Is it possible that's because of the conservatives on Slashdot? Or maybe it's because of the overall quality of what passes for "conservative thought" circa 2011 and the cognitive dissonance such opinion requires.
No, it's mostly because of binary thought like you've just expressed. The kind that sees a conservative opinion expressed, and knee-jerks into, "I don't agree with you, and therefore, you must be a conservative, gun toting, Palin-loving neo-con. I'd add idiot, but that's redundant!"
Fact: There are very few issues where there are only 2 possible positions which a person can hold. Fact: A person's position on one issue does not necessarily indicate their position on every other issue it's possible to hold an opinion on. Fact: The Republican and Democratic platforms are not the only two possible positions it is possible to hold. And also, one need not accept either of them in their entirety, or reject either of them in their entirety, especially based on idiotically binary labels like "conservative" and "liberal". Fact: Rejecting specific elements of a party's platform, while still voting for some of their politicians, does not require cognitive dissonance, it simply requires prioritization. Fact: Prioritization of political issues is a deeply personal decision; that somebody else values - for example - fiscal discipline over - for example - abortion rights does not mean they are "wrong" or "stupid" or "blind." It means they, personally, value certain things differently than you do.
But just for fun here, let's try it your way:
For a group that loves to crow about the high value of diversity, you socialist big spending baby killing tree huggers sure are intolerant of dissenting opinions! I wonder if "liberal thought" circa 2011 requires the shutdown of all logic circuits in the brain to avoid damage when parsing value statements that are mutually contradictory?
Now we can just sling insults at each other, maligning each other based on the set of values we've each imagined the other to have. It's so much easier to forego all the "discussing" and "conversation" and "reaching an understanding," and get right to the truly productive name-calling, innit?
Only to somebody who doesn't understand how contracts work, and only to somebody who reads it as if it were "plain english" - which it is not. Here's what the GPL says about the way Apple has chosen to comply with non-source distribution:
d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.
Where do you see the word "accompany" in that distribution clause?
You may claim that the "intent" is that all clauses call for instant, simultaneous release; A court will not care what you perceive the "intent" to be, a court will care about what the license stipulates, and it does not stipulate anything about the time frame when the source code must be available, it simply says "it must be made available," and in fact implies in other methods of conveyance that delays and turnaround time is reasonable, and does not constitute a license violation:
b) Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.
This paragraph clearly states that a delay between receiving the object code & receiving access to the source constitutes compliance - you cannot receive the written offer to supply the source without having already received the object code, and if you have only received a "written offer" to supply the source, then you do not have access to the source when you receive the object code.
If you really think Apple is in violation, then take them to court. I see no evidence that the FSF, or the WebKit developers, or any other person is trying to take Apple to court over this to claim they are in violation - if we're to believe that they're constant and willfully violating their obligations, then isn't it in the best interests of the FSF and other FOSS advocates to take them to court to establish a clear precedent in court which can be used to force them to comply with what you claim their obligations are?
They should do this, but the problem is, then they don't get to charge you $4-10 for streaming a single movie on demand - they'd get a buck or two a month from Netflix per subscriber, and it'd probably be a net loss for them, because:
1) They don't have access to data about the viewing habits of VOD viewers, since they're just providing the pipes to connect your tv to netflix's servers; 2) They probably make more money off selling the movies for $4-10 per view, since there's a lot of people without a set-top box that's got netflix installed still;
This fight will likely have to be fought between the cable companies on one side and Video Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple on the other. Amazon and Apple might not love each other much, but I suspect they'd much rather compete with each other than compete with a bunch of cable/dsl providers who can simply say "Sorry, we're downgrading the priority of your streaming video services over our networks." Until the ISPs get bound by net neutrality rules, there's always going to be this sort of issue looming over the heads of streaming/rental services.
As someone else has already pointed out, the license doesn't specify any time frame within which the source must be made available - and if there's no window specified and no evidence that they have some intent to never release the source code, no court is going to do anything but say "you must release this, you already knew that. So provide a reasonable plan, and get to it." Unless you can subpoena some emails from Steve Jobs which read, "Let's close the source for all that webkit stuff starting with iOS 4.3.0, because we r teh evulz and I hate openness," you're going to be hard-pressed to get much out of a court action.
Given Apple's "positive-but-not-spotless" historical record, it's entirely likely that the release of this code to their opensource.apple.com website was delayed due to key people taking vacations, leaving the company, or being pulled off an ongoing project to deal with something unexpected - like say, a media storm around 'iphone tracking,' or perhaps a combination of those factors.
Indeed. Let's not forget that the whole "iphone tracking" issue came up in the last few weeks as well - it'd be a little foolish to think that dealing with that wouldn't cause some other efforts to get derailed.
From the blog post: "So far, it seems they have always provided the respective source code in a timely manner for each and every release they have made." But then they go on to write, "I think it is time that Apple gets their act together and becomes more straight-forward with LGPL compliance."
So, which is it? Either they have a good record of releasing all the appropriate source code in a timely fashion, and this is a simple aberration which will likely be corrected soon, or they have a long-standing record of not complying with the LGPL terms, and they have to "get their act together and become more straight-forward with compliance." You can't cite their years-long history of compliance, then point to one outlier, and say "OOOOH NEFARIOUS PATTERN, Apple is trying to steal our codez!!!11!!"
My best guess: Apple will have this released within a week or two, and it's likely the iphone tracking issue disrupted their plans to have this stuff posted by now, due to resource shifting to manage the sudden shitstorm-in-a-teacup they had to deal with. I further predict that dozens of Slashdot armchair lawyers will clamor for legal action against Apple to right this outrageous wrong, despite the fact that they have no iOS device, nor any interest in developing code against the ios 4.3.3 webkit baseline.
It's like the open source community is deliberately trying to alienate a large corporate supporter. Curious indeed.
There are a lot of people in the so-called "fuck-you money" bracket.
No, there really aren't. Because those people would have to both *have the money to afford this trip,* and *have any interest in going.* When you are talking about a plane ticket that costs more than the household income of 75% of the households in the United States, you have a VERY small potential market. Realistically, your target market is people making well over a million dollars a year, and they're a fraction of 1% of the population. And then you have to find the fraction of that fraction that is interested enough to spend ridiculous amounts of money going to & staying in space.
And somehow I manage to find ways to fly thousands of miles a year without having a personal aircraft in my backyard. I imagine there will be ways to fly into space at or below $1100 per kg without requiring personal space craft installed in our backyards.
That's funny, the guy who's actively trying to commercialize space says that $1100 is his "eventual" blue sky scenario. What's the mechanism by which you envision it's going to get even cheaper than that (already a nearly 75% reduction in cost from the $4000/kg today)? Will we build giant pogo sticks? Will we ride unicorns, fueled by rainbows and wishes?
It will always be expensive (economically, and energetically) to push a human being up out of earth's gravity. It would have to be several orders of magnitude cheaper (i.e., in the $10 per kilogram range) to even be possible for a sustainable market. Where are these improvements going to come from? SpaceX thinks they can shrink the number by 75% eventually. Barring some new breakthrough in physics and/or materials science, there's no reasonable expectation that we will reach a price that cheap to enable tourism. We can speculate all we want, and we can engage in "what if" fantasies all we want, but there is no mechanism by which we reach that price point today, or anywhere in the foreseeable future.
See some of my other posts throughout this thread. The founder of SpaceX expects that the price-per-kilogram to orbit will "eventually" reach $1100, from roughly $4000 today.
Yes, that's a dramatic reduction. Yes, that means that it's cheaper to get there. It still means that a 75kg human being is paying $82,500 for a ride into space, and that's just the launch - the costs for all of the other stuff need to be factored in as well - building & maintaining & staffing a safe, livable habitat in space for 6 people (the ISS) is estimated to have cost between 35 and 160 billion dollars. By contrast, the Wynn Las Vegas cost ~2.7 billion dollars, and has nearly 2800 rooms, and those rooms cost anywhere from ~275-2000 per night, generally - not exactly cheap.
Even if you could build living quarters more luxurious than the ISS, but housing only 6 people, do you realize what the costs of a night or two in space would be? This is not "tourism" this is "idle rich at play," and this assumes that: 1) They drive the launch costs down as far as the SpaceX founder suggests they will; he has no reason to be negative about his expected performance; 2) They find a way to build a working space station that is both safe enough & durable enough for commercial use, and at least 1/10 the low-end cost estimate of the ISS;
There is no way for the economics of this to work out as a "tourist destination" given these estimates. The BEST you could hope for would be short orbital flights that cost tens of thousands of dollars, but which consist of launch, a few minutes of zero-gravity and photo taking, followed by a return to earth. Instead of saying "I read that it's going to be way cheaper on the internet somewhere, so it must be true," you're welcome to show me how my math is faulty here, and how costs will be driven down to just a couple thousand dollars a week, which would still make it out of reach for many people, but would probably generate enough demand that it could be sustained as a tourist destination.
GPL advocates never complain about the BSD license
BSD advocates are doing exactly what GPL advocates do: complaining about less-permissive licensing schemes.
GPL supporters regularly and loudly complain about less-permissive licensing schemes (see: Apple's iOS App Store, Microsoft, any other company that has not embraced the One True Way).
The attitude seems to be, "Everybody who is less permissive than us sucks because we can't use their shit, but anybody who's more permissive than us? Oh well, thanks for the code, LOL!" I have no sympathy for GPL advocates on this score, and it's not trolling. If the end-user's freedom is what the GPL is all about, shouldn't GPL advocates be criticizing BSD and other permissive licenses for not defending the same freedoms they criticize closed source software for not defending?
I'd think that GPL advocates, given their stated ideals of preserving "user freedom" as a valuable societal resource, would stick to their stated principles in all cases, but it seems like they're willing to throw out the whole "end-user freedom" thing as long as they can still see the source code and use it.
The founder of SpaceX, who has every reason to talk up his chosen industry, expects that they'll be able to ship cargo to space for $1100 per kilogram - eventually.
Do the math, and figure out why shipping a 75kg human being, with all of the food, water, oxygen, and hell, 30 kg of luggage too, is never going to be anything more than a dream for anybody who is not in the "fuck-you money" bracket of the idle rich.
Here, I'll help: a 75kg person (that's ~165 pounds) will need to spend $82,500 just to ship themselves up. Let's assume that that's a *round trip* cost. Now factor in the mass of all the food, water, oxygen, luggage, and other "stuff" that they'll need to survive in space, and you're easily talking about paying the equivalent of a very affluent person's yearly gross pay to spend a week up in space in a tin can with... absolutely fuck-all to do - quite literally.
That 1100/kg figure is nowhere near what it costs today to ship someone up to space, that's the "blue sky" scenario the SpaceX founder envisions someday being able to achieve, and you know when the founder of a company says "1100 or less," he's pretty sure 1100 is easily 10-20% better than he ever really expects to achieve in practice. Today, it costs about 4,000 per kilogram - that's 300,000 just to put a 75kg human in orbit.
This notion that someday we're going to hope in a personal space craft in our backyard and fly to the moon is a fantasy. Gravity's a harsh mistress, and escaping her clutches is a bitch, unless you know some loophole in our current understanding of physics that will make flying off into space a zero-cost endeavor.
If people do become successful in establishing a permanent presence in space
They will not, at least not on any scale that would be commercially viable, and your vapid wishful thinking will not change one iota of the economic reasons for that. There is *no place to go* and there is *nothing to do,* in the "tourism" sense. And from the "exploiting raw materials" perspective, there is no resource on Jupiter that would be cheaper to produce there and ship back to earth that wouldn't be cheaper to simply find a way to extract/produce here on earth.
Your statement that the wilderness was alien and hostile traveling overland to San Francisco just underscores the fact that you don't know what "alien and hostile" means. The environment of earth is an environment that humans are eminently evolved to survive in. Incredibly alien and hostile = "no air, no water, no place to grow food - simply standing there without actively expending enormous amounts of energy and resources to keep your little bubble of "earth-like" atmosphere sustained around you will result in your death." Sort of dangerous = "You might have to deal with dysentery or have to scare off a bear or two, and it's a long walk." You obviously have zero sense of perspective about the issue, given that you are comparing interplanetary travel to overland travel to San Francisco, and suggesting that they are even remotely "similar" in any way.
So let's assume that it's TEN TIMES more expensive than it needed to be. That means to create a livable environment for six humans, it'd cost between 3.5 and 16 billion dollars. Let's assume cost scales perfectly with occupancy, and housing for a single new person costs 580 million to add: Suddenly your 40-person luxury space hotel costs 23 billion at the low end, or 107 billion at the high end. And that's *if the tech can be built for one tenth of the cost it reportedly took to build the ISS,* which is probably a VERY generous view of how cheap we could ever make this technology.
Ask SpaceX? Okay, the founder of SpaceX has asserted that "someday" they will be able to drop the cost per kilogram of payload delivered into orbit to $1,100 / kg. That's not a typo, that's one thousand, one hundred dollars, per kilogram.
The ISS has a mass of 417,000 kg (and change) - again, not a typo - four hundred and seventeen thousand kilograms. It provides living space for 6. Now, let's consider that the ISS' ~850 cubic meters of living space is not exactly the type of environment most people would consider a "vacation" in any sense of the word. So, let's assume that they:
1) Reduce the mass required by an order of magnitude - 41,700 kg to house 6 people. 2) The mass scales perfectly as you add more people - e.g., ~7,000 kg of mass are added to the space station for each new person it has to house. 3) SpaceX delivers on its promise of $1100/kg launch costs.
So, let's launch a luxury space hotel with living quarters for 20 staff and crew and 20 guests. That's 278,000 kg of space station you need to launch, for a grand total of just over 300 million dollars - JUST TO LAUNCH THE MODULES, in your fanciful world where unicorns will someday deliver magically lighter space-worthy materials and SpaceX will magically drive the costs of launching to levels far below what they are today.
Now, let's consider you'll need a construction crew; thousands of kilograms of cabin appointments, food, oxygen, water, and any other luxury "stuffs" your luxury space hotel will offer in order to, you know, operate. And food, oxygen, water, and other resupply need to happen on a regular basis. And a weekly personnel shuttle to bring staff & guests up and down. And probably some sort of shuttle/escape pod that can hold the entire staff, in case something goes really wrong with your luxury space hotel.
And further, let's also consider that none of this tech exists today, so we need to develop. ALL. OF. IT. At a R&D, development, and testing cost of - quite likely - billions of dollars.
You see where this is going? Even if they drive costs down to $1100 / kg to launch... a single 75 kg human (that's 165 pounds, certainly not a big fat fatty) will still cost $82,500 to put them in orbit. You want to eat decent food for a week? Well, how many kilograms of supplies will need to go up too? And how many kilograms of oxygen are required? And water? And... with all this, you think that any sort of "space tourism" besides a brief launch-photos-return experience will ever be anything but the domain of the idle rich with more money than sense?
Yes, yes, and yes. Put down the Star Trek DVDs and engage your fucking brain.
He-3 on the moon is the same as He-3 on earth. There will never be a time where it will be cheaper to extract it from the moon, or Saturn, or Jupiter and ship it back here to earth than it is to manufacture it through tritium decay here on earth. Period. Full stop.
There is NO economically viable future in "mining asteroids" or "mining the moon" or "extracting gases from jupiter." Why? Because we'd have to strip-mine half of Canada to get the materials to: 1) Build a fleet of mining & transport vehicles; 2) Launch them into orbit; 3) Wait while they fly to some other planet; 4) Deploy their super-duper whiz-bang automated mining / extraction equipment in enough quantity that they can reasonably hope to extract volumes enough to be useful back here on earth; 5) Fill the transports; 6) Wait while the transports RETURN to earth; 7) Find some way of offloading the cargo from those transports back down to earth's surface; 8) Relaunch/redeploy the transport back to jupiter. Repeatedly. Over the course of tens of years;
And somehow, all this has to happen *without a single error,* or you've created a significant disruption in your supply line, which ruins all the industries relying on your fancy supply network. Oh, and what happens if the mining machinery breaks down? Will we have repair crew on site? Do you really think we'll be able to send a livable human habitat to Jupiter for a mining and tech crew which is probably 10-20 men strong for a *reasonable* amount of money?
And let's not overlook the simple fact that *none of this tech exists today,* so we might as well assert that we'll send space miners out to Jupiter riding fucking space unicorns, with space leprechauns riding shotgun to show them where all the ore is at the end of the rainbow.
Here's the problem with your comparison to the Gold Rush: San Francisco isn't millions of miles away in a vacuum that is completely inhospitable to human life, which requires hundreds of millions of dollars just to reach, much less extract minerals from, and ship them back to earth.
By contrast, during the gold rush, a few tens of dollars would get you set up to prospect. Some chisels & hammers, sifting pans, shovels, and pickaxes were sufficient. And yet, about half of the miners ended up losing money, and only a small number of prospectors made more than "modest" profits. Do you know how valuable those asteroid minerals would have to get to make flying out to the asteroid, extracting them, and shipping them back to earth even a break-even operation?
And for your comment about Helium: Helium-4 makes up well over 99% of the helium on earth, since Helium 4 has 2 protons, 2 neutrons, and is the stable, standard non-radioactive isotope of helium. I don't think it will *ever* be economically viable to go retrieve helium-4 from space, since, you know, we have tons of it (literally) down here on earth already. Helium-3 is certainly more difficult to obtain, but if you think building and maintaining a supply line to Saturn is easier and cheaper than developing enough Tritium breeder stock to guarantee a constant supply of He-3... well, think again.
What happens if you stay in orbit for a week? A month? A year? Are you sure that you can't do that again?
Pray tell, what will you do in orbit for a week? A month? A year? What wonderful sights and experiences will you have while you're there, and where will you have these wonderful experiences - on your launch vehicle? For a month? I'm really hard-pressed to think of anybody who would consider a year floating in circles above the earth in a single seat in the space shuttle to be much of a "vacation".
How many people do you think would like to be part of the first hundred folks who have gone past the Moon
Not enough to make it a sustainable market.
How about being named the "first person in the 21st Century to orbit the Moon"?
Not enough to make it a sustainable market.
There certainly are some folks have egos that large, and even bank accounts to afford it.
Exactly, there are some folks with egos & bank accounts. Those folks will never be numerous enough to make "space tourism" a sustainable venture for regular folks. "Space tourism" is, and will continue to be - barring signficant advances in the economics of survival in space - a novelty marketed to the very wealthy. The ONLY "space tourism" that will be within reach of the "regular" people (i.e. upper middle class, nobody below that will ever be able to afford it) will be the couple-hour joyride with some photos and a few minutes of zero gravity.
Folks have been into orbit through purely private efforts (non-subsidized by government agencies) and it will continue. It won't be just for the view.
Yes, it will be just for the view. What else is there to do up there, for a "tourist"? Float around in zero-g for a month? That would appeal to about 30 Slashdotters, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't make a sustainable market. Space tourism is simply a big "Observation Deck," and unless you make significant changes in the economics of survival in space, that's all it will be. And as I said, if the Observation Deck at the Empire State Building was literally the ONLY THING you could do in New York City as a tourist, then NYC would have a lot fewer tourists.
I get the feeling reading these comments that people think we're going to be launching to some massive space station in earth orbit which is some sort of Battlestar Galactica-style pleasure ship, complete with blue-skinned Alpha Centaurian courtesans. There IS NO facility in space for tourism to be anything more than "up, look around, down." Anything else will have to be built, i.e. launched from earth and assembled in space, and constantly resupplied and operated for YEARS with perfect safety while handling a steady stream of cargo & human traffic moving to it from the earth's surface.
The ISS, designed for a crew of 6, has an estimated cost of between 35 and 160 billion dollars. How many tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars will it take to build something that could handle an operational crew of 20, and 20-30 guests at a time? And you think this is somehow a feasible economic reality within the reach of a large market of people?
The enduring popularity of tourism markets in general is the fact that there are things to do and see once you get there. There is none of that in space, and we are long, long years away from any sort of "cruise ship in space" experience. If you have no destination to go to, and nothing to do while you're there, "space tourism" is simply not sustainable. Even if-and-when there are "private space stations" the economics of building living facilities in space will keep it a novelty experience for the ultra-rich. Just like you and I don't get to stay in the penthouse of the Trump Tower for 3 months at a time when we visit New York, we'll find that "2 hours of flight with 15 minutes of zero g and the opportunity to take some photos of the earth from orbit" are the tourism experiences that will be within reach of the "common man" - and by "common man," I mean upper middle class.
Why? Are these asteroids magical Asteroids of Infinite Ore? Do they have a super-fast bugged respawn rate that allows us to spawn-camp them, getting enough ore to finally corner the auction house?
You are trying to gloss over a huge number of practical economic issues, which makes it clear you haven't actually thought this premise through to its conclusion.
I have a feeling that the people you're responding to have a raging case of PHB syndrome: "Look, coal mining is done by a bunch of blue-collar high school dropouts, how hard can mining really be? The hard part is clearly just developing a rocket to get there. We can make robots at least as smart as high school dropouts, GAWD."
Why would we mine asteroids, or gas giants, when we have the technology to mine all those same elements right back here on earth?
You realize that the elements available here are pretty much the same as you'd find anywhere, right? Like, Hydrogen here on earth is the same as Hydrogen on Jupiter? Considering that 70% of the earth's surface is covered, in some places miles deep, with a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, I'd say extracting hydrogen and oxygen right here on earth would be a lot more economical than building a fleet of starships and setting up a supply line to a mining operation on Jupiter or Saturn.
(And let's consider, just for a second, the fun times to be had shipping a container full of Hydrogen from Jupiter through the stresses & heat of re-entry into earth's atmosphere. If you thought the Hindenberg was a spectacular disaster, just imagine what it'll look like the first time one of those tanks ruptures! Oh the humanity!)
"Space tourism" is not a sustainable market. Once you've shot your wad and everybody with the money and interest to pay 10k for a couple hours in space has gone (and I think you'll find that the number of people both interested & wealthy enough to do this are much smaller than you seem to think)... what then?
There's still nowhere to go up there, it's a joyride. Yay, you went WAY UP IN THE AIR, got a couple lovely panoramic views as the craft inverted, and then came back down. Now what? How many people will do that more than once? It's a small fraction of the people who would do it once for the novelty of seeing it. So you built out this fleet of spaceships... and launched them a thousand times... and now... we're back where we started, with maybe a few launches a year to cater to the sustained demand - and at a few launches a year, you can bet that the price of each ride is going to go right back up into the hundreds of thousands of dollar range.
If the observation deck of the Empire State Building were the only thing to do in New York City, they'd have a lot of trouble keeping their hotels filled.
A helicopter trying to hover and correct for down- and up-drafts, making lots of noise in plain sight over the trees a few thousand yards away from its target would make a terrible platform for a sniper to fire from. The point of a sniper is to deliver precisely-targeted shots from cover at a long range, not burning off clip after clip in full view of god & country until you hit something because the elevation and angle of your firing platform keeps shifting from second to second.
A "hovering" helicopter still has a lot of jitter. A "quiet" helicopter still makes quite a bit of noise. A "stealthy" helicopter isn't invisible to the human eye at 2000 yards.
Sun Tzu understood why this was a concern: "Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate."
If you know what materials are in use, and what technologies are implemented by your opponent, then you're no longer looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. You know exactly what the other guy is using, and can then build systems specifically designed & tuned to hinder/counter/neutralize the benefits that tech gives him.
It's not just that the "experts recognize X as way of making quieter rotors," it's that "here's an operating piece of the tech that they're actually using, so now we know exactly what components and designs they've used, and can take specific steps to counteract that tech's advantages."
Will it benefit an organization like Al Qaeda, with limited scientific & research resources? Probably not. But a country with the resources and military of China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Iran? You'd be crazy to think they wouldn't be interested in seeing the classified tech we use up close and personal, but without the hidden prize of a Navy SEAL team inside.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's mostly because of binary thought like you've just expressed. The kind that sees a conservative opinion expressed, and knee-jerks into, "I don't agree with you, and therefore, you must be a conservative, gun toting, Palin-loving neo-con. I'd add idiot, but that's redundant!"
Fact: There are very few issues where there are only 2 possible positions which a person can hold.
Fact: A person's position on one issue does not necessarily indicate their position on every other issue it's possible to hold an opinion on.
Fact: The Republican and Democratic platforms are not the only two possible positions it is possible to hold. And also, one need not accept either of them in their entirety, or reject either of them in their entirety, especially based on idiotically binary labels like "conservative" and "liberal".
Fact: Rejecting specific elements of a party's platform, while still voting for some of their politicians, does not require cognitive dissonance, it simply requires prioritization.
Fact: Prioritization of political issues is a deeply personal decision; that somebody else values - for example - fiscal discipline over - for example - abortion rights does not mean they are "wrong" or "stupid" or "blind." It means they, personally, value certain things differently than you do.
But just for fun here, let's try it your way:
For a group that loves to crow about the high value of diversity, you socialist big spending baby killing tree huggers sure are intolerant of dissenting opinions! I wonder if "liberal thought" circa 2011 requires the shutdown of all logic circuits in the brain to avoid damage when parsing value statements that are mutually contradictory?
Now we can just sling insults at each other, maligning each other based on the set of values we've each imagined the other to have. It's so much easier to forego all the "discussing" and "conversation" and "reaching an understanding," and get right to the truly productive name-calling, innit?
Only to somebody who doesn't understand how contracts work, and only to somebody who reads it as if it were "plain english" - which it is not. Here's what the GPL says about the way Apple has chosen to comply with non-source distribution:
Where do you see the word "accompany" in that distribution clause?
You may claim that the "intent" is that all clauses call for instant, simultaneous release; A court will not care what you perceive the "intent" to be, a court will care about what the license stipulates, and it does not stipulate anything about the time frame when the source code must be available, it simply says "it must be made available," and in fact implies in other methods of conveyance that delays and turnaround time is reasonable, and does not constitute a license violation:
This paragraph clearly states that a delay between receiving the object code & receiving access to the source constitutes compliance - you cannot receive the written offer to supply the source without having already received the object code, and if you have only received a "written offer" to supply the source, then you do not have access to the source when you receive the object code.
If you really think Apple is in violation, then take them to court. I see no evidence that the FSF, or the WebKit developers, or any other person is trying to take Apple to court over this to claim they are in violation - if we're to believe that they're constant and willfully violating their obligations, then isn't it in the best interests of the FSF and other FOSS advocates to take them to court to establish a clear precedent in court which can be used to force them to comply with what you claim their obligations are?
They should do this, but the problem is, then they don't get to charge you $4-10 for streaming a single movie on demand - they'd get a buck or two a month from Netflix per subscriber, and it'd probably be a net loss for them, because:
1) They don't have access to data about the viewing habits of VOD viewers, since they're just providing the pipes to connect your tv to netflix's servers;
2) They probably make more money off selling the movies for $4-10 per view, since there's a lot of people without a set-top box that's got netflix installed still;
This fight will likely have to be fought between the cable companies on one side and Video Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple on the other. Amazon and Apple might not love each other much, but I suspect they'd much rather compete with each other than compete with a bunch of cable/dsl providers who can simply say "Sorry, we're downgrading the priority of your streaming video services over our networks." Until the ISPs get bound by net neutrality rules, there's always going to be this sort of issue looming over the heads of streaming/rental services.
As someone else has already pointed out, the license doesn't specify any time frame within which the source must be made available - and if there's no window specified and no evidence that they have some intent to never release the source code, no court is going to do anything but say "you must release this, you already knew that. So provide a reasonable plan, and get to it." Unless you can subpoena some emails from Steve Jobs which read, "Let's close the source for all that webkit stuff starting with iOS 4.3.0, because we r teh evulz and I hate openness," you're going to be hard-pressed to get much out of a court action.
Given Apple's "positive-but-not-spotless" historical record, it's entirely likely that the release of this code to their opensource.apple.com website was delayed due to key people taking vacations, leaving the company, or being pulled off an ongoing project to deal with something unexpected - like say, a media storm around 'iphone tracking,' or perhaps a combination of those factors.
Indeed. Let's not forget that the whole "iphone tracking" issue came up in the last few weeks as well - it'd be a little foolish to think that dealing with that wouldn't cause some other efforts to get derailed.
From the blog post: "So far, it seems they have always provided the respective source code in a timely manner for each and every release they have made." But then they go on to write, "I think it is time that Apple gets their act together and becomes more straight-forward with LGPL compliance."
So, which is it? Either they have a good record of releasing all the appropriate source code in a timely fashion, and this is a simple aberration which will likely be corrected soon, or they have a long-standing record of not complying with the LGPL terms, and they have to "get their act together and become more straight-forward with compliance." You can't cite their years-long history of compliance, then point to one outlier, and say "OOOOH NEFARIOUS PATTERN, Apple is trying to steal our codez!!!11!!"
My best guess: Apple will have this released within a week or two, and it's likely the iphone tracking issue disrupted their plans to have this stuff posted by now, due to resource shifting to manage the sudden shitstorm-in-a-teacup they had to deal with. I further predict that dozens of Slashdot armchair lawyers will clamor for legal action against Apple to right this outrageous wrong, despite the fact that they have no iOS device, nor any interest in developing code against the ios 4.3.3 webkit baseline.
It's like the open source community is deliberately trying to alienate a large corporate supporter. Curious indeed.
No, there really aren't. Because those people would have to both *have the money to afford this trip,* and *have any interest in going.* When you are talking about a plane ticket that costs more than the household income of 75% of the households in the United States, you have a VERY small potential market. Realistically, your target market is people making well over a million dollars a year, and they're a fraction of 1% of the population. And then you have to find the fraction of that fraction that is interested enough to spend ridiculous amounts of money going to & staying in space.
That's funny, the guy who's actively trying to commercialize space says that $1100 is his "eventual" blue sky scenario. What's the mechanism by which you envision it's going to get even cheaper than that (already a nearly 75% reduction in cost from the $4000/kg today)? Will we build giant pogo sticks? Will we ride unicorns, fueled by rainbows and wishes?
It will always be expensive (economically, and energetically) to push a human being up out of earth's gravity. It would have to be several orders of magnitude cheaper (i.e., in the $10 per kilogram range) to even be possible for a sustainable market. Where are these improvements going to come from? SpaceX thinks they can shrink the number by 75% eventually. Barring some new breakthrough in physics and/or materials science, there's no reasonable expectation that we will reach a price that cheap to enable tourism. We can speculate all we want, and we can engage in "what if" fantasies all we want, but there is no mechanism by which we reach that price point today, or anywhere in the foreseeable future.
And if it cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to ride the ferris wheel, people wouldn't do that, either.
See some of my other posts throughout this thread. The founder of SpaceX expects that the price-per-kilogram to orbit will "eventually" reach $1100, from roughly $4000 today.
Yes, that's a dramatic reduction. Yes, that means that it's cheaper to get there. It still means that a 75kg human being is paying $82,500 for a ride into space, and that's just the launch - the costs for all of the other stuff need to be factored in as well - building & maintaining & staffing a safe, livable habitat in space for 6 people (the ISS) is estimated to have cost between 35 and 160 billion dollars. By contrast, the Wynn Las Vegas cost ~2.7 billion dollars, and has nearly 2800 rooms, and those rooms cost anywhere from ~275-2000 per night, generally - not exactly cheap.
Even if you could build living quarters more luxurious than the ISS, but housing only 6 people, do you realize what the costs of a night or two in space would be? This is not "tourism" this is "idle rich at play," and this assumes that:
1) They drive the launch costs down as far as the SpaceX founder suggests they will; he has no reason to be negative about his expected performance;
2) They find a way to build a working space station that is both safe enough & durable enough for commercial use, and at least 1/10 the low-end cost estimate of the ISS;
There is no way for the economics of this to work out as a "tourist destination" given these estimates. The BEST you could hope for would be short orbital flights that cost tens of thousands of dollars, but which consist of launch, a few minutes of zero-gravity and photo taking, followed by a return to earth. Instead of saying "I read that it's going to be way cheaper on the internet somewhere, so it must be true," you're welcome to show me how my math is faulty here, and how costs will be driven down to just a couple thousand dollars a week, which would still make it out of reach for many people, but would probably generate enough demand that it could be sustained as a tourist destination.
BSD advocates are doing exactly what GPL advocates do: complaining about less-permissive licensing schemes.
GPL supporters regularly and loudly complain about less-permissive licensing schemes (see: Apple's iOS App Store, Microsoft, any other company that has not embraced the One True Way).
The attitude seems to be, "Everybody who is less permissive than us sucks because we can't use their shit, but anybody who's more permissive than us? Oh well, thanks for the code, LOL!" I have no sympathy for GPL advocates on this score, and it's not trolling. If the end-user's freedom is what the GPL is all about, shouldn't GPL advocates be criticizing BSD and other permissive licenses for not defending the same freedoms they criticize closed source software for not defending?
I'd think that GPL advocates, given their stated ideals of preserving "user freedom" as a valuable societal resource, would stick to their stated principles in all cases, but it seems like they're willing to throw out the whole "end-user freedom" thing as long as they can still see the source code and use it.
The founder of SpaceX, who has every reason to talk up his chosen industry, expects that they'll be able to ship cargo to space for $1100 per kilogram - eventually.
Do the math, and figure out why shipping a 75kg human being, with all of the food, water, oxygen, and hell, 30 kg of luggage too, is never going to be anything more than a dream for anybody who is not in the "fuck-you money" bracket of the idle rich.
Here, I'll help: a 75kg person (that's ~165 pounds) will need to spend $82,500 just to ship themselves up. Let's assume that that's a *round trip* cost. Now factor in the mass of all the food, water, oxygen, luggage, and other "stuff" that they'll need to survive in space, and you're easily talking about paying the equivalent of a very affluent person's yearly gross pay to spend a week up in space in a tin can with... absolutely fuck-all to do - quite literally.
That 1100/kg figure is nowhere near what it costs today to ship someone up to space, that's the "blue sky" scenario the SpaceX founder envisions someday being able to achieve, and you know when the founder of a company says "1100 or less," he's pretty sure 1100 is easily 10-20% better than he ever really expects to achieve in practice. Today, it costs about 4,000 per kilogram - that's 300,000 just to put a 75kg human in orbit.
This notion that someday we're going to hope in a personal space craft in our backyard and fly to the moon is a fantasy. Gravity's a harsh mistress, and escaping her clutches is a bitch, unless you know some loophole in our current understanding of physics that will make flying off into space a zero-cost endeavor.
They will not, at least not on any scale that would be commercially viable, and your vapid wishful thinking will not change one iota of the economic reasons for that. There is *no place to go* and there is *nothing to do,* in the "tourism" sense. And from the "exploiting raw materials" perspective, there is no resource on Jupiter that would be cheaper to produce there and ship back to earth that wouldn't be cheaper to simply find a way to extract/produce here on earth.
Your statement that the wilderness was alien and hostile traveling overland to San Francisco just underscores the fact that you don't know what "alien and hostile" means. The environment of earth is an environment that humans are eminently evolved to survive in. Incredibly alien and hostile = "no air, no water, no place to grow food - simply standing there without actively expending enormous amounts of energy and resources to keep your little bubble of "earth-like" atmosphere sustained around you will result in your death." Sort of dangerous = "You might have to deal with dysentery or have to scare off a bear or two, and it's a long walk." You obviously have zero sense of perspective about the issue, given that you are comparing interplanetary travel to overland travel to San Francisco, and suggesting that they are even remotely "similar" in any way.
Well, I'm sure political snark will make the business model MUCH more sustainable.
Thanks for trolling!
So let's assume that it's TEN TIMES more expensive than it needed to be. That means to create a livable environment for six humans, it'd cost between 3.5 and 16 billion dollars. Let's assume cost scales perfectly with occupancy, and housing for a single new person costs 580 million to add: Suddenly your 40-person luxury space hotel costs 23 billion at the low end, or 107 billion at the high end. And that's *if the tech can be built for one tenth of the cost it reportedly took to build the ISS,* which is probably a VERY generous view of how cheap we could ever make this technology.
Ask SpaceX? Okay, the founder of SpaceX has asserted that "someday" they will be able to drop the cost per kilogram of payload delivered into orbit to $1,100 / kg. That's not a typo, that's one thousand, one hundred dollars, per kilogram.
The ISS has a mass of 417,000 kg (and change) - again, not a typo - four hundred and seventeen thousand kilograms. It provides living space for 6. Now, let's consider that the ISS' ~850 cubic meters of living space is not exactly the type of environment most people would consider a "vacation" in any sense of the word. So, let's assume that they:
1) Reduce the mass required by an order of magnitude - 41,700 kg to house 6 people.
2) The mass scales perfectly as you add more people - e.g., ~7,000 kg of mass are added to the space station for each new person it has to house.
3) SpaceX delivers on its promise of $1100/kg launch costs.
So, let's launch a luxury space hotel with living quarters for 20 staff and crew and 20 guests. That's 278,000 kg of space station you need to launch, for a grand total of just over 300 million dollars - JUST TO LAUNCH THE MODULES, in your fanciful world where unicorns will someday deliver magically lighter space-worthy materials and SpaceX will magically drive the costs of launching to levels far below what they are today.
Now, let's consider you'll need a construction crew; thousands of kilograms of cabin appointments, food, oxygen, water, and any other luxury "stuffs" your luxury space hotel will offer in order to, you know, operate. And food, oxygen, water, and other resupply need to happen on a regular basis. And a weekly personnel shuttle to bring staff & guests up and down. And probably some sort of shuttle/escape pod that can hold the entire staff, in case something goes really wrong with your luxury space hotel.
And further, let's also consider that none of this tech exists today, so we need to develop. ALL. OF. IT. At a R&D, development, and testing cost of - quite likely - billions of dollars.
You see where this is going? Even if they drive costs down to $1100 / kg to launch... a single 75 kg human (that's 165 pounds, certainly not a big fat fatty) will still cost $82,500 to put them in orbit. You want to eat decent food for a week? Well, how many kilograms of supplies will need to go up too? And how many kilograms of oxygen are required? And water? And... with all this, you think that any sort of "space tourism" besides a brief launch-photos-return experience will ever be anything but the domain of the idle rich with more money than sense?
Yes, yes, and yes. Put down the Star Trek DVDs and engage your fucking brain.
He-3 on the moon is the same as He-3 on earth. There will never be a time where it will be cheaper to extract it from the moon, or Saturn, or Jupiter and ship it back here to earth than it is to manufacture it through tritium decay here on earth. Period. Full stop.
There is NO economically viable future in "mining asteroids" or "mining the moon" or "extracting gases from jupiter." Why? Because we'd have to strip-mine half of Canada to get the materials to:
1) Build a fleet of mining & transport vehicles;
2) Launch them into orbit;
3) Wait while they fly to some other planet;
4) Deploy their super-duper whiz-bang automated mining / extraction equipment in enough quantity that they can reasonably hope to extract volumes enough to be useful back here on earth;
5) Fill the transports;
6) Wait while the transports RETURN to earth;
7) Find some way of offloading the cargo from those transports back down to earth's surface;
8) Relaunch/redeploy the transport back to jupiter. Repeatedly. Over the course of tens of years;
And somehow, all this has to happen *without a single error,* or you've created a significant disruption in your supply line, which ruins all the industries relying on your fancy supply network. Oh, and what happens if the mining machinery breaks down? Will we have repair crew on site? Do you really think we'll be able to send a livable human habitat to Jupiter for a mining and tech crew which is probably 10-20 men strong for a *reasonable* amount of money?
And let's not overlook the simple fact that *none of this tech exists today,* so we might as well assert that we'll send space miners out to Jupiter riding fucking space unicorns, with space leprechauns riding shotgun to show them where all the ore is at the end of the rainbow.
Yeah, and you're also missing all the pesky overlying atmosphere which is sort of required by the people mining this magical rock. Oops.
Here's the problem with your comparison to the Gold Rush: San Francisco isn't millions of miles away in a vacuum that is completely inhospitable to human life, which requires hundreds of millions of dollars just to reach, much less extract minerals from, and ship them back to earth.
By contrast, during the gold rush, a few tens of dollars would get you set up to prospect. Some chisels & hammers, sifting pans, shovels, and pickaxes were sufficient. And yet, about half of the miners ended up losing money, and only a small number of prospectors made more than "modest" profits. Do you know how valuable those asteroid minerals would have to get to make flying out to the asteroid, extracting them, and shipping them back to earth even a break-even operation?
And for your comment about Helium: Helium-4 makes up well over 99% of the helium on earth, since Helium 4 has 2 protons, 2 neutrons, and is the stable, standard non-radioactive isotope of helium. I don't think it will *ever* be economically viable to go retrieve helium-4 from space, since, you know, we have tons of it (literally) down here on earth already. Helium-3 is certainly more difficult to obtain, but if you think building and maintaining a supply line to Saturn is easier and cheaper than developing enough Tritium breeder stock to guarantee a constant supply of He-3... well, think again.
Pray tell, what will you do in orbit for a week? A month? A year? What wonderful sights and experiences will you have while you're there, and where will you have these wonderful experiences - on your launch vehicle? For a month? I'm really hard-pressed to think of anybody who would consider a year floating in circles above the earth in a single seat in the space shuttle to be much of a "vacation".
Not enough to make it a sustainable market.
Not enough to make it a sustainable market.
Exactly, there are some folks with egos & bank accounts. Those folks will never be numerous enough to make "space tourism" a sustainable venture for regular folks. "Space tourism" is, and will continue to be - barring signficant advances in the economics of survival in space - a novelty marketed to the very wealthy. The ONLY "space tourism" that will be within reach of the "regular" people (i.e. upper middle class, nobody below that will ever be able to afford it) will be the couple-hour joyride with some photos and a few minutes of zero gravity.
Yes, it will be just for the view. What else is there to do up there, for a "tourist"? Float around in zero-g for a month? That would appeal to about 30 Slashdotters, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't make a sustainable market. Space tourism is simply a big "Observation Deck," and unless you make significant changes in the economics of survival in space, that's all it will be. And as I said, if the Observation Deck at the Empire State Building was literally the ONLY THING you could do in New York City as a tourist, then NYC would have a lot fewer tourists.
I get the feeling reading these comments that people think we're going to be launching to some massive space station in earth orbit which is some sort of Battlestar Galactica-style pleasure ship, complete with blue-skinned Alpha Centaurian courtesans. There IS NO facility in space for tourism to be anything more than "up, look around, down." Anything else will have to be built, i.e. launched from earth and assembled in space, and constantly resupplied and operated for YEARS with perfect safety while handling a steady stream of cargo & human traffic moving to it from the earth's surface.
The ISS, designed for a crew of 6, has an estimated cost of between 35 and 160 billion dollars. How many tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars will it take to build something that could handle an operational crew of 20, and 20-30 guests at a time? And you think this is somehow a feasible economic reality within the reach of a large market of people?
The enduring popularity of tourism markets in general is the fact that there are things to do and see once you get there. There is none of that in space, and we are long, long years away from any sort of "cruise ship in space" experience. If you have no destination to go to, and nothing to do while you're there, "space tourism" is simply not sustainable. Even if-and-when there are "private space stations" the economics of building living facilities in space will keep it a novelty experience for the ultra-rich. Just like you and I don't get to stay in the penthouse of the Trump Tower for 3 months at a time when we visit New York, we'll find that "2 hours of flight with 15 minutes of zero g and the opportunity to take some photos of the earth from orbit" are the tourism experiences that will be within reach of the "common man" - and by "common man," I mean upper middle class.
Why? Are these asteroids magical Asteroids of Infinite Ore? Do they have a super-fast bugged respawn rate that allows us to spawn-camp them, getting enough ore to finally corner the auction house?
You are trying to gloss over a huge number of practical economic issues, which makes it clear you haven't actually thought this premise through to its conclusion.
I have a feeling that the people you're responding to have a raging case of PHB syndrome: "Look, coal mining is done by a bunch of blue-collar high school dropouts, how hard can mining really be? The hard part is clearly just developing a rocket to get there. We can make robots at least as smart as high school dropouts, GAWD."
Why would we mine asteroids, or gas giants, when we have the technology to mine all those same elements right back here on earth?
You realize that the elements available here are pretty much the same as you'd find anywhere, right? Like, Hydrogen here on earth is the same as Hydrogen on Jupiter? Considering that 70% of the earth's surface is covered, in some places miles deep, with a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, I'd say extracting hydrogen and oxygen right here on earth would be a lot more economical than building a fleet of starships and setting up a supply line to a mining operation on Jupiter or Saturn.
(And let's consider, just for a second, the fun times to be had shipping a container full of Hydrogen from Jupiter through the stresses & heat of re-entry into earth's atmosphere. If you thought the Hindenberg was a spectacular disaster, just imagine what it'll look like the first time one of those tanks ruptures! Oh the humanity!)
"Space tourism" is not a sustainable market. Once you've shot your wad and everybody with the money and interest to pay 10k for a couple hours in space has gone (and I think you'll find that the number of people both interested & wealthy enough to do this are much smaller than you seem to think)... what then?
There's still nowhere to go up there, it's a joyride. Yay, you went WAY UP IN THE AIR, got a couple lovely panoramic views as the craft inverted, and then came back down. Now what? How many people will do that more than once? It's a small fraction of the people who would do it once for the novelty of seeing it. So you built out this fleet of spaceships... and launched them a thousand times... and now... we're back where we started, with maybe a few launches a year to cater to the sustained demand - and at a few launches a year, you can bet that the price of each ride is going to go right back up into the hundreds of thousands of dollar range.
If the observation deck of the Empire State Building were the only thing to do in New York City, they'd have a lot of trouble keeping their hotels filled.
No duh, McDonald's is clearly Irish.
A helicopter trying to hover and correct for down- and up-drafts, making lots of noise in plain sight over the trees a few thousand yards away from its target would make a terrible platform for a sniper to fire from. The point of a sniper is to deliver precisely-targeted shots from cover at a long range, not burning off clip after clip in full view of god & country until you hit something because the elevation and angle of your firing platform keeps shifting from second to second.
A "hovering" helicopter still has a lot of jitter. A "quiet" helicopter still makes quite a bit of noise. A "stealthy" helicopter isn't invisible to the human eye at 2000 yards.
Sun Tzu understood why this was a concern: "Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate."
If you know what materials are in use, and what technologies are implemented by your opponent, then you're no longer looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. You know exactly what the other guy is using, and can then build systems specifically designed & tuned to hinder/counter/neutralize the benefits that tech gives him.
It's not just that the "experts recognize X as way of making quieter rotors," it's that "here's an operating piece of the tech that they're actually using, so now we know exactly what components and designs they've used, and can take specific steps to counteract that tech's advantages."
Will it benefit an organization like Al Qaeda, with limited scientific & research resources? Probably not. But a country with the resources and military of China, or North Korea, or Russia, or Iran? You'd be crazy to think they wouldn't be interested in seeing the classified tech we use up close and personal, but without the hidden prize of a Navy SEAL team inside.