for WEEKS and it never goes over 200mb unless it needs to, say for massively image filled threads (and then it goes back down when it no longer needs to).