Except there are judicial opinions and legal precedence with regards to the GPL. This isn't 1990 when there are six websites on the internet and the GPL was brand new with everybody speculating about what a judge might say about the GPL. SCO v. IBM is one example of a set of legal opinions written (in this case from federal courts) by actual judges where the GPL was a central point of contention and real legal precedence can be found.

Fortunately the GPL was written to be understood by those who were using the license, where violations of the terms of the license are very clear and almost everybody who is out of compliance knows they are out of compliance. It is usually jerks and idiots who push the terms of the license to the point you even need a judicial opinion on the matter.

That isn't true either, particularly with standard contracts that are in widespread usage. A good example of such a contract is the standard Screen Actors' Guild contract, which is something frequently that goes to trial and has had nearly every provision tested in one way or another. Legal precedence in particular (previous court cases that have occurred with regards to that contract) are definitely something you would be wise to pay attention to, in particular any cases argued in Los Angeles County.

Generally the history of the license or contract is not quite so known, particularly from a legal standpoint, but you can't say that about the GPL. And I might point out that there is legal precedence with regards to enforcement of several parts of the GPL. Any lawyer who does not know what those cases are with regards to the GPL is just showing their incompetence, particularly when a Google search or even searching Wikipedia can get you links to the actual judicial opinions.

RMS actually wrote the version 1 of the license. He did get some legal assistance in terms of crafting the language of the license, and Eben Moglen was frequently involved in those legal discussion including enforcement of the GPL with regards to software owned (aka the primary copyright holder through various agreements) by the Free Software Foundation (primarily GNU related software). Another significant contributor was Mike Godwin, of Godwin's Law fame, although you could also point to several other people who contributed too.

By the time it got to the version 3 of the GPL license, legal commentary and assistance was very widespread where it would be very hard to point to any single author, although RMS is clearly selecting the language as a sort of editor with regards to how the final wording of the license turned out.

It definitely was not RMS sitting back and hiring a lawyer to draft the language for him like you would a business contract.

There is also a step between permanent resident and somebody qualified to work on ITAR related projects. It takes special State Department investigations and approval to make that happens.... usually with a pile of money spent on lawyers to make it happen.

There is a precedent for such things if you aren't compensated and haven't signed a waiver granting film rights. That is why the school where my kids attend have asked me to sign such waivers for the schools to film my kids in promotional videos about my kids.

And I think I would be pissed off enough and have a legal right to claim such contract was invalid if it was used for something else like a porn video. So yes, there is a legal precedent for such things.

On the other hand, it would largely depend on what contract that the actress actually signed and what conditions that the actress agreed to do the performance. That is why you generally should have a competent lawyer that drafts such contracts... to make sure your interests are properly represented in the agreement. A standard SAG (Screen Actors' Guild) contract has been brought to court a number of times so it could be said that most provisions have been properly vetted but includes protection against directors who make changes to the film.

A good example of how actors have changed the standard SAG contract is with the movie The Four Musketeers, where so much footage was shot that two films were released even though the actors only agreed to make one film and weren't told that the second film was going to be made until after it was released. This is also a good example of how such contracts can force at least a legal injunction to prohibit exhibition on the part of an actor.

I doubt anybody going before a parole board is going to be released if they made such statement public. It is also likely to get you put on a short list for investigators as soon as there is a reported crime of pedophilia.

It isn't magic. These larger companies like you mention who make these acquisitions make the decision to purchase the smaller companies because they think they can get even more money than the amount they are paying. It really is that simple.

It certainly isn't some kind of grand conspiracy where a couple people in a smoke-filled room decide at random that somebody is going to become a billionaire or a millionaire like some sort of weird lottery system. These large companies also became large because they knew how to make a profit and how to continue making money even when seemingly every effort by the government tries to make sure they can't make a profit.

As for the Hollywood agents for actors, I think you have some things messed up there too. There may be a few actors who are hyped up way beyond recognition and don't deserve the salaries they receive, but for the most part actors get paid pretty normal salaries even when they have agents... and often are hurting for work because there are far more actors than jobs to be had in the movie industry. At best a good agent will be somebody who gets your face in front of casting directors and makes sure you are made aware of potential auditions as they become available.

I don't get your complaint. Are you really expecting Elon Musk to personally hire every American into one of his companies?

Also, there aren't more astronauts in the NASA astronaut corps currently. A total in the entire history from the original Mercury 7 astronauts to right now is 339 candidates have "received their wings" to be certified as astronauts, and not all of them have even been into space. The current number is 43, and likely to go down in the near future.

On the other hand, this is 300 new jobs for the people of central Texas, and I think they don't mind high paying industrial jobs that bring in money from outside of the immediate area, unlike new jobs that come from Wal-Mart of a Subway restaurant opening up. This is on top of other substantial moves that the companies of Elon Musk have been doing to hire literally thousands of new workers in the past couple of years.

If only more entrepreneurs had this kind of vision to do something really unique and original.

Not too many. You have to be a U.S. Citizen to work for SpaceX due to ITAR restrictions, and pass a criminal background check too. It is possible to get hired if you aren't a U.S. Citizen, but that amounts to being something like a security clearance for classified work (which also must happen for much of what SpaceX does). It is a separate part of the Department of State that must issue the authorization for a non-citizen to work.

It seems like I heard a SpaceX employee say that they didn't know of any H1-B visa holders that worked for their company... but I could be mistaken. They certainly aren't milking the visa system to get cheap workers. It is one of the restrictions when you make something that can be used with thermonuclear weapons that gets a whole lot more attention in terms of immigration and work status rules.

SpaceX even tried to hire the previous lease holders to farm that land. The problem was that the additional terms of the contract (like you said.... farming at night and working around test schedules) were something those farmers didn't agree to doing. They also needed to go through a criminal background check and verify that they haven't been involved with international arms trades due to requirements of the ITAR laws and the Department of Defense contracts that SpaceX is signing.

All told, bringing the position in-house sounds like a better way to get the job done.

I might. That is sort of something that self-aware machines can do. Then again, do you want me to kill myself?

BTW, when I say I will be dead for a long, long time, I am suggesting it will be centuries or milleniia in the future. You and everybody reading this as well as anybody who has even the most remote notion of what Slashdot might have been or is will be long dead too.

Only the problem is that AI can't build machines that can build themselves. It takes people, technicians and machinists, to get that to happen right now.

Like I said, this is science fiction, not something grounded in reality. There is also a whole lot of time before the heat death of the universe, which concept by itself sort of rules out "eternity". Still, my point is that for a machine a human lifetime is currently eternal... or seemingly so.

We are already seeing the huge risk in automating data gathering, almost precisely on the points you are mentioning too.

Loans are granted or denied based upon arbitrary criteria that is often full of biases that frequently even the loan officer rarely knows or understands. Try to ask one of these guys why your credit score is at a certain number, and they really can't honestly reply. They won't even be able to tell you how to improve your score other than some broad and vague generalities either... and no promise that if you engage in certain actions that it will have any impact at all. Furthermore, they can't even look at a particular credit score and history to tell you with any certainty that you will be approved... other than if your credit score (something very arbitrary) is very high that it is "very likely" or if it is low it is "very unlikely".

People get put on or removed from a travel "Watch List" with just as much arbitrariness... often because of messaging this kind of BIG DATA that you are talking about too. In that case it is more than just if you are going to get a fancy car, but basic liberties or where you may even be incarcerated simply because some computer algorithm thought your Slashdot post was a little too anti-government or scary based on keywords or something else you said.

There is massive misuse of these tools even now. Some of it has valid reasons for it being developed, but the blind trust of computers is already happening in a number of ways. This isn't a future concern but something right now that needs to be evaluated.... and like you said autonomy is not necessarily the issue at hand.

Or understood it all too well. Self-aware AI is something that is still centuries or even millennia away, not mere years. Well funded AI research has been around for quite some time and has broken a great many careers from people trying to reach that golden grail with very little to show for it except for parlor tricks. Useful ideas have certainly come from the effort and in some cases have even made a considerable amount of money (AI techniques used on Wall Street are worth billions of dollars today and consume more top engineers and technicians than the rest of the technology industry put together).

I will be dead for a long, long time before real self-aware AI raises its head.

AI will hardly be eternal. I dare you to show me a computer system that is currently running that is more than a century old. Perhaps one of Charles Babbage's machines, but those aren't likely to be used for AI either. For that matter, what operating system is going to be functional in a hundred years from now? Most operating systems from Microsoft barely last a decade.

This is a concept of some fictional notion of artificial intelligence that may likely never exist to be considered "eternal". If something like that is ever produced, will will be something made thousands of years from now, if even that. It certainly isn't anything that could possibly be produced in my lifetime or for that matter the lifetime of by great grandchildren.