It is a right of copyright holder to decide which of his exclusive rights he would like to grant or share with others. This is what the entire premise of copyright is based on (and this is waht GNU is using in GPL too).
When an author creates a web site, it would be apparent by placing such site on the internet that a right to view it and interact with it has been granted. However, a right to COPY it clearly has not been (otherwise nobody would be able to put any proprietory images or texts without them being misappropriated). Someone storing the copy of this information and presenting it to others without express permission of copyright holder is violating the basic rights.
This is akin to an unauthorized book copying where a book would be copied in its entirety and offered to others. It is irrelevant whether money is being charged or not - just that the copy was not authorized by the author.
The example of quotation mentioned above misses the point. Quotation allows limited use of certain information from the source in another work, as long as it is properly identified. It is however NOT permitted to "quote" an entire book, adding perhaps a line above saying that "the following is a quote". Otherwise one might expect a full quotation of Harry Potter to appear in print in about a week and for half the price.
So, to sum up, unless Internet Archive or anyone else for that matter has express permission to copy and further display the ENTIRE work they may not do so. They may choose to display small informational quotes, about the size of information Google will display regarding each site.
I find it ironic that Sun has a huge photographs of two CEO's looking mighty friendly on it's main page. This is certainly the first time I see something purporting to be major corporation to devote its entire main web page (read - web presense) to the image of a head of more successful rival and related news.
On the other hand, there is no mention of this on www.microsoft.com and searching for "sun" on their site brings up old legal documents related to Sun vs. Microsoft Java court battle.
I think (as others said in this thread before me) that this is a sign of desperate grasping at straws at Sun. Not only that, but such obvious signs of struggling to float will add a lot more damage to Sun's already pretty bleak image and future.
You are right -/. is extremely biased and full of silly propaghanda. Fortunately they are not at all skilled in making it inconspicuous, and so their agenda is clear as day. That makes it easy to ignore. More importantly, their information usefulness to brainwashing ratio is still acceptable, whereas the one for TV is not.
What is this with software development groups? I wonder if vacuum cleaners loose any sales because they have "Dirt Devil" brand name (Beware the power of a dirt devil). What about the New Jersey Devils, the hockey team? Or Tasmanian Devil from WB cartoons? They dont' seem to be losing money, customers or auditory because of "unholy connotations".
If anything, this pondering to non-existant "offended" customers is a sign that a project is diverting its attention from real to imaginary problems. Logical step in a sequence of events that took FreeBSD from the true original to the project it is today.
I wonder if there was a warning. If BEFORE prompting user for a serial number there is a BIG RED warning stating that entering a "stolen" serial number will DELETE ALL YOUR DATA, then may be, just may be, I can see this as a legitimate, if boneheaded method. Of course if it were me, I'd cancel the installation and put this guy on a mental blacklist forever - who wants to deal with an a-hole. Still, that method would at least be remotely legal. As it stands, lots of you have said it before but I'll repeat it - erasing private data is a crime, period.
Ah, on the topic of cost of software. The interesting thing is that software market is NO MARKET AT ALL! To be a market, one has to be provided with choices of a product doing substantially similar things with prices set by supply and demand and some competition to boot. Often in software there is no choice - there is one product doing one thing and sold at a fixed price set by developers. When there is a true choice of products, prices still don't seem to be set by the market. Rather, developers randomly set the price and users excercise their market power by pirating (i.e. leveragint their fear of illegal action or acting immorally vs. the cost being too high for functionality provided.) Want to reduce pirating - auction your software. The real price will be found very soon, but it will very likely be a lot lower then $20 most seem to be asking for. BTW, $20 is an astronomical price for all but the most complicated software packages geared for ahome user. I would bet that market set prices would be somwhere between 5 cents and 2$.
On a few recent Continental flights there was a (clearly sponsored) article in their magazine about a Swedish engineer that was an "inventor" of a Bluetooth. The article was promoting the technology in general, Ericsson in particular and was extremely upbeat about endless future horizons for this brand new technology. I remember wondering then whether their marketing department is feeling desperate.
First, let me say that I had an extremely stable XP Pro system that was running for weeks and months without a crash.
After installing SP2 the following things have changed:
1) Minor - wireless connection icon in a tray appears regardless of the setting telling it not to.
2) The wireless wizard keeps the WPA shared password and when you re-run it, you can click "unmask" and read it in plain text. Horrible for security - anyone with 5 seconds near your keyboard will get unrestricted network access very soon if you have WPA. (Fortunately, the wizard was unable to configure my wireless network and I happily returned to the Funk client that worked flawlessly for a long time. I would feel bad using it if native support was any good)
3) And this one is the kicker - system now freezes up randomly from time to time. This has never happened before. If anyone has experienced this and has an idea as to how to fix this - let me know. I will wait a short while and then try to uninstall SP2 if problems persist (mind you, I don't have any need in the "security fixes" that they have applied - I just like feeling up to date:)
Re:Yes, but measuring webserver market share is ha
on
2003: Year of Apache
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Netcraft gives very specific rules by which it measures webserver counts here: http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/mechanics.html
Always helps to actually visit the site. Their methods will favor Apache somewhat, as IIS does not generally play very well in hosting environments with virtual domains for various reasons. Of course that in itself is an indicator of server quality:)
That time warp feature is called "BACKUP".. Oh wait, they are doing just that.
I would hope that people sending them data to store do not require them to throw out old data - that would definitely defeat the purpose of backups.
On the other hand, format obsolescense is a problem. In a 100 years who would be able to read this large shiny round things? And even if they could coax a stream of bits (or bytes, if byte is still 8 bits) off it, where would be the consultant from Bangalore that knows a format of data in that stream?
What good is a phone if you cannot speak. (wow, this finally came in handy:)
Well then, surely the incidence of skin cancer should be on the decrease. Skin cancer is caused by and large by increased sun radiation. Clearly a drop in sunshine as large as this (10%, to think of it) would translate into a measurable drop in sun exposure and skin cancers (among people under 30 anyway). Sadly, there isn't any drop and, if anything, skin cancer is on the rise consistently (which other scientists connect with the thinning ozone layer when it's time to scare governments into some more research financing). So this is no different. Any "scientific discovery" that has the following attributes: 1. Peruses a scary prospect of global doom or change 2. Is developed by a "few and special" 3. Is published extensively in a news articles world over (as opposed to specialty magazines) is achieving one thing - lots of grants for the guys that do it.
If i can get the same deal (price vs. number of minutes and day/night start times) from the T-Mobile, as i get now from Sprint - I am switching in a second.
GSM service doesn't give much advantage here but having it is very useful when traveling abroad and SMS messages can come in handy. While traveling in Europe recently, I was the only one without a cellphone (with choices being - to buy a new service over there or rent, both incurring too much startup cost).
The russian authorities have a law (SORM) which requires any communications provider to have special equipment tapped by FSB. This law is well implemented and therefore FSB has access to all phone conversation regardless of the encryption.
The true purpose of this action is any one of the following in order of highest to lowest probability:
1) Draw public attention to the bombing/terrorist act and drum up support for whatever it is the government is planning next. Good way to do it as anyone and their dog carries a cell phone. Bad way to really tap conversations since now everyone knows they are being tapped.
2) Draw a lot of attention to current interior minister Gryzlov and his tough and honest men tactics (that and the current cleaning of "dishonest" policement from less important police units). He's probably getting promoted to head up some political party so that will help.
3) Put the terrorists/chechens/whoever on the run - scare them etc. This sure is a big dynamite in a small pond though - so i doubt it.
4) Have other units not equipped with SORM uplink do the tapping, using scanners or some such. Unlikely since GSM even when unencrypted still can't be listened in on without expensive equipment. I doubt this one even more, but i had to put it here for the sake of balanced options:)
1) Thank you for clarifying the point by specifying a list of other potential employment search methods. Have you had placed these in your original post - I wouldn'y have replied.
2) I am reasonably employed at the moment but will soon take your advice as the time comes to look for a new job. Hopefully someone else is reading your reply as well, taking notice.
3) "Hypocricy" was perhaps a wrong word. Giving an advice based on assumed high moral ground but not helpful to someone in distress should have been called sanctimonious or self-righteous. Pardon me, but English is not my native tongue.
Dice.com? Reputable? What have you been smoking? They used to be (before their bancrupcy) a shameless front for recruiter agencies. My local newspapers don't have too many jobs for high-tech professionals and the largest of them is using monster.com database.
I have no specific resentment for anyone with Ph.D , I myself hold a (somewhat?) advanced degree in Computer Science (MSc at that).
What i do resent is someone with clearly safe and convenient job giving advice of "not using the largest job site on the internet" to everyone else. That is in the current tough job market where people spend long months to get anything at all.
It's as if a well fed westerner telling a poor hungry 3rd world citizen to stay away from the truffles because they will give him a bad case of indigestion. Hypocritical at best...
What part of this "red sweater/blue pants" (and btw - that is screaming "gay") is something that stores could not track visually? The only protection against that is when everyone wears same clothes:))) True protection from identity tracking only comes when nobody has any identity.
I can't see what the hysterical whining is about. Here is the link: http://www.rf-id.com to general tags site. Read all about them. The tags are just that - tags, just like any other tag on your clothing. It is not as if unique id is "embedded" in the threads of your pants and cannot be removed. In fact, if you will continue wearning clothes with RFID tag still attached - you will look like an idiot. Much like keeping any other tags on clothes.
Incidentally, what is the issue with privacy, even if the tag was somehow magically embedded into the thread of your pants? The tag identifies your pants as being a olive-green khakees size 48L, specifically made in Malaysia by a 12 year old? What part of that is not public knowledge or painfully obvious? What part of that is divulging information about the wearer of such clothes that he/she is not already giving up simply by wearing them?
I briefly worked for these guys
on
Joltage Powers Down
·
· Score: 5, Informative
(If you can call that work - they didn't pay at the time:)
It was painfully obvious that the idea would never fly, though i have to admit that it was a cute technical hack. The "grassroots" systems do not seem to be working in US of A. Years of "customer service" indoctrinated population here to rely on someone else to provide the service. So don't expect anything that requires people to provide initiative (or anything else aside from the cold hard cash) to take off this side of the Atlantic.
On the other hand it seems that in Moscow the only way to get broadband internet is by means of your local microprovider - either tenant organized or, at least, tenant supported. Being unaccostomed to others taking care of one's problems moves people toward self-sufficiency.
In case of services, such as networks and many others this is a great weapon against monopolies taking over.
What kind of service can they provide to millions of DNS requests a second and thousands of.ORG customers coming to manage their domains, if their site is inaccessible, apparently due to being "slashdotted"? VeriSign is evil and onerous, but at least it (as well, as any other operating registrar) is up and running. Let's hope these guys get their act together...
While Apache is indeed a good responsive project with strong management, Mozilla is a prime example of open source mismanagement. Its non-responsive, riddled with bugs, slow to fix those and generally led in a way we prefer to attribute to "evil commercial" software. Not sure where are those rosy conclusions in paper came from on the basis of these then. There are better open-source projects (FreeBSD?), well managed and extremely open to outside users. Development there, by the way, is done by a core much larger then 15 people.
Whoever moded this down to a troll is: 1) A fucking moron 2) Never actually used Mozilla as a platform 3) Precludes other potential developers from being forewarned on pitfalls of Mozilla as a development platform
Well, obviously this is a free message board and all opinions are welcome - as long as they support whatever notion de-jour the geeks of the site enjoy, no matter true or not.
In my work i had an option to use Mozilla as a codebase for one of the projects. At a first glance and idea of XUL gui, which can be custom tailored to application needs and run on any platofrm while using some native objects - seemed very tempting. However the devil as always is in the details.
The XUL described interfaces are severely limited and their implementation is often buggy, and extremely slow.
Bidings to native objects using XPCOM and XPConnect are a horrible mess, adding layers upon layers of complexity.
All this may in theory be remedied by a good group of developers, but currently Mozilla does not posess such a group. There is no consistent documentation on interfaces (which tend to change without warning), and no good documentation to speak of. With no docs and no commentaries in the 3 million lines of code, Mozilla is an unyeildy beast. I can only assume that lack of documentation and comments is created on purpose to discourage "outsiders" from intruding upon developers turf.
Add to that general lack of responsivness from Mozilla developers, be that to other developers looking for solutions and API's or to users (and i am not alone in multiple requests to mailing lists or newsgroups that go unanswered).
Add gazillion of bug reports that go un-fixed (a bug that prevents mozilla windows to be started from javascript in xpconnect is lingering for a year now with a patch attached).
To summarize - a lot of time and/or money and a different group of people are needed to make it work before it will become a viable platform. As things stand, this is just a plug for AOL.
Looks like a scam. The catch is in that they attract multiple investors and then let them purchase more stock only during a short period following a "test flight" at the lower price. Clearly this is a period of heightened hype and coupled with the short timeframe for decision should bring a lot of money in to the "inventor". From what the video shows, however, the "hovercraft" is relying at least partially on the hoist from the crane to be suspended in the air, so it doesn't seem to be able to fly on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a right of copyright holder to decide which of his exclusive rights he would like to grant or share with others. This is what the entire premise of copyright is based on (and this is waht GNU is using in GPL too).
When an author creates a web site, it would be apparent by placing such site on the internet that a right to view it and interact with it has been granted. However, a right to COPY it clearly has not been (otherwise nobody would be able to put any proprietory images or texts without them being misappropriated). Someone storing the copy of this information and presenting it to others without express permission of copyright holder is violating the basic rights.
This is akin to an unauthorized book copying where a book would be copied in its entirety and offered to others. It is irrelevant whether money is being charged or not - just that the copy was not authorized by the author.
The example of quotation mentioned above misses the point. Quotation allows limited use of certain information from the source in another work, as long as it is properly identified. It is however NOT permitted to "quote" an entire book, adding perhaps a line above saying that "the following is a quote". Otherwise one might expect a full quotation of Harry Potter to appear in print in about a week and for half the price.
So, to sum up, unless Internet Archive or anyone else for that matter has express permission to copy and further display the ENTIRE work they may not do so. They may choose to display small informational quotes, about the size of information Google will display regarding each site.
Birds do not fly like airplanes, they continuously wave their wings - and do not have turbines or propellers.
Sure hope my taxes don't pay for that "research".
I find it ironic that Sun has a huge photographs of two CEO's looking mighty friendly on it's main page. This is certainly the first time I see something purporting to be major corporation to devote its entire main web page (read - web presense) to the image of a head of more successful rival and related news.
On the other hand, there is no mention of this on www.microsoft.com and searching for "sun" on their site brings up old legal documents related to Sun vs. Microsoft Java court battle.
I think (as others said in this thread before me) that this is a sign of desperate grasping at straws at Sun. Not only that, but such obvious signs of struggling to float will add a lot more damage to Sun's already pretty bleak image and future.
You are right - /. is extremely biased and full of silly propaghanda. Fortunately they are not at all skilled in making it inconspicuous, and so their agenda is clear as day. That makes it easy to ignore. More importantly, their information usefulness to brainwashing ratio is still acceptable, whereas the one for TV is not.
By golly, people - don't you have anything else to do with your lives then stare at an idiot's box all day and get brainwashed?
I sure hope they make another flag that makes it impossible for a program to be viewed on any compliant device, and then set it on all programming.
What is this with software development groups? I wonder if vacuum cleaners loose any sales because they have "Dirt Devil" brand name (Beware the power of a dirt devil). What about the New Jersey Devils, the hockey team? Or Tasmanian Devil from WB cartoons? They dont' seem to be losing money, customers or auditory because of "unholy connotations".
If anything, this pondering to non-existant "offended" customers is a sign that a project is diverting its attention from real to imaginary problems. Logical step in a sequence of events that took FreeBSD from the true original to the project it is today.
I wonder if there was a warning. If BEFORE prompting user for a serial number there is a BIG RED warning stating that entering a "stolen" serial number will DELETE ALL YOUR DATA, then may be, just may be, I can see this as a legitimate, if boneheaded method. Of course if it were me, I'd cancel the installation and put this guy on a mental blacklist forever - who wants to deal with an a-hole. Still, that method would at least be remotely legal. As it stands, lots of you have said it before but I'll repeat it - erasing private data is a crime, period.
Ah, on the topic of cost of software. The interesting thing is that software market is NO MARKET AT ALL! To be a market, one has to be provided with choices of a product doing substantially similar things with prices set by supply and demand and some competition to boot.
Often in software there is no choice - there is one product doing one thing and sold at a fixed price set by developers. When there is a true choice of products, prices still don't seem to be set by the market. Rather, developers randomly set the price and users excercise their market power by pirating (i.e. leveragint their fear of illegal action or acting immorally vs. the cost being too high for functionality provided.) Want to reduce pirating - auction your software. The real price will be found very soon, but it will very likely be a lot lower then $20 most seem to be asking for. BTW, $20 is an astronomical price for all but the most complicated software packages geared for ahome user. I would bet that market set prices would be somwhere between 5 cents and 2$.
On a few recent Continental flights there was a (clearly sponsored) article in their magazine about a Swedish engineer that was an "inventor" of a Bluetooth. The article was promoting the technology in general, Ericsson in particular and was extremely upbeat about endless future horizons for this brand new technology. I remember wondering then whether their marketing department is feeling desperate.
First, let me say that I had an extremely stable XP Pro system that was running for weeks and months without a crash.
:)
After installing SP2 the following things have changed:
1) Minor - wireless connection icon in a tray appears regardless of the setting telling it not to.
2) The wireless wizard keeps the WPA shared password and when you re-run it, you can click "unmask" and read it in plain text. Horrible for security - anyone with 5 seconds near your keyboard will get unrestricted network access very soon if you have WPA. (Fortunately, the wizard was unable to configure my wireless network and I happily returned to the Funk client that worked flawlessly for a long time. I would feel bad using it if native support was any good)
3) And this one is the kicker - system now freezes up randomly from time to time. This has never happened before. If anyone has experienced this and has an idea as to how to fix this - let me know. I will wait a short while and then try to uninstall SP2 if problems persist (mind you, I don't have any need in the "security fixes" that they have applied - I just like feeling up to date
Netcraft gives very specific rules by which it measures webserver counts here: http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/mechanics.html
:)
Always helps to actually visit the site. Their methods will favor Apache somewhat, as IIS does not generally play very well in hosting environments with virtual domains for various reasons. Of course that in itself is an indicator of server quality
That time warp feature is called "BACKUP".. Oh wait, they are doing just that.
I would hope that people sending them data to store do not require them to throw out old data - that would definitely defeat the purpose of backups.
On the other hand, format obsolescense is a problem. In a 100 years who would be able to read this large shiny round things? And even if they could coax a stream of bits (or bytes, if byte is still 8 bits) off it, where would be the consultant from Bangalore that knows a format of data in that stream?
What good is a phone if you cannot speak. (wow, this finally came in handy:)
Well then, surely the incidence of skin cancer should be on the decrease. Skin cancer is caused by and large by increased sun radiation. Clearly a drop in sunshine as large as this (10%, to think of it) would translate into a measurable drop in sun exposure and skin cancers (among people under 30 anyway).
Sadly, there isn't any drop and, if anything, skin cancer is on the rise consistently (which other scientists connect with the thinning ozone layer when it's time to scare governments into some more research financing). So this is no different. Any "scientific discovery" that has the following attributes:
1. Peruses a scary prospect of global doom or change
2. Is developed by a "few and special"
3. Is published extensively in a news articles world over (as opposed to specialty magazines)
is achieving one thing - lots of grants for the guys that do it.
Think for yourself...
If i can get the same deal (price vs. number of minutes and day/night start times) from the T-Mobile, as i get now from Sprint - I am switching in a second.
GSM service doesn't give much advantage here but having it is very useful when traveling abroad and SMS messages can come in handy. While traveling in Europe recently, I was the only one without a cellphone (with choices being - to buy a new service over there or rent, both incurring too much startup cost).
The russian authorities have a law (SORM) which requires any communications provider to have special equipment tapped by FSB. This law is well implemented and therefore FSB has access to all phone conversation regardless of the encryption.
The true purpose of this action is any one of the following in order of highest to lowest probability:
1) Draw public attention to the bombing/terrorist act and drum up support for whatever it is the government is planning next. Good way to do it as anyone and their dog carries a cell phone. Bad way to really tap conversations since now everyone knows they are being tapped.
2) Draw a lot of attention to current interior minister Gryzlov and his tough and honest men tactics (that and the current cleaning of "dishonest" policement from less important police units). He's probably getting promoted to
head up some political party so that will help.
3) Put the terrorists/chechens/whoever on the run - scare them etc. This sure is a big dynamite in a small pond though - so i doubt it.
4) Have other units not equipped with SORM uplink do the tapping, using scanners or some such. Unlikely since GSM even when unencrypted still can't be listened in on without expensive equipment. I doubt this one even more, but i had to put it here for the sake of balanced options:)
1) Thank you for clarifying the point by specifying a list of other potential employment search methods. Have you had placed these in your original post - I wouldn'y have replied.
2) I am reasonably employed at the moment but will soon take your advice as the time comes to look for a new job. Hopefully someone else is reading your reply as well, taking notice.
3) "Hypocricy" was perhaps a wrong word. Giving an advice based on assumed high moral ground but not helpful to someone in distress should have been called sanctimonious or self-righteous. Pardon me, but English is not my native tongue.
Dice.com? Reputable? What have you been smoking? They used to be (before their bancrupcy) a shameless front for recruiter agencies. My local newspapers don't have too many jobs for high-tech professionals and the largest of them is using monster.com database.
I have no specific resentment for anyone with Ph.D , I myself hold a (somewhat?) advanced degree in Computer Science (MSc at that).
What i do resent is someone with clearly safe and convenient job giving advice of "not using the largest job site on the internet" to everyone else. That is in the current tough job market where people spend long months to get anything at all.
It's as if a well fed westerner telling a poor hungry 3rd world citizen to stay away from the truffles because they will give him a bad case of indigestion. Hypocritical at best...
And what other means of procuring a bread-winning position would You suggest from Your high-horse, Dr. Cowan?
What part of this "red sweater/blue pants" (and btw - that is screaming "gay") is something that stores could not track visually? The only protection against that is when everyone wears same clothes:)))
True protection from identity tracking only comes when nobody has any identity.
I can't see what the hysterical whining is about.
Here is the link: http://www.rf-id.com to general tags site. Read all about them.
The tags are just that - tags, just like any other tag on your clothing. It is not as if unique id is "embedded" in the threads of your pants and cannot be removed. In fact, if you will continue wearning clothes with RFID tag still attached - you will look like an idiot. Much like keeping any other tags on clothes.
Incidentally, what is the issue with privacy, even if the tag was somehow magically embedded into the thread of your pants? The tag identifies your pants as being a olive-green khakees size 48L, specifically made in Malaysia by a 12 year old? What part of that is not public knowledge or painfully obvious? What part of that is divulging information about the wearer of such clothes that he/she is not already giving up simply by wearing them?
(If you can call that work - they didn't pay at the time:)
It was painfully obvious that the idea would never fly, though i have to admit that it was a cute technical hack. The "grassroots" systems do not seem to be working in US of A. Years of "customer service" indoctrinated population here to rely on someone else to provide the service. So don't expect anything that requires people to provide initiative (or anything else aside from the cold hard cash) to take off this side of the Atlantic.
On the other hand it seems that in Moscow the only way to get broadband internet is by means of your local microprovider - either tenant organized or, at least, tenant supported. Being unaccostomed to others taking care of one's problems moves people toward self-sufficiency.
In case of services, such as networks and many others this is a great weapon against monopolies taking over.
What kind of service can they provide to millions of DNS requests a second and thousands of .ORG customers coming to manage their domains, if their site is inaccessible, apparently due to being "slashdotted"?
VeriSign is evil and onerous, but at least it (as well, as any other operating registrar) is up and running. Let's hope these guys get their act together...
While Apache is indeed a good responsive project with strong management, Mozilla is a prime example of open source mismanagement. Its non-responsive, riddled with bugs, slow to fix those and generally led in a way we prefer to attribute to "evil commercial" software.
Not sure where are those rosy conclusions in paper came from on the basis of these then.
There are better open-source projects (FreeBSD?), well managed and extremely open to outside users. Development there, by the way, is done by a core much larger then 15 people.
Whoever moded this down to a troll is:
1) A fucking moron
2) Never actually used Mozilla as a platform
3) Precludes other potential developers from being forewarned on pitfalls of Mozilla as a development platform
Well, obviously this is a free message board and all opinions are welcome - as long as they support whatever notion de-jour the geeks of the site enjoy, no matter true or not.
In my work i had an option to use Mozilla as a codebase for one of the projects. At a first glance and idea of XUL gui, which can be custom tailored to application needs and run on any platofrm while using some native objects - seemed very tempting. However the devil as always is in the details.
The XUL described interfaces are severely limited and their implementation is often buggy, and extremely slow.
Bidings to native objects using XPCOM and XPConnect are a horrible mess, adding layers upon layers of complexity.
All this may in theory be remedied by a good group of developers, but currently Mozilla does not posess such a group. There is no consistent documentation on interfaces (which tend to change without warning), and no good documentation to speak of. With no docs and no commentaries in the 3 million lines of code, Mozilla is an unyeildy beast. I can only assume that lack of documentation and comments is created on purpose to discourage "outsiders" from intruding upon developers turf.
Add to that general lack of responsivness from Mozilla developers, be that to other developers looking for solutions and API's or to users (and i am not alone in multiple requests to mailing lists or newsgroups that go unanswered).
Add gazillion of bug reports that go un-fixed (a bug that prevents mozilla windows to be started from javascript in xpconnect is lingering for a year now with a patch attached).
To summarize - a lot of time and/or money and a different group of people are needed to make it work before it will become a viable platform. As things stand, this is just a plug for AOL.
Looks like a scam.
The catch is in that they attract multiple investors and then let them purchase more stock only during a short period following a "test flight" at the lower price. Clearly this is a period of heightened hype and coupled with the short timeframe for decision should bring a lot of money in to the "inventor".
From what the video shows, however, the "hovercraft" is relying at least partially on the hoist from the crane to be suspended in the air, so it doesn't seem to be able to fly on its own.