Amendment 4 - Search and Seizure. Ratified 12/15/1791.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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How the heck is this constitutional? I guess it has something to do with Congress' power to regulate imports and exports - if they are allowed to regulate import/export of software and 'state secrets', then I suppose the argument can be made that they need the power to check what is being taken out or in the country. But how can they possibly hold it *indefinitely*? For one thing, they could just clone the hard drive (and any flash memory, if they are that worried) contents and *give me back* my computer/mp3 player, whatever. What about all the small, inconspicous USB flash devices that no doubt could get past customs (like one disguised as part of a pen, or hidden in the spine of a book, or something like that)?
Also, what's to stop people from just sending this stuff over the Internet if they are determined to get stuff out of the country?
Seems to me that such siezures are clearly 'unreasonable' when there's no reason to suspect the person.
Yes, I was using the latest (at the time - about 3 weeks ago, might be a new release by now) 'release' version of the source code available from the official virtualbox.org website (which just sends you to a Sun download site for the download), NOT a cvs snapshot. I know that cvs snapshot are often prone to problems, and you can't hold that against the developers - it's a work in progress. But the 'release' version of the GPL code tree should compile without requiring users to make changes to the source code to fix type casting errors. That seems either sloppy at best, on the part of the VirtualBox developers, or malicious, at worst, that the release version was released in an unbuildable state.
Ok, my point still stands though - if you make even seemingly small changes to a source tree to resolve warnings or errors, and you don't really understand the full impact of those changes, you could be making a very bad change, and not even know it. The main point was, that the tree as shipped by the VBox developers was not compilable, and the only advice I got to fix the compile issue is. . . suspect methodology, let's say.
Calling your software 'open source' because you make *unbuildable* source code available for download under the GPL is really lousy. Legal, but lousy. No, this wasn't a CVS snapshot either - this was the officially 'released' version of source code available from Sun at the time (2 or 3 weeks ago). That wouldn't build.
I too ran into this problem where I wanted the OSE (Open Source Edition) GPL binaries on Windows. I already had Visual Studio installed, so that wasn't a big deal, but one of the requirements to build is having the MinGW g++ compiler, so now you have a situation where you need two seperate c++ compilers to compile the thing, which is kind of wierd. On top of that you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and the Windows Driver Kit, along with several open source libraries (ok, needing various library dependencies is kind of of par for the course though).
After finally getting everything downloaded and unpacked into a build tree, and getting all the command line arguments for their configure script (so it would know where to find all the libraries), the build process ran for about 1/2 hour then died with a type casting error related to the USB device driver. Now, according to the VirtualBox website, the USB wasn't even supposed to be part of the Open Source Edition (and I suspect that might be part of why I got the errors - because it was expecting it and it wasn't there).
I asked on the VirtualBox forums and developer mailing list, and after a week someone said that they got it to build by commenting out the 2 lines that generated the build error. But now I'm *very afraid*. A Debian developer who 'got rid of build errors' by commenting out 2 very critical lines of source code put hundreds of thousands or millions of users in jeopardy (because of weak SSL keys generated with insufficient randomness). I have no idea what the long term effects of commenting out those two lines of code are, so I wouldn't be comfortable distributing the OSE binaries I built to anyone anyhow.
On that topic - I'm not sure whether *any* binaries built of VirtualBox could legally be distributed under the GPL, anyhow - I'm worried about the fact that it depends on the DirectX SDK and Windows Driver Kit - would the terms of either of those 'poison' the binaries?
I should, I suppose, mention that it's possible that since the version of the source that I downloaded, the VBox developers may have fixed the compile issue, but the whole thing just reeks of trying to appear to be GPL, while making it practically impossible for most users (on Windows, at least) to get it working from source, starting with the fact that you can't compile it on Windows without Visual C++, and continuing on to the un-compilability of the source code version which was released at the time I tried to build the binaries ( about a month ago ).
Well, this is getting way off topic, but since it's been raised anyhow. . . I think the greatest tragedy of the Bush administration is that we got into the right war. . . the wrong way. All the things you listed off were good, valid reasons for us to finish the job in Iraq. I think Saddam clearly should have been deposed by International intervention - not just because he was a dictator (we really can't go around deposing every dictator, I'm afraid), but because he did violate the terms of his surrender, as you said.
Unfortunately, that is not how the Bushies sold the war. The Bushies sold the war on a bunch of claims that turned out to be false and/or misleading. That makes the war look bad and unjustified to people all over the world. Basically, he didn't give the right justifications for war, so now it makes the war look like a mistake to many people.
I just don't want to see/. sued by Reuters, and I suspect Reuters might be just the kind of company that would sue over something like this. I've seen this practice in the past, and never commented on it before, but honestly, if we tolerate that crap,/. might get sued out of existence someday. Some people might not agree with copyright, or at least not agree that it should apply to short articles like this, but that's not the point - the point is that copyright *is* the law right now, and it won't be good for the long-term health of/. or any other site to be on the wrong side of the law.
I hate crap-tastic 'news' websites as much as the next guy, but PLEASE do not EVER copy the entire text of a copyrighted article into the Slasdhot comments. You are inviting a lawsuit by the copyright holder against Slashdot. Slashdot can probably pass on the buck to you, maybe, but since you posted as anonymous coward, that probably leaves/. holding the buck. Setup your own damn website to violate copyright.
The only *power* the Olympic Committee has, at this point, at least I think, would be to *cancel* the Olympics. What other power do they have over China at this point? It's not like the IOC can impose sanctions on China, can it?
"And while I've brought up the subject, have you called your representative about a term limit law?"
If you want term-limits, contacting your representative is not a useful way to go about getting them. If the people really want term limits, it needs to be a Constitutional amendment, brought by the legislatures of the States, and not from within Congress itself - representatives will never vote themselves term limits.
"The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress;"
So, I suppose you might be right that people should contact a 'representative', but it should be your state legislature representative, not your US Rep or Senator.
I don't claim to be any business expert. I've heard this argument before though (wait - hasn't everybody?). The argument seems to go like this. . . if Apple starts licensing Mac OS to run on non-Apple hardware, they run a risk of having the hardware makers release shoddy, sub-standard, non-quite-compatible hardware. This will cause problems for the end users, who will blame Apple. The value of the Apple name and their margins go down, while simultaneously their support costs go up. Or something like that.
But, that said, at, say $250 or so per license, and with minimal per-unit costs on software, as Microsoft has found, if you sell a few hundred million licenses, you can spend a lot on support and still make massive profit, so I'm not really so sure what Apple is worried about, except for direct competition with Microsoft.
Seriously, who would use this 'spray' on their iphone/ipod/whatever? At $1000, it costs 2 or 3 times the price of most consumer electronics. You could, probably, buy some sort of accidental damage insurance much cheaper than this spray costs, and just get the device replaced if it's damaged by water. Heck, put the $1000 into a fairly safe/conservative investment fund, and get interest on it.
The article isn't about principles or ethics, and neither was my reply. The whole article was about Warner Brothers trying to maximize revenue of the movie through their piracy control measures, and the fact that they came to the conclusion that it 'paid off' because the movie had a large box office revenue. What I'm saying is, while piracy might be ethically wrong, they have no basis to really come to the conclusion that their piracy efforts paid off in larger box office revenue. That is a statement that appears to be unsupportable based on the given data.
So, the hypothesis is that delaying piracy for 2 or 3 days increases the box office take. They manage to delay piracy for about 2 days with The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight has a big opening weekend. So, they proclaim that the experiment is a success.
The problem: Correlation does not prove causation. This 'experiment' appears to have no control - no way to measure how the movie *would* have done if there *had* been piracy. No baseline to compare against.
I am in the camp that think that, basically, piracy has very little to do with how a movie does at the box office. I currently believe (though don't have a study to prove this, admittedly, so this is opinion) that most of the people who pirate movies, won't pay for them (there are some people, no doubt, who use the pirated version as a shareware/try-before-you-buy system, so it might have some impact there, but I personally don't know of many people who do that, so I'm inclined to estimate that as a low percentage). Along with that, it is my current belief that most of the people who *do* pay for movies at the movie theater, will do so if the movie is good, *even if* a pirate version is available, because the movie theater provides that big-screen, awesome sound system experience that most people can't afford to have at home.
I don't know that I'm any more right than the people who think the piracy control is so important, but my point is, I don't think they've really established a strong link between their anti-piracy measures and the box office sales. I think a better indicator is that the previous Batman Begins movie was well received by audiences, and they knew that basically the same team was doing this sequel, and wanted to see another movie with this new interpretation of Batman.
Well, as one of the other respondants pointed out, once the docs are out there, it can benefit any operating system, but the point is that VIA wants Linux, in particular (and the technologies like X that operate with the Linux kernel) to better support their products. I think of the three, the one that is most likely to be directly used by the Linux kernel dev is the crypto engine documentation. I think there are kernel-space crypto block device drivers (LUKS - at least, I think it's kernel space; I suppose it might be implemented in user-space) which could be accellerated by the padlock engine. In fact, I think the kernel already has some support for the padlock - whenever I boot my laptop, on which I have used LUKS to encrypt my/home partition, I get a warning that the padlock engine was not found (of course, because I have an Intel Core2 Duo, so don't have padlock).
It really seems like the most logical way to deal with Jurisdiction in space would be to simply extend existing maritime law principles, which basically say that the Jurisdiction of a Nation is 'carried' by vessels that fly its flag. Of course, that just means that all the space tourism will launch from the Bahamas, and fly the Bahamian (is that the right form for the adjective?) flag.
Have you ever heard of Maritime Law? There is such a thing as law and jurisdiction in "International Waters". I don't really know if Maritime law extends to space, but it would sort of make sense to use the same, or substantially similar, principles. Otherwise, murder in space would be legal. Rape would be legal. Whatever. Do we really want that?
That said, I agree that it's somewhat ridiculous to say you need a license to photograph the earth. I suspect that a lot of this comes from the US Govt wanting to not have people take photos of certain government facilities on earth. All I can say to that is, if something is so secret, *hide* it - don't just pass some law that people can't photograph your country, cause I'm pretty certain that won't stop the Russians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, or whoever else has a national space program.
When considering questions of Jurisdiction like this, certain thorny questions arise. Is there 'no' law in space? Could you 'legally' commit murder in space?
There is a historical precedent for dealing with a similar question which arose in Maritime law - does any country have any legal authority on ocean-going vessels in international waters? People, fundamentally, don't want to lose all protection of law in such situations.
I don't really know much about Maritime law, but my basic understanding is that every ship has to be registered with some nation, and has to fly the flag of that nation. The law of the nation whose flag you fly applies on-board that vessel when it is in international water (at least, I think that's how it works). Now, Maritime law has been 'settled' somewhat, I think, by some International Treaties, and I don't know if any such treaties exist for space.
However, dealing with the issue of Jurisdiction in space, it seems most logical to extend the concepts of Maritime law to space.
That said, I still think it's completely ridiculous to claim that it is illegal to photograph the Earth, but there may be a precendent in Maritime law for US 'vessels' to have to submit to US jurisdication in legal matters when they are outside of the physical boundaries of US jurisdiction.
That is a very big space savings, before any compression is applied. The article summary mentions that they reduced the Imax frames to 8000 lines. Reducing that down to 1920 (someone said the 8000 lines corresponds to horizontal resolution; not sure if that's true, but if so, corresponds to the 1920 in 1920x1080 HD resolution), which corresponds to an approximate downscale of 1/4 *in one axis* when converting to HD, which gives us a total size reduction to 1/16 of the original frame size (1/4 horiz * 1/4 vertical), so if the frames were approx 200MB at Imax resolution, they would be about 12.5MB per frame in HD resolution. MPEG compression probably takes that down to, what, like 1-2 MB per frame?
Simple things, sure. But, you're saying there aren't any algorithms someone might devise in the future that any other person might be unlikely to independently rediscover? Reverse engineering can only take you so far - without some sort of disclosure, it's virtually guaranteed that some Art (not in the sense of paintings or music, but in the sense of extremley creative programming) will be lost, buried in the vaults of some corp somewhere.
Well, you might want to take a look at Worldforge, then. Like I said, they do have some tech, and you're right - there is quite a bit of tech that has to be developed, fairly complicated tech, in order to build an MMO. As far as I can tell, WorldForge looks like it's done a somewhat decent job of creating a game engine for building an MMO, there just doesn't seem to be any actual game that's been created with that Tech yet. Might be a good time for you and your friends to jump in and contribute.
You've got to decide whether software patents are good or bad. If it's good for Google to patent the idea of page ranking, then software patents, in general, must be a good idea. If software patents are a bad idea, then allowing Google to have a software patent on the PageRank algorithm is a bad idea.
In the future, if software patents are basically denied altogether, Trade Secret law will used to protect this sort of thing. Unfortunately for the many companies like Google, who've already been awarded patents, the algorithms are already disclosed. Which is why you will probably see some sort of transition period where currently existing software patents aren't just immediately invalidated, but I suspect will be grandfathered in - a basic principle of fairness is you can't change the rules after someone has already upheld their end of the bargain - the patent bargain is that you publically disclose your 'secrets', so that other people can *eventually* use them, but get legal protection on those secrets for a limited time. Telling people who've made disclosure that suddenly they get no protection on their disclosured algorithms is something I don't think is gonna pass - there will be too much resistance from companies on legislators to get protection for this sort of thing.
Personally, I think search engine competition is a good thing. I think competition in general is a good thing. My only concern with outright gutting of the patent system, is that now much knowledge that would have been disclosed in patents, will now remain locked up as trade secrets and NOT eventually become generally available to practitioners of software engineering, and so will, long-term, hold back the progress of computer science. Of course, we all know that right now, patent trolls are holding back the progress of computer science even more. Sort of a lose-lose situation. I guess gutting software patents is, really, probably the lesser of two evils here.
There is an Open Source MMO project, launched over ten years ago (I remember it was announced on Slashdot) called WorldForge. It, so far, has failed to really go anywhere. Don't get me wrong, it has stayed alive, and they do have some tech they've built. But nothing that's really much of a game. They've had various things that I would describe as 'prototypes' or 'tech demos' - I check in on them every year or two to see what they have.
WorldForge has it's developers, but for whatever reason, it never seemed to reach that critical mass where there were a lot of developers, artists, writers, etc who really jumped in and started building a true MMO with it, that I can tell. It's interesting, but for whatever reason, it seems like an MMO is just something that, at least so far, doesn't seem to work well as an Open Source project.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that the HIPPA laws allow sharing the info with the government.
Amendment 4 - Search and Seizure. Ratified 12/15/1791.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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How the heck is this constitutional? I guess it has something to do with Congress' power to regulate imports and exports - if they are allowed to regulate import/export of software and 'state secrets', then I suppose the argument can be made that they need the power to check what is being taken out or in the country. But how can they possibly hold it *indefinitely*? For one thing, they could just clone the hard drive (and any flash memory, if they are that worried) contents and *give me back* my computer/mp3 player, whatever. What about all the small, inconspicous USB flash devices that no doubt could get past customs (like one disguised as part of a pen, or hidden in the spine of a book, or something like that)?
Also, what's to stop people from just sending this stuff over the Internet if they are determined to get stuff out of the country?
Seems to me that such siezures are clearly 'unreasonable' when there's no reason to suspect the person.
Yes, I was using the latest (at the time - about 3 weeks ago, might be a new release by now) 'release' version of the source code available from the official virtualbox.org website (which just sends you to a Sun download site for the download), NOT a cvs snapshot. I know that cvs snapshot are often prone to problems, and you can't hold that against the developers - it's a work in progress. But the 'release' version of the GPL code tree should compile without requiring users to make changes to the source code to fix type casting errors. That seems either sloppy at best, on the part of the VirtualBox developers, or malicious, at worst, that the release version was released in an unbuildable state.
Ok, my point still stands though - if you make even seemingly small changes to a source tree to resolve warnings or errors, and you don't really understand the full impact of those changes, you could be making a very bad change, and not even know it. The main point was, that the tree as shipped by the VBox developers was not compilable, and the only advice I got to fix the compile issue is. . . suspect methodology, let's say.
Calling your software 'open source' because you make *unbuildable* source code available for download under the GPL is really lousy. Legal, but lousy. No, this wasn't a CVS snapshot either - this was the officially 'released' version of source code available from Sun at the time (2 or 3 weeks ago). That wouldn't build.
I too ran into this problem where I wanted the OSE (Open Source Edition) GPL binaries on Windows. I already had Visual Studio installed, so that wasn't a big deal, but one of the requirements to build is having the MinGW g++ compiler, so now you have a situation where you need two seperate c++ compilers to compile the thing, which is kind of wierd. On top of that you need to download and install the DirectX SDK and the Windows Driver Kit, along with several open source libraries (ok, needing various library dependencies is kind of of par for the course though).
After finally getting everything downloaded and unpacked into a build tree, and getting all the command line arguments for their configure script (so it would know where to find all the libraries), the build process ran for about 1/2 hour then died with a type casting error related to the USB device driver. Now, according to the VirtualBox website, the USB wasn't even supposed to be part of the Open Source Edition (and I suspect that might be part of why I got the errors - because it was expecting it and it wasn't there).
I asked on the VirtualBox forums and developer mailing list, and after a week someone said that they got it to build by commenting out the 2 lines that generated the build error. But now I'm *very afraid*. A Debian developer who 'got rid of build errors' by commenting out 2 very critical lines of source code put hundreds of thousands or millions of users in jeopardy (because of weak SSL keys generated with insufficient randomness). I have no idea what the long term effects of commenting out those two lines of code are, so I wouldn't be comfortable distributing the OSE binaries I built to anyone anyhow.
On that topic - I'm not sure whether *any* binaries built of VirtualBox could legally be distributed under the GPL, anyhow - I'm worried about the fact that it depends on the DirectX SDK and Windows Driver Kit - would the terms of either of those 'poison' the binaries?
I should, I suppose, mention that it's possible that since the version of the source that I downloaded, the VBox developers may have fixed the compile issue, but the whole thing just reeks of trying to appear to be GPL, while making it practically impossible for most users (on Windows, at least) to get it working from source, starting with the fact that you can't compile it on Windows without Visual C++, and continuing on to the un-compilability of the source code version which was released at the time I tried to build the binaries ( about a month ago ).
Well, this is getting way off topic, but since it's been raised anyhow. . . I think the greatest tragedy of the Bush administration is that we got into the right war. . . the wrong way. All the things you listed off were good, valid reasons for us to finish the job in Iraq. I think Saddam clearly should have been deposed by International intervention - not just because he was a dictator (we really can't go around deposing every dictator, I'm afraid), but because he did violate the terms of his surrender, as you said.
Unfortunately, that is not how the Bushies sold the war. The Bushies sold the war on a bunch of claims that turned out to be false and/or misleading. That makes the war look bad and unjustified to people all over the world. Basically, he didn't give the right justifications for war, so now it makes the war look like a mistake to many people.
I don't watch anyhow. :-p
I just don't want to see /. sued by Reuters, and I suspect Reuters might be just the kind of company that would sue over something like this. I've seen this practice in the past, and never commented on it before, but honestly, if we tolerate that crap, /. might get sued out of existence someday. Some people might not agree with copyright, or at least not agree that it should apply to short articles like this, but that's not the point - the point is that copyright *is* the law right now, and it won't be good for the long-term health of /. or any other site to be on the wrong side of the law.
I hate crap-tastic 'news' websites as much as the next guy, but PLEASE do not EVER copy the entire text of a copyrighted article into the Slasdhot comments. You are inviting a lawsuit by the copyright holder against Slashdot. Slashdot can probably pass on the buck to you, maybe, but since you posted as anonymous coward, that probably leaves /. holding the buck. Setup your own damn website to violate copyright.
The only *power* the Olympic Committee has, at this point, at least I think, would be to *cancel* the Olympics. What other power do they have over China at this point? It's not like the IOC can impose sanctions on China, can it?
"And while I've brought up the subject, have you called your representative about a term limit law?"
If you want term-limits, contacting your representative is not a useful way to go about getting them. If the people really want term limits, it needs to be a Constitutional amendment, brought by the legislatures of the States, and not from within Congress itself - representatives will never vote themselves term limits.
"The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments , which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress;"
So, I suppose you might be right that people should contact a 'representative', but it should be your state legislature representative, not your US Rep or Senator.
I don't claim to be any business expert. I've heard this argument before though (wait - hasn't everybody?). The argument seems to go like this. . . if Apple starts licensing Mac OS to run on non-Apple hardware, they run a risk of having the hardware makers release shoddy, sub-standard, non-quite-compatible hardware. This will cause problems for the end users, who will blame Apple. The value of the Apple name and their margins go down, while simultaneously their support costs go up. Or something like that.
But, that said, at, say $250 or so per license, and with minimal per-unit costs on software, as Microsoft has found, if you sell a few hundred million licenses, you can spend a lot on support and still make massive profit, so I'm not really so sure what Apple is worried about, except for direct competition with Microsoft.
Seriously, who would use this 'spray' on their iphone/ipod/whatever? At $1000, it costs 2 or 3 times the price of most consumer electronics. You could, probably, buy some sort of accidental damage insurance much cheaper than this spray costs, and just get the device replaced if it's damaged by water. Heck, put the $1000 into a fairly safe/conservative investment fund, and get interest on it.
The article isn't about principles or ethics, and neither was my reply. The whole article was about Warner Brothers trying to maximize revenue of the movie through their piracy control measures, and the fact that they came to the conclusion that it 'paid off' because the movie had a large box office revenue. What I'm saying is, while piracy might be ethically wrong, they have no basis to really come to the conclusion that their piracy efforts paid off in larger box office revenue. That is a statement that appears to be unsupportable based on the given data.
So, the hypothesis is that delaying piracy for 2 or 3 days increases the box office take. They manage to delay piracy for about 2 days with The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight has a big opening weekend. So, they proclaim that the experiment is a success.
The problem: Correlation does not prove causation. This 'experiment' appears to have no control - no way to measure how the movie *would* have done if there *had* been piracy. No baseline to compare against.
I am in the camp that think that, basically, piracy has very little to do with how a movie does at the box office. I currently believe (though don't have a study to prove this, admittedly, so this is opinion) that most of the people who pirate movies, won't pay for them (there are some people, no doubt, who use the pirated version as a shareware/try-before-you-buy system, so it might have some impact there, but I personally don't know of many people who do that, so I'm inclined to estimate that as a low percentage). Along with that, it is my current belief that most of the people who *do* pay for movies at the movie theater, will do so if the movie is good, *even if* a pirate version is available, because the movie theater provides that big-screen, awesome sound system experience that most people can't afford to have at home.
I don't know that I'm any more right than the people who think the piracy control is so important, but my point is, I don't think they've really established a strong link between their anti-piracy measures and the box office sales. I think a better indicator is that the previous Batman Begins movie was well received by audiences, and they knew that basically the same team was doing this sequel, and wanted to see another movie with this new interpretation of Batman.
Well, as one of the other respondants pointed out, once the docs are out there, it can benefit any operating system, but the point is that VIA wants Linux, in particular (and the technologies like X that operate with the Linux kernel) to better support their products. I think of the three, the one that is most likely to be directly used by the Linux kernel dev is the crypto engine documentation. I think there are kernel-space crypto block device drivers (LUKS - at least, I think it's kernel space; I suppose it might be implemented in user-space) which could be accellerated by the padlock engine. In fact, I think the kernel already has some support for the padlock - whenever I boot my laptop, on which I have used LUKS to encrypt my /home partition, I get a warning that the padlock engine was not found (of course, because I have an Intel Core2 Duo, so don't have padlock).
After posting, I wanted to find some sort of source which validates what I've said. I found a link about law and jurisdiction in international waters:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mlawofsea.html/
It really seems like the most logical way to deal with Jurisdiction in space would be to simply extend existing maritime law principles, which basically say that the Jurisdiction of a Nation is 'carried' by vessels that fly its flag. Of course, that just means that all the space tourism will launch from the Bahamas, and fly the Bahamian (is that the right form for the adjective?) flag.
Have you ever heard of Maritime Law? There is such a thing as law and jurisdiction in "International Waters". I don't really know if Maritime law extends to space, but it would sort of make sense to use the same, or substantially similar, principles. Otherwise, murder in space would be legal. Rape would be legal. Whatever. Do we really want that?
That said, I agree that it's somewhat ridiculous to say you need a license to photograph the earth. I suspect that a lot of this comes from the US Govt wanting to not have people take photos of certain government facilities on earth. All I can say to that is, if something is so secret, *hide* it - don't just pass some law that people can't photograph your country, cause I'm pretty certain that won't stop the Russians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, or whoever else has a national space program.
When considering questions of Jurisdiction like this, certain thorny questions arise. Is there 'no' law in space? Could you 'legally' commit murder in space?
There is a historical precedent for dealing with a similar question which arose in Maritime law - does any country have any legal authority on ocean-going vessels in international waters? People, fundamentally, don't want to lose all protection of law in such situations.
I don't really know much about Maritime law, but my basic understanding is that every ship has to be registered with some nation, and has to fly the flag of that nation. The law of the nation whose flag you fly applies on-board that vessel when it is in international water (at least, I think that's how it works). Now, Maritime law has been 'settled' somewhat, I think, by some International Treaties, and I don't know if any such treaties exist for space.
However, dealing with the issue of Jurisdiction in space, it seems most logical to extend the concepts of Maritime law to space.
That said, I still think it's completely ridiculous to claim that it is illegal to photograph the Earth, but there may be a precendent in Maritime law for US 'vessels' to have to submit to US jurisdication in legal matters when they are outside of the physical boundaries of US jurisdiction.
That is a very big space savings, before any compression is applied. The article summary mentions that they reduced the Imax frames to 8000 lines. Reducing that down to 1920 (someone said the 8000 lines corresponds to horizontal resolution; not sure if that's true, but if so, corresponds to the 1920 in 1920x1080 HD resolution), which corresponds to an approximate downscale of 1/4 *in one axis* when converting to HD, which gives us a total size reduction to 1/16 of the original frame size (1/4 horiz * 1/4 vertical), so if the frames were approx 200MB at Imax resolution, they would be about 12.5MB per frame in HD resolution. MPEG compression probably takes that down to, what, like 1-2 MB per frame?
Simple things, sure. But, you're saying there aren't any algorithms someone might devise in the future that any other person might be unlikely to independently rediscover? Reverse engineering can only take you so far - without some sort of disclosure, it's virtually guaranteed that some Art (not in the sense of paintings or music, but in the sense of extremley creative programming) will be lost, buried in the vaults of some corp somewhere.
Well, you might want to take a look at Worldforge, then. Like I said, they do have some tech, and you're right - there is quite a bit of tech that has to be developed, fairly complicated tech, in order to build an MMO. As far as I can tell, WorldForge looks like it's done a somewhat decent job of creating a game engine for building an MMO, there just doesn't seem to be any actual game that's been created with that Tech yet. Might be a good time for you and your friends to jump in and contribute.
You've got to decide whether software patents are good or bad. If it's good for Google to patent the idea of page ranking, then software patents, in general, must be a good idea. If software patents are a bad idea, then allowing Google to have a software patent on the PageRank algorithm is a bad idea.
In the future, if software patents are basically denied altogether, Trade Secret law will used to protect this sort of thing. Unfortunately for the many companies like Google, who've already been awarded patents, the algorithms are already disclosed. Which is why you will probably see some sort of transition period where currently existing software patents aren't just immediately invalidated, but I suspect will be grandfathered in - a basic principle of fairness is you can't change the rules after someone has already upheld their end of the bargain - the patent bargain is that you publically disclose your 'secrets', so that other people can *eventually* use them, but get legal protection on those secrets for a limited time. Telling people who've made disclosure that suddenly they get no protection on their disclosured algorithms is something I don't think is gonna pass - there will be too much resistance from companies on legislators to get protection for this sort of thing.
Personally, I think search engine competition is a good thing. I think competition in general is a good thing. My only concern with outright gutting of the patent system, is that now much knowledge that would have been disclosed in patents, will now remain locked up as trade secrets and NOT eventually become generally available to practitioners of software engineering, and so will, long-term, hold back the progress of computer science. Of course, we all know that right now, patent trolls are holding back the progress of computer science even more. Sort of a lose-lose situation. I guess gutting software patents is, really, probably the lesser of two evils here.
WorldForge
There is an Open Source MMO project, launched over ten years ago (I remember it was announced on Slashdot) called WorldForge. It, so far, has failed to really go anywhere. Don't get me wrong, it has stayed alive, and they do have some tech they've built. But nothing that's really much of a game. They've had various things that I would describe as 'prototypes' or 'tech demos' - I check in on them every year or two to see what they have.
WorldForge has it's developers, but for whatever reason, it never seemed to reach that critical mass where there were a lot of developers, artists, writers, etc who really jumped in and started building a true MMO with it, that I can tell. It's interesting, but for whatever reason, it seems like an MMO is just something that, at least so far, doesn't seem to work well as an Open Source project.